Anna Delvey and her ankle monitor are dancing with the stars on Dancing With The Stars this season.
This season’s biggest names hail from the The Bachelor franchise, the Olympics, and the house of Tori Spelling.
But Anna Delvey has a very different claim to fame. She’s a fake socialite. She’s a fraudster. And she went to prison on a larceny conviction. Now, she and her ankle monitor, which is all anyone is talking about, will be on DWTS.
It’s the new American dream.
Who is Anna Delvey?
Anna Delvey does not, strictly speaking, exist. Anna Sorokin was born in Russia in the early ’90s and eventually made her way to the United States. As a fashion magazine intern, she used falsified documents to pretend to be a wealthy European heiress — gaining access to people, places, and loans.
Eventually, the NYPD caught her in a 2017 sting operation. Her former friend not only turned her in, but wrote about her online and published a book about her.
Anna Delvey — as she seems to still be using the fake heiress psuedonym that she adopted — received a 4-to-12 year sentence for grand larceny, larceny in the second degree, and theft of services. Since 2022, she’s been on home release with an ankle monitor — and fighting deportation to Germany.
Why is she wearing an ankle monitor?
If that story sounds familiar … well, it really ought to. Even if you didn’t read her former friend’s account, there have been numerous documentaries, podcasts, and ripped-from-the-headlines scripted iterations of Anna Delvey’s scheme.
Most famously, Netflix paid Anna Delvey $320,000 for the rights to her story. That is how the 2022 miniseries, Inventing Anna, came to be.
In October of 2022, Anna Delvey received a $10,000 bail bond and left prison. Since then, the infamous con artist has remained on home confinement — with an ankle monitor.
The titular “stars” of Dancing With The Stars tend to have dubious celebrity statuses. And there have been plenty of people of Dancing With The Stars contestants much worse than a fraudster who fooled some banks and rich people. But one detail really stands out.
Yes, Anna Delvey has an ankle monitor — and it’s not coming off for ‘DWTS’
Some ankle monitors are for exclusive home confinement. Someone released on these conditions can often only step out of the house for court appointments, to meet with authorities, or when granted special leave (such as for a funeral or for work).
According to The Associated Press, Anna Delvey’s representative, Juda Engelmayer, confirmed on Tuesday, September 3 that Anna’s house arrest conditions allow travel anywhere within 70 miles of her home and anywhere within the five boroughs of New York City.
Geography fact: Los Angeles, where DWTS films, is not part of New York. It is possible — even likely — that Anna Delvey received special permission to participate in Dancing With The Stars. The farcical alternative would mean that she’s doing this without permission, and will soon end up behind bars.
As you can see in her official Dancing With The Stars promo, Anna Delvey is wearing an ankle monitor for the official promos. This is deliberate. Many promo shots zoom in on the “star.” This one did not.
It is, naturally, sensational that Anna Delvey and her ankle monitor are on the show. As we noted, DWTS has courted controversy in the past, offsetting a lineup of contestants that primary includes has-beens and The Bachelor alums with people who truly do not deserve a place in any decent, civilized society.
Truth be told, that’s not Anna Delvey. It’s often wise to judge fraudsters by their victims. If you must scam someone, it may be morally better to be an Anna Delvey than a Jen Shah.
By the way? She’d rather wear something else…
Dancing With The Stars may be all too happy to showcase her ankle monitor and its bedazzled “A,” but Anna Delvey is tired of it. According to The New York Post, she has been a “pain in the ass” during monthly ICE check-ins about her “not fashionable” ankle monitor.
“It’s just like I would not want to make such a spectacle out of this,” Delvey said earlier this summer. “I would love to be able to go out, and not be stared at or like not every delivery person asking me if I killed my husband, or something.”
A tongue-in-cheek response would be to mention that one of the few positives to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic is no-contact delivery. Between that and the existence of all sorts of clothes and shoes, she could avoid any human being seeing her ankle monitor if she chose.
On a more serious note … there are thousands of non-violent people who are languishing behind bars who would likely love a chance to be as non-fashionable as Anna Delvey. A few might enjoy competing on Dancing With The Stars, too.
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