虚构安娜

艾伦第一次出场，坐在美术馆里面对的那幅画，跟机械姬里的那幅画很像，都是滴画，应该是杰克逊·波洛克的作品，被称为无意识绘画。此时的艾伦已经知道自己被骗了，而且沦为安娜的工具，对于自己在工作上表现出的无意识应该是无比懊恼。艾伦认识安娜之前只是个无聊的律师，按部就班，生活像上了发条一样准确无误，此时的艾伦在工作上是清醒的，但是在生活上是无意识的。在安娜举办的第一次派对上，他把维特鲁威人说成是米开朗基罗的作品，应该是从没有关心过艺术吧。而之后的艾伦重焕新生，即便知道自己被骗之后，依然会去逛美术馆，安娜虽然骗了他，但是也赋予了他新的生活意识。从这一点上来看，安娜的确对周围的人有巨大的影响力。

郊区的监狱里，有一位女子，与周围格格不入。

她戴着黑框眼镜，逻辑清晰，谈吐优雅。

有人嗤之以鼻，她就是纽约第一女骗子；

也有人坚信不疑，她家财万贯，是上亿资产的继承人。

而她自己却说，钱对我来说不是问题，信不信由你。

她就是——虚构安娜

*以下内容为真实事件与剧情相结合，少部分为剧集杜撰

她叫安娜·索罗金，另一个更广为人知的名字，叫安娜·德尔维。

她是“德尔维”家族的继承人，父亲希望她能自力更生，便在她名下设立了6000万欧元的信托基金。

只要她年满26岁，就能自由支配这笔钱。

而安娜的社交平台，也充满着富二代的奢靡气息——

游走时尚秀场，穿梭艺术画廊，跨界名流峰会。

无处不在的高端奢侈品，数不尽的上流派对，还有与她亲密合影的富豪贵族、时尚名流，甚至不乏商界大拿的身影。

整个纽约的富豪名流圈里，似乎就没有安娜不认识的人，走到哪里都能听见她的名字。

安娜还和一般只会挥霍玩乐的富二代们不同，她有着自己的事业：以自己的名字来命名的基金会。

在基金会初创阶段，安娜凭借广泛的人脉，组建了基金会的核心成员。

并通过详细的商业计划书，成功说服银行投资人为她作担保，向国家城市银行申请了2200万美元的贷款，并且拿到了高达20万美元的信贷额度。

从始至终，没有一个人怀疑过安娜的真实身份，直到她因为涉嫌诈骗锒铛入狱。

为了挖掘安娜的故事，《曼哈顿》的女记者耗费了几个月的时间，从社交平台到辩护资料，再到安娜住过的酒店、交往过的人群进行详细的采访取材。

这位传奇女子的神秘面纱，终于被揭开——

令人大跌眼镜的是，安娜并不是什么坐拥上亿遗产的富二代。

她的父亲是货车司机，母亲是家庭主妇，家中还有一个弟弟，非常普通的家庭。

作为俄罗斯移民，16岁才到德国生活学习的她，并不受待见。

传闻中的那些富豪身世，全都是假的！

实在让人震惊。

安娜到底是怎么融入纽约名流圈，又是怎样让富豪名流们对她的满口胡言深信不疑，甚至心甘情愿被骗的？

这一切都离不开最关键的两个字，“人设”。

从小，安娜就流露出对时尚的兴趣与关心，在高中毕业之后，便到伦敦中央圣马丁学院进行学习。

然而待了没多久，安娜就从圣马丁退学，在柏林的一家公关公司实习。

随后，她又辗转去了巴黎，拿到了在法国时尚杂志《Purple》实习的机会。

也正是在《Purple》实习的那段时间里，让安娜有了接触时尚、艺术和名流的机会。

现实中安娜·索罗金的日常

在最能够一眼辨别暴发户和网红的时尚人士看来，安娜的品味是独一无二的。

她总能很精准地抓到“品味”的精髓，不管是穿着、谈吐、行为举止，甚至细节到去哪里吃什么样的菜，该点什么年份区域的红酒。

安娜浑身上下散发着“上流社会”的气息。

在真正的名媛眼里，安娜和她们就是同一类人。

“不试图给人留下深刻印象，不畏惧，不在乎，而且对艺术很有品味。”

安娜时常辗转于各大画廊艺术展中，在无意中与名流大家们分享自己对于艺术的见解。

一旦碰上同道中人，便很快能与对方结成友谊。

对于时尚与艺术的独到见解，是安娜跻身名流社会的第一块敲门砖。

当安娜拥有了这些“人脉”与“朋友”，便要最大程度地利用这些资源。

首先是社交平台。

安娜通过社交平台留下了与各种名流的合影，并亲密地标记对方的名字，不断对自己是贵族继承人的形象进行印象加深。

与此同时，社交平台上也不乏各种艺术展览、旅游度假的照片，甚至搭乘私人飞机、豪华邮轮，让越来越多的人对她编造的身世深信不疑。

人设已经搭建成功，安娜便开始了自己的新一步扩张。

通过“我和某某名流认识”、“某某名流是我的朋友”这样的搭桥牵线，安娜开始挤进更高层次的圈层。

她有了一个新的名号：创业。

安娜不断地利用女性崛起和创业热情来大做文章，强调家族虽然有钱，但是希望她能够独立自主，所以她需要靠自己的努力来创业，获得更多人的支持与引荐。

和其他只懂得享受的富二代不同，安娜对于创业的热情，吸引了一部分投资人的青睐。

与此同时，当时安娜的男友蔡斯正处于创业失败阶段，她利用了蔡斯的失败，向蔡斯的引荐人诺拉告发，将诺拉的资源顺到了自己的阵营里。

之前因人际网络不够庞大而四处碰壁的安娜，顺利地将建筑师、收藏家、地产大亨都纳入了自己创业团队中，形成了一份“完美”的商业计划。

要想启动这份计划，便需要通过融资贷款来实现。

起初，她也和所有创业人士一样，提交商业计划书，试图说服投资人艾伦为她担保贷款。

但不管她说得再怎么天花乱坠，艾伦从她的项目里看不到利益，也无法对这样一个年轻人产生信赖，便拒绝了她。

多次碰壁之后，安娜找到了新的出路：

先改变自己的形象，她不再是一个出入时尚派对的富二代，而是头脑清晰的女企业家。

戴了眼镜，换了更为深沉的色调搭配，摇身一变商界人士。

接着，她试图寻找着艾伦身上的弱点：他有一个女儿。

好巧不巧，艾伦的女儿就跟所有纨绔子弟一样，不学无术，天天只想着花家里的钱。

安娜对创业充满热情的姿态，逐渐点燃了艾伦的生活激情。

当然最重要的，还是利益。

安娜施加了一些简陋的伎俩，像是购买虚假电话卡、变声装备，为她的假身份提供更为真实的验证，让艾伦相信她所提供作为担保物的信托基金没有任何问题。

甚至在承销商要求交出10万美金的保证金时，艾伦用自己的判断作为担保，替安娜向国民城市银行申请到了20万美金的信用额度。

艾伦坚信，这是一笔“能够吃到死”的生意，在做到全球扩张之前，他就能吃下超过两亿美元。

就算现在安娜无法马上拿出钱来，但也都是迟早的事。

故事看到这里，不禁让人有了一种错觉：

这不是一个女骗子的行骗故事，而更像是一个女企业家的血泪创业史。

然而，最关键的问题在于——

安娜的钱都从哪里来的？

她用了一个很聪明的办法，以小博大。

一开始，安娜刚踏入名流社交圈时，豪掷千金，用高奢衣服和消费来包装自己。

就连给小费，一般人最多10美金，但安娜都是100美金起步。

当认识的有钱人越来越多，安娜便以自己只有现金、或者只能汇款为由，让对方提前帮自己刷卡垫付。

和男友蔡斯恋爱时，住酒店、吃饭、逛街，刷的都是蔡斯的卡；

帮诺拉到买手店取衣服、记账消费、招待朋友时，将自己的消费记在诺拉名下，或者直接刷诺拉交给她的信用卡。

就连预约私人飞机，也是借用投资人的名号，一分钱都没付，敷衍几句赶时间便坐上了私人飞机。

也正因为她骗的都是有钱人，有钱人们都理所当然地觉得，安娜没有理由会欠他们钱不还，便心安理得地替她先行付款。

就算发现被骗了，有钱人们也碍于面子，而选择不了了之。

甚至其中还有不少人直到安娜入狱，他们才意识到自己被骗了。

唯一一位不停向安娜追讨欠款的，是《名利场》的一位女记者瑞秋。

和安娜成为朋友之后，为了表现出自己的阔绰，大多数时候，安娜都不会让瑞秋付钱。

不管是美容、购物还是吃饭，安娜都会主动为瑞秋掏腰包。

然而就在她们一同结伴去摩洛哥游玩的时候，安娜的信用卡刷不了了，便只好让瑞秋垫付了六万多美金的消费。

对于一般的有钱人来说，可能这并不算什么钱。

但对于瑞秋而言，这相当于她一年的工资，还刷爆了她的信用卡。

为了追讨回这一笔欠款瑞秋便把安娜骗钱的故事发表在了《名利场》上，并向警方报案。

与此同时，安娜也由于不断在各个酒店吃霸王餐、逃酒店钱，被警方正式逮捕。

安娜因被身负四项“重大诈骗”罪名，被判4到12年有期徒刑，罚款19.9万元和2.4万。

长达四年的纽约第一假名媛诈骗案，就此划下句号。

直到被保释出狱、这部以她为主人公的剧集播出，她依然在利用着世界的有钱人们。

每次庭审，安娜都精心打扮自己，甚至找了设计师为自己设计“出庭造型”，也会因为对造型不满意而拒绝出庭。

安娜在庭审上的“时装秀”，一度还成为社交平台的热门话题。

*与日本女杀人犯木嶋佳苗的“庭审搭配”如出一辙

在监狱里的安娜，也忙着写自己在纽约的回忆录，还打算将自己在监狱里的生活撰写出书。

而她的这段诈骗故事，以32万美元卖给了网飞，拍成了这部剧集。

庭审中的安娜·索罗金

安娜的人生，确实是一出极其精彩的戏剧。

她深谙名流社交，掌握了游戏规则，强势的气场和自信的谈吐让她在真正的有钱人们面前也显得十分突出。

她制造了一种“世界唯我独尊”的存在感，这也是有钱人们的通病。

当别人对上流社会仰望不已、俯首称臣的时候，安娜以更高贵的姿态一脚踏入，打破了名流们的固有思维习惯。

即便安娜的诈骗手法并不高级，更有着肉眼可见的漏洞百出，但“当局者迷”。

安娜的演技已经卓越到，连她自己都活在预设的虚假之中。

在被捕之前，安娜疑似服药自杀，被送入了医院。

在医院里，即便她的谎言被揭穿，她却把所有的罪责推给了自己臆想中的“原生家庭”——

爸爸是黑帮，不仅家暴，自己因为是俄罗斯移民，还收受到各种歧视……等等。

然而在调查过后，平凡又普通的蓝领家庭，并不能为安娜的犯罪而背锅。

在很多残忍的案件背后，总是充斥着对原生家庭的控诉。

但像安娜这样的现实故事却在告诉我们，基因与环境，并不是让一个人“变坏”的绝对因素。

安娜的性格扭曲与自命不凡，来自于她对于命运的不服，还有对金钱与名利的偏执。

她所渴望的，早已不仅仅是钱，是那种万人拥戴、受人追捧的虚荣感。

被安娜所欺骗的人们，可以追回钱财，断绝往来；

然而唯有她自己，深陷在亲手布下的骗局，永生难逃。

*本文作者：D

说在前面：我逛了一下IMDB，看到一篇影评，又刷新了我对于剧里剧外Anna的认知，特此搬运翻译一下这篇影评，如有侵权，请及时告知。

以下是正文（标题如上）：

Netflix支付给Anna Sorokin，本剧的核心诈骗犯32万美元用于购买其故事的版权。Sorokin用这笔钱偿还了她从银行盗窃的资金，以及她欠纽约州的一些罚款。接着，她参加了大大小小的脱口秀或是其他综艺以继续出名。

在我撰写这篇影评的时候，她正在等待被遣返回德国，但罹患新冠阻碍了这一进程。美国海关认为她是故意患病以呆在美国更久，毕竟，Anna本就是个骗子。

因此，为了让我们这些普罗大众明白反社会人格和好莱坞的运作模式，（被诈骗的）银行又重新通过Anna的故事版权获得了补偿，然而，在Anna诈骗过程中用的那些普通人的信用卡和银行账户仍然没有得到补偿。尽管纽约州有山姆之子法律条文（译者注：禁止以盈利为目的出版罪犯的犯罪回忆录）的存在，通过Shonda Rimes撰写的这个剧本，Anna仍然变成了一个“非主流主角”并通过她的罪行获利。当我们看这部剧的时候，我们正在帮助一个反社会者牟利。

诈骗是骗子的本质。

Julia Garner对Anna的诠释很棒，但她的口音让我想砸了我的电视。Shonda呈现给了我们一个迷人的剧本。但这部剧的意义究竟是什么，只是为了拍某种OJ（译者注：OJ Simpson案是美国历史上最轰动的案子，有相关纪录片及改编美剧）“如果我做了”视角的犯罪吗？

我不喜欢拔高骗子地位的想法，尤其是我不喜欢因为她只诈骗富人所以她的诈骗行为没有问题的想法。诈骗就是诈骗。

她不是罗宾汉。她只是个小偷。

这部剧改编自真实事件，聚焦一起著名的“名媛骗局”，来自纽约杂志热门文章《How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People》：讲述的是一个名叫安娜·德尔维的女子自称是德国巨富豪门之女，从ins开始吸引了不少人的关注，成为纽约社交圈的热门girl，认识许多圈中富人名流，拿走了他们的钱，还差点办起了一家豪华俱乐部。但此后，安娜被指控是诈骗犯，她的真实身份是俄罗斯人安娜·索罗金。她从银行、所结交的朋友处骗取钱财，骗过酒店工作人员入住五星级酒店......

把纽约名流耍得团团转的顶级女骗子“安娜”，真正的故事是怎样的？是否映照了整个时代的缩影？假扮名媛的她，是骗子，是天才，还是两者兼具？看完了这部剧的第一集，我认识了什么是“白领犯罪”，此外我还整理了一些有意思的口语表达，一起分享给你~

1、white-collar felonies 白领犯罪

白领犯罪“white-collar crime”一词于 1939 年创造于美国，现在已成为企业和政府专业人士实施的各种欺诈行为的代名词。一般来说，白领犯罪是纯粹为了经济利益而犯下的非暴力犯罪。 剧中的安娜正是一个活生生的例子，她瞒天过海，伪装成了名媛，利用这个身份所能够获得的信息或资源的特权，对银行进行欺骗和隐瞒并且违反信任，企图窃取数百万美元。最后以犯了“白领重罪”而被捕入狱，她背后的动机便是为了获得金钱以及服务。

2、pulling yourself up by your bootstraps 奋发图强

pull yourself up by your bootstraps，字面上是拉紧靴子的鞋带站立，真正的含义则是奋发图强。“bootstrap”是靴子的鞋带，“pull yourself up”就是把自己拉起来。

可以这样记：就是不管事情有多么困难即使只能从拉紧鞋带开始你也要努力完成。比如说: Pull yourself up by the bootstrap and finish the project.你要奋发图强，努力地完成这个企划案。

3、drop it 别提了

let's drop it=let's drop the subject在口语中常用来结束当前谈话以及转换话题。“drop”除了“落下”的意思之外，还可以表示“问题、事件、话题等完了、结束、停止”。比如说：Let's drop it. I don't want to talk about it anymore. 别提了，我再也不想说那件事了。

4、flattery will get you everywhere 拍拍马屁会让你心想事成

flattery的意思是奉承、恭维、谄媚。其实无论东西方人，听到恭维话的第一反应还是比较高兴的。适度的说有利于人与人之间的交流，也能够使气氛变得轻松活跃，对于比较陌生的人，还有利于拉近双方的距离。

正因为flattery的种种好处，所以才有了这句俚语。无论是古代还是现在，flattery will get you everywhere！但是要注意，好的恭维应该是真心称赞别人所引以为自豪的东西，不要过了头哦~

5、bull 胡扯、扯淡

a load of bull=a lot of bull表示一派胡言。bull原意是“公牛”，但在这里是指“胡说八道”或“完全错误的事情”，是一个俚语，相当于bullshit。这个词虽然粗俗却很流行，bull或B.S.其实是bullshit的委婉说法。

6、agree to disagree 求同存异

这个短语在Urban Dictionary的解释是：

当谈话双方都认为自己是对的，再争下去没有意义时，他们就会说agree to disagree来结束争论。也就是双方保留意见，“求同存异”的意思啦。

在生活中，我们常常有要提出自己不同意见的时候，特别是在工作中。但是当意见提出来后，常常会有达不成一致的情况，这时候就可以说: Let's agree to disagree. 让我们保留各自意见，接受分歧的存在。

7、take a plea 认罪

在日常用语中，“plea” 表示的是“请求、恳求”。但是大多数情况下在法律判决书、状书中常用来表示“认罪”，如：Early pleas to lesser offences. 提早承认较轻控罪。

8 shed light on 描述，解释，使明朗

shed light on这个词组字面上是“打一道灯光来照亮”，引申为使某事物更明朗、容易理解，意思和explain这个词基本一样。

英文中常以“光明”、“黑暗作为“知识”、“无知”的对比。比如:in the dark是指“处于不明就里的状态”反过来in light of则是“借助于…的启发”。 比如说：This discussion has shed light on the problem. 这次讨论给解决问题带来了曙光。

9 knock-off 山寨货，仿制品

knock off有很多意思如“下班，别闹了”等，但是在这里是一个比较口语化的日常用词，指“山寨货、仿制品”，尤其指昂贵产品的山寨版。 比如要问一件产品是真货还是假货，你可以这么说：Is that the real thing or a knock-off? 那是真品还是仿制品？

10 be dying to do 迫切渴望、急于做某事

dying是die的现在分词，表示“临终的，垂死的”，进行时态表将来。但注意了，可不要将 be dying to 解释为“处于临死状态”，它的意思其实是“迫切渴望”。

在我们中文里有一个常见的说法，叫做“想什么想得要死”，因此 be dying to 可引申为“非常的渴望做某事”。 比如说：I'm dying to see you soon. 我渴望能很快见到你。

11 tap into 利用，开发

一说起tap很多人应该会想到“tap water”自来水这个词，而“tap”则表示“水龙头”。“tap”在这里则是它的引申词义，表示“利用、开发、发掘”。当表示这个意思时，常与介词into连用，即tap into sth。比如说：tap into your brain to get new ideas. 开动脑筋获得新想法。

其他与tap相关的搭配：

tap sb for sth 向…索要，向…乞讨（尤指钱）

tap in/out 输入，输出（信息、数字、字母等）

tap out（跟着音乐节奏）轻轻打拍子、（用计算机或移动电话）写，敲出，键入

12 LOL——Laughing Out Loud 大声笑 / STFU——Shut The Fuck Up 闭上你的臭嘴

这个"LOL"除了表示大家常说的英雄联盟游戏之外，还有另一个意思哦！那就是"Laughing out loud"的缩写，大声笑出来，一般在文字聊天的时候会用到。 比如：LOL! That was so funny! 笑死我了，那真是太搞笑了！

STFU是“Shut The Fuck Up ”的缩写，表示很生气的让人闭上臭嘴，是一句脏话（好孩子勿学）。

13 so be it 就这样吧

so be it. 就那么样吧。常在表达不甘心，但又不得不放弃、认输的时候使用，十分无奈的感觉。 语法小知识：so be it不是虚拟语气，而是倒装句。原来的顺序应该是：let it be so, 倒装之后就省略了let. 意思是：“就让it如此或怎样吧。”

14 right off the bat 立刻，一下子

bat是“球棒”的意思，right off the bat字面解释就是“刚刚击出一球”。我们知道棒球和球棒都十分坚硬，所以球棒一击中棒球，棒球就立即会以非常高的速度弹飞出去。据说球速是每小时一百英里，right off the bat就出自棒球一接触球棒立即飞离而去，给人一种即刻出动的感觉。

比如说：Right off the bat I knew she was the girl for me.一瞬间，我明白了，她就是我的心上人。

15 I loathe you 我讨厌你

在生活中说“我讨厌你”我们常用“I hate you”来表达，hate 通常为语气较强的动词，常用于口语或非正式英语中，无足轻重地谈论所讨厌的人或物，如某种食物。 loathe的意思是“极不喜欢;厌恶”， 这个词的厌恶程度是非常深的，比 hate 和 dislike 严重多了，但也可以用于非正式场合指不太重要的事情，表示确实不喜欢。 有两个固定搭配： loathe sb / sth 讨厌某人

loathe doing sth 讨厌做某事

16 make a pledge 作出承诺

这里的make a pledge是发誓、作出承诺的意思，相当于我们熟悉的promise，但pledge这个词更加正式一些。比如歌曲《Sealed With A Kiss》里就有一句歌词写到“Oh, let us make a pledge to meet in September ”喔，让我们约定九月再相见吧。感兴趣的朋友可以去听听看，一首非常经典的英文歌~

17 name-dropper 搬出名人以自抬身价

dropper可以解释为“随口说出什么的人”。a name-dropper就是指由于虚荣心作怪，以仿佛很熟悉的口吻谈到著名人物名字，并且到处显摆的人，明显在自抬身价啦。 所以‘name-dropper’就是“自抬身价者”的意思。这种人往往是在说大话，甚至在胡说八道，所以人们早晚不会信他的。

18 ass-kissing 拍马屁

ass-kisser / ass-kissing 马屁精。很好理解，吻屁股的人，就是马屁精。比如说：Oh, he's such an ass-kisser. I can't believe the boss falls for it! 喔，他真是个大马屁精，我不敢相信老板吃他那一套。 也可表示”拍马屁“这一行为，kiss sb's ass就是指拍某人的马屁。

19 be amped for 对某事非常激动，抱有激情

amped是指“激动的，兴奋的”。如果你对某事amped，这说明你非常激动且迫不及待的让这件事发生。比如说："I'm so amped for the game tonight!” 我超级期待今晚的比赛！

20 breathe down one's neck 步步紧逼

breathe是呼吸的意思，neck是脖子的意思。breathe down one's neck 很容易联想到勒着脖子使人难以呼吸，引申为令人窒息的逼迫，对某人盯得特别紧的意思。

21 lay low 躲着点，保持低调

lay low本意有宅在家，避风头的意思，理解为低调也非常合适，其实这里和中文也有相合的地方：中文的“低”和英文的“low”，都有行事不太惹人注目的意思。所以lay low字面意义是“停在低的地方”，实际上就是指“保持低调”。比如说因为新冠，我们得在家宅（低调）一段时间。你可以这么说：We have to lay low for a while because of the Coronavirus.

喜欢的话，点个赞支持一下呗~

｜本文作者：Zohra

｜审校编辑：Juliet

“Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It”

Jessica Pressler

It started with money, as it so often does in New York. A crisp $100 bill slipped across the smooth surface of the mid-century-inspired concierge desk at 11 Howard, the sleek new boutique hotel in Soho. Looking up, Neffatari Davis, the 25-year-old concierge, who goes by “Neff,” was surprised to see the cash had come from a young woman who seemed to be around her age. She had a heart-shaped face and pouty lips surrounded by a wild tangle of red hair, her eyes framed by incongruously chunky black glasses that Neff, an aspiring cinematographer with an eye for detail, identified as Céline. She was looking, she said in an accent that sounded European, for “the best food in Soho.”

Anna

Vivian原型、原作者：Jessica Pressler

“What’s your name?” Neff asked, after the girl waved off her suggestions of Carbone and the Mercer Kitchen and settled on the Butcher’s Daughter.

“Anna Delvey,” said the young woman. She’d be staying at the hotel for a month, she went on, which Neff also found surprising: Usually it was only celebrities who came for such long stretches. But Neff checked the system, and there it was. Delvey was booked into a Howard Deluxe, one of the hotel’s midrange options, about $400 a night, with ceramic sculptures on the walls and oversize windows looking onto the bustling streets of Soho. It was February 18, 2017.

“Thanks,” said Delvey. “See you around.”

That turned out to be a promise. Over the next few weeks, Delvey stopped by often to ask Neff’s advice, slipping her $100 each time. Neff would wax on about how Mr. Purple was totally washed and Vandal was for hipsters, while Delvey’s eyes would flit around behind her glasses. Eventually, Neff realized: Delvey already knew all the cool places to go — not only that, she knew the names of the bartenders and waiters and owners. “This is not a guest that needs my help,” it dawned on her. “This is a guest that wants my time.”

This was not out of the ordinary. Since she’d started working there, Neff, a Washington, D.C., native with a wedge of natural hair, giant Margaret Keane eyes, and a gap-toothed smile, had found herself playing therapist to all manner of hotel guests: husbands cheating on their wives, wives getting away from their husbands. “You just sit there and listen, because that’s your concierge life,” she recalled recently, at a coffee shop near her apartment in Crown Heights.

Usually, these guests went back to their own lives, leaving Neff to hers. But February became March, and Delvey kept showing up. She’d bring food down, or a glass of extra-dry white wine, and settle near Neff’s desk to chat. Some of the other hotel employees found Anna deeply annoying. She could be oddly ill-mannered for a rich person: Please and thank you were not in her vocabulary, and she would sometimes say things that were “Not racist,” Neff said, “but classist.” (“What are you bitches, broke?” Anna asked her and another hotel employee.) But to Neff, it didn’t come across as mean-spirited. More like she was some kind of old-fashioned princess who’d been plucked from an ancient European castle and deposited in the modern world, although according to Anna she came from modern-day Germany and her father ran a business producing solar panels. And despite her unassuming figure — “a sort of Sound of Music Fräulein,” one acquaintance later put it — Anna quickly established herself as one of 11 Howard’s most generous guests. “People would fight to take her packages upstairs,” said Neff. “Fight, because you knew you were getting $100.” Over time, Delvey got more and more comfortable in the hotel, swanning around in sheer Alexander Wang leggings or, occasionally, a hotel robe. “She ran that place,” said Neff. “You know how Rihanna walks out with wineglasses? That was Anna. And they let her. Bye, Ms. Delvey …”

Anna was preparing to launch a business, a Soho House–ish type club, she told Neff, focused on art, with locations in L.A., London, Hong Kong, and Dubai, and Neff became her de facto secretary, organizing business lunches and dinners at restaurants like Seamore’s and the hotel’s own Le Coucou. (“That’s what they do in the rich culture, is meals,” said Neff.) On occasion, when Delvey showed up while the concierge desk was busy, she would stand at the counter, coolly counting out bills until she got Neff’s attention. “I’d be like, ‘Anna, there’s a line of eight people.’ But she’d keep putting money down.” And even though Neff had begun to think of Anna as not just a hotel guest but a friend, a real friend, she didn’t hesitate to take it. “A little selfish of me,” she admitted later. “But … yeah.”

Who can blame her? This was Manhattan in the 21st century, and money is more powerful than ever. Rare is the city dweller who, when presented with an opportunity for a sudden and unexpected influx of cash, doesn’t grasp for it. Of course, this money almost always comes with strings attached. Sometimes you can barely see them, like that vaudeville bit in which the pawn dives for a loose bill only to find it pulled just ahead. Still, everyone makes the reach. Because here, money is the one thing that no one can ever have enough of.

For a stretch of time in New York, no small amount of the cash in circulation was coming from Anna Delvey. “She gave to everyone,” said Neff. “Uber drivers, $100 cash. Meals — listen. You know how you reach for your credit card? She wouldn’t let me.”

The way Anna spent money, it was like she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. Her room was overflowing with shopping bags from Acne and Supreme, and in between meetings, she’d invite Neff to foot massages, cryotherapy, manicures (Anna favored “a light Wes Anderson pink,” according to Neff). One day, she brought Neff to a session with a personal trainer–slash–life coach she’d found online, a svelte, ageless Oprah-esque figure who works with celebrities like Dakota Johnson.

“Stop sinking into your body,” the trainer commanded Anna. “Shoulders back, navel to spine. You are a bright woman; you want to be a businesswoman. You gotta be staying strong on your own power.”

Afterward, as Neff panted on the sidelines, Anna bought a package of sessions. “It was, I’m not lying, $4,500,” said Neff.

Anna paid cash.

Neff’s boyfriend didn’t understand why she was spending so much time with this weird girl from work. Anna didn’t understand why Neff had a boyfriend. But he was rich, Neff protested. He’d promised to finance her first movie. “Dump him,” Anna advised. “I have more money.” She would finance the movie.

Neff did dump the guy. Not because of what Anna had said, although she had no reason to doubt it. Her new friend, she discovered, belonged to a vast and glittering social circle. “Anna knew everyone,” said Neff. At night, she’d taken to hosting large dinners at Le Coucou, attended by CEOs, artists, athletes, even celebrities. One night, Neff found herself seated next to her childhood idol, Macaulay Culkin. “Which was awkward,” she said. “Because I had so many questions. And he was right there. But they were talking about, like, friend stuff. So I never got the chance to be like, ‘So, you the godfather to Michael Jackson’s kids?’”

Despite her seemingly nomadic living situation, Anna had long been a figure on the New York social scene. “She was at all the best parties,” said marketing director Tommy Saleh, who met her in 2013 at Le Baron in Paris during Fashion Week. Delvey had been an intern at European scenester magazine Purple and appeared to be tight with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Olivier Zahm, and its man-about-town, André Saraiva, an owner of Le Baron — two of “the 200 or so people you see everywhere,” as Saleh put it: Chilterns and Loulou’s in London; the Crow’s Nest in Montauk; Paul’s Baby Grand and the Bowery Hotel; Frieze, Coachella, Art Basel. “She introduced herself, and she was a sweet girl, very polite,” said Saleh. “Then we’re just hanging with my friends all of a sudden.”

Soon, Anna was everywhere too. “She managed to be in all the sort of right places,” recalled one acquaintance who met Anna in 2015 at a party thrown by a start-up mogul in Berlin. “She was wearing really fancy clothing” — Balenciaga, or maybe Alaïa — “and someone mentioned that she flew in on a private jet.” It was unclear where exactly Anna came from — she told people she was from Cologne, but her German wasn’t very good — or what the source of her wealth was. But that wasn’t unusual. “There are so many trust-fund kids running around,” said Saleh. “Everyone is your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone.”

She was wearing really fancy clothing. Some one mentioned she flew in on a private jet.

After a gallerist at Pace introduced her to Michael Xufu Huang, the extremely young, extremely dapper collector and founder of Beijing’s M Woods museum, Anna proposed they go together to the Venice Biennale. Huang thought it was “a little weird” when Anna asked him to book the plane tickets and hotel on his credit card. “But I was like, Okay, whatever,” he said. It was also strange, he noticed during their time there, that Anna only ever paid with cash, and after they got back, she seemed to forget she’d said she’d pay him back. “It was not a lot of money,” he said. “Like two or three thousand dollars.” After a while, Huang kind of forgot about it too.

When you’re superrich, you can be forgetful in this way. Which is maybe why no one thought much of the instances in which Anna did things that seemed odd for a wealthy person: calling a friend to have her put a taxi from the airport on her credit card, or asking to sleep on someone’s couch, or moving into someone’s apartment with the tacit agreement to pay rent, and then … not doing it. Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it.

The following January, Anna hired a PR firm to put together a birthday party at one of her favorite restaurants, Sadelle’s in Soho. “It was a lot of very cool, very successful people,” said Huang, who, while aware Anna owed him money for their Venice trip, remained mostly unconcerned about it, at least until the restaurant, having seen Polaroids of Huang and Anna at the party on Instagram, messaged him a few days later. “They were like, ‘Do you have her contact info?’” he says now. “‘Because she didn’t pay her bill.’ Then I realized, Oh my God, she is not legit.”

As Anna bounced around the globe, there was some speculation as to where her means to do this came from, though no one seemed to care that much so long as the bills got paid.

“I thought she had family money,” said Jayma Cardoso, one of the owners of the Surf Lodge in Montauk. Delvey’s father was a diplomat to Russia, one friend was sure. No, another insisted, he was an oil-industry titan. “As far as I knew, her family was the Delvey family that is big in antiques in Germany,” said another acquaintance, a millionaire tech CEO. (It is unclear what family he was referring to.) The CEO met Anna through the boyfriend she was running around with for a while, a futurist on the TED-Talks circuit who’d been profiled in The New Yorker.For about two years, they’d been kind of like a team, showing up in places frequented by the itinerant wealthy, living out of fancy hotels and hosting sceney dinners where the Futurist talked up his app and Delvey spoke of the private club she wanted to open once she turned 25 and came into her trust fund.

Then it was 2016. The Futurist, whose app never materialized, moved to the Emirates, and Anna came to New York on her own, determined to make her arts club a reality, although she worried to Marc Kremers, the London creative director helping her with branding, that the name she’d come up with — the Anna Delvey Foundation, or ADF — was “too narcissistic.”

Early on, Anna and architect Ron Castellano, a friend of her Purple cohort, had scouted a building on the Lower East Side, but it turned out to be too close to a school to get a liquor license, and soon Anna had shifted her aspirations uptown. Through her connections, she’d befriended Gabriel Calatrava, one of the sons of famed architect Santiago. His family’s real-estate advisory company, Calatrava Grace, had helped her “secure the lease,” she informed people, on the perfect space: 45,000 square feet occupying six floors of the historic Church Missions House, a landmarked building on the corner of Park Avenue and 22nd. The heart of the club would be, she said, a “dynamic visual-arts center,” with a rotating array of pop-up shops curated by artist Daniel Arsham, whom she knew from her Purpledays, and exhibitions and installations from blue-chip artists like Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin. For the inaugural event, Anna told people, the artist Christo had agreed to wrap the building. Some people raised their eyebrows at the grandiosity of this plan, but to others it made sense, in a New York kind of way. The building’s owner, developer Aby Rosen, was no stranger to the private-club genre; a few years earlier, he’d bought a midtown building and opened the Core Club, which housed an art collection. He also happened to own 11 Howard.

With the help of Calatrava executive Michael Jaffe, a former employee of Rosen’s RFR realty firm, Anna soon began meeting with big names in the food-and-beverage world to discuss possibilities in the space. One was André Balazs, who, according to Anna, suggested they add two floors of hotel rooms. Another was Richie Notar, one of the founders of Nobu, who did a walk-through of the building with Anna as she described her vision, which included three restaurants, a juice bar, and a German bakery. “Apparently her family was prominent in Germany,” Notar said, “and funding this big project for her.”

But a project of this size required more capital than even someone of Anna’s apparently considerable resources could manage: approximately $25 million, “in addition to $25m existing,” Anna wrote in an email to a prominent Silicon Valley publicist in 2016. “If you think this is something you could help us with and have anyone in mind who would be a good cultural fit for this project.” But by fall, Anna had turned on the idea of private investors, in part because she didn’t want anyone telling her what to do. “If we were to bring in investors, they would say, ‘Oh, she’s 25; she doesn’t know what she’s doing,’” Anna explained later. “I wanted to build the first one myself.”

To help secure a loan, one of Anna’s “finance friends” had told her to get in touch with Joel Cohen, best known as the prosecutor of Jordan Belfort, a.k.a. the Wolf of Wall Street. Cohen now worked at Gibson Dunn, a large firm known for its real-estate practice. He put her in touch with Andy Lance, a partner who happened to have the exact kind of expertise that Anna was looking for. In the past, she’d complained to friends about feeling condescended to by older male lawyers because of her age and gender. But Lance was different. “He knows how to talk to women,” she said. “And he would explain to me the right amount, without being patronizing.” According to Anna, she and Lance spoke every day. “He was there all the time. He would answer in the middle of the night, or when he was in Turks and Caicos for Christmas.”

After filling out Gibson Dunn’s new-client-intake form, which included checking boxes that confirmed the client had the resources to pay and would not embarrass the firm, Lance put Anna in touch with several large financial institutions, including Los Angeles–based City National Bank and Fortress Investment Group. “Our client Anna Delvey is undertaking a very exciting redevelopment of 281 Park Avenue South, backed by a marquee team for this type of venue and space,” Lance wrote in one email, in which he explained that Anna needed the loan because “her personal assets, which are quite substantial, are located outside the US, some of them in trust with UBS outside the US.” The monies she received, he added, would be “fully secured” by a letter of credit from the Swiss bank. (Lance did not respond to requests for comment.)

When the banker at City National asked to see the UBS statements, he received a list of figures from a man named Peter W. Hennecke. “Please use these for your projections for now,” Hennecke wrote in an email. “I’ll send the physical statements on Monday.”

“Question: Are you from UBS?” the banker replied, puzzled by Hennecke’s AOL address.

No, Anna explained. “Peter is head of my family office.”

With Anna in fund-raising mode, the artists and celebrity friends at her dinners were gradually supplanted by men with “Goyard briefcases and Rolexes, and Hublot, like that Jay-Z lyric,” according to Neff, who at one point looked across the table at Le Coucou and recognized the face of infamous “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, who would later be convicted of securities fraud. Anna introduced Shkreli as a “dear friend,” although it was really the only time they’d met, Shkreli told New York in a letter from the penitentiary; Anna was close with one of his executives. “Anna did seem to be a popular ‘woman about town’ who knew everyone,” he wrote. “Even though I was nationally known, I felt like a computer geek next to her.”

As for Neff, she was not as discreet as she had been with Macaulay Culkin, tweeting after the fact that Shkreli had played her and Anna the leaked tracks from Tha Carter V, the delayed Lil Wayne album he’d acquired. Anna was furious, but Neff refused to delete the tweet. “I wanted everybody to know that I heard this album that the world is waiting on! But Anna was pretty mad. She didn’t come down to my desk for maybe three days.”

In the meantime, though, Neff said she had another visitor: Charlie Rosen. Aby Rosen’s sons were generally regarded as pretty-boy trust-fund kids — a few years back, they made headlines for reportedly racing ATVs over piping-plover nests in the Hamptons — but Neff liked them, and when Charlie stopped by one evening, she dropped that she’d recently been to visit the Park Avenue building that one of the guests, a young woman, was leasing from their father for an arts club.

Rosen looked confused. He didn’t appear to have ever heard of Anna or her project. “What room is she staying in?” he asked. When Neff told him, he looked skeptical. “If my dad has someone buying property from him staying here,” he said, “would she be in a Deluxe or would she be in a suite?”

He had a point. A few days later, Neff broached the subject. “Why did you tell me you’re buying property from Aby but you’re not staying in a suite?” she asked.

Anna looked surprised but answered immediately. “She said, ‘You ever have someone do so many favors for you, you kind of just want to pay them back in silence?’”

“Genius,” Neff said.

Soon it was April. Spring was poking its head through the gray New York City sidewalks, and the weather was getting warm enough to sip rosé on rooftops, one of Anna’s favorite activities, although the circle she was doing this with, Neff noticed, was smaller than it had been in the past and mainly consisted of herself; Rachel Williams, a photo editor at Vanity Fair; and the trainer, who, although she was notably older, had taken a motherly interest in her client. “I know a lot of trust-fund babies, and I was impressed that Anna had something that she wanted to do, instead of, you know, living like a Kardashian,” said the trainer. Plus, she said, Anna seemed lonely. Neff noticed the same thing. “What happened to your friends?” she asked Anna after one night out. “Oh,” Anna said vaguely. “They’re all mad I left Purple.” She was too busy for parties, anyway, she said, what with building her business.

It was true that Anna was spending a lot of time working, frowning at her in-box and huffing into the phone. “She was always on the phone with lawyers,” said Neff, who would sort of listen in from the concierge desk. “They were always toning her down. Like, ‘Anna, you’re trying to make something that’s worth this much be worth that much, and that’s just not how it works.’”

Back in December, City National had turned down her loan request — a management decision is how Anna framed it — and while the ever-loyal Andy Lance was reaching out to hedge funds and banks for alternate financing, executives at RFR were pressuring her to come up with the money fast, Anna said. If she didn’t, they were going to give it to another party, rumored to be the Swedish museum Fotografiska. “How do they even pay for that?” Anna fumed. “It’s like two old guys.”

In the meantime, Anna was having cash-flow issues of her own. One night, Anna asked Neff to dinner at Sant Ambroeus in Soho. They were by themselves, which was unusual. Even more unusually, at the end of the meal, Anna’s card was declined. “Here,” she told the waiter, handing him a list of credit-card numbers. In Neff’s admittedly foggy memory, they were in a small book, though it may have been the Notes app on her phone. But she’s clear on what happened next. “The waiter went back to his station and began entering the numbers. There were like 12, and I know the guy tried them all,” she said. “He was trying it and then shaking his head. And then I started to sweat, because I knew the bill was mine.” While the amount — $286 — was a fraction of what Anna usually spent, it was a lot for Neff, who quietly transferred money from her savings to cover the bill. Doing so made her feel sick, but after all the money Anna had spent on her, she understood it was her turn.

What happened to all your friends?” “Oh, they’re all mad I left Purple.

Not long after, Neff’s manager called and asked her to address a delicate issue: It seemed 11 Howard didn’t have a credit card on file for Anna Delvey. Because the hotel had been so new when she arrived, and because she was staying for such an unusually long time, and because she was a client of Aby Rosen’s and a very valued guest, it had agreed to accept a wire transfer. But a month and a half later, no such transfer had arrived, and now Delvey owed the hotel some $30,000, including charges from Le Coucou that she’d been billing to her room.

Neff wasn’t sure what to think. She was sure Anna was good for the money. The day after the Sant Ambroeus debacle, she’d paid her back triple. In cash.

When Anna came by her desk the next day, Neff took her aside and told her that management had said Anna needed to pay her bill. Anna nodded, her eyes inscrutable behind her sunglasses. There was a wire transfer on the way, she said. It should arrive soon. Then, about midway into her shift, Anna came by the desk again and, with a mischievous smile on her face, told Neff to expect a package. When it arrived, Neff opened it to find a case of 1975 Dom Pérignon, with Anna’s instructions to distribute it among the staff. Neff hesitated. Gifts, especially of the liquid variety, needed to be approved by management. “They were like, ‘How do we look approving this if she hasn’t paid us?’ So they went after her. ‘We need the money or we’re locking you out.’”

One morning, Anna showed up to her morning session with the trainer looking visibly upset. “Can we do a life-coaching session?” she pleaded. She was trying to build something, to do something, she went on, and no one was taking her seriously. “They think because I am young, they think I have all this money,” she sobbed. “I told them the money would be there soon. I’m having it transferred.”

The trainer told her to breathe. “I feel like you are in a little over your head,” she offered. “Maybe you just need a break.”

Then something miraculous happened. Citibank sent 11 Howard a wire transfer on behalf of Ms. Anna Delvey for $30,000. Neff called Anna on her cell phone. “Where you at?” she asked. Across the street at Rick Owens, Anna replied. Neff checked the clock: It was her lunch break. When she came through the door of the store, Anna was holding up a T-shirt. “Look what I found,” she said, beaming. “It’s perfect for you.” She was right: The shirt was the exact orangey red of the creepy bathroom scene in The Shining, one of Neff’s favorite movies, and the signature color of the brand Neff was trying to launch, FilmColours. It was also $400. “I’d love to buy it for you,” Anna said.

A few weeks later, Anna told Neff she was going to Omaha. “I’m going to see Warren Buffett,” she announced, grandly. One of her bankers had gotten her on the list to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investment conference, and she’d decided to bring the executive from Martin Shkreli’s hedge fund, who was fun and a friend of his, on the private jet she’d rented to take them there. “I’ll be back,” she promised Neff.

But there was still a problem with her account at 11 Howard. Despite being repeatedly asked by hotel management, she still hadn’t given the hotel a working credit card, and her charges continued to mount. Following through on their warning, hotel employees changed the code on the lock of Anna’s room and put her things in storage. Neff texted Anna in Omaha to deliver the bad news.

“How can they do that?” Anna asked indignantly, although if she was truly shocked, it didn’t last long. The conference had been great, she said. The best part had happened the very last day, when, having exhausted all the opportunities for luxury Omaha had to offer, Anna and her party had taken a cab driver’s suggestion to check out the zoo. They hadn’t expected much, but then, while they were riding around on their golf carts, they’d stumbled on a private dinner hosted by Buffett for a slew of VIPs. “Everyone was there,” she said. “Like, Bill Gates was there.”

For a little while, they’d watched through the glass, then they’d slipped in and mingled among them.

When Anna got back to 11 Howard, she made her fury known. She was going to purchase web domains in all of the managers’ names, she told Neff, a trick she’d learned from Shkreli: “They’re going to pay me one day,” she said. Also, she was moving out — as soon as she got back from Morocco. Inspired by Khloé Kardashian, she’d reserved a $7,000-a-night riad with a private butler at La Mamounia, an opulent resort in Marrakech, and asked Neff if she wanted to join herself, the trainer, Rachel Williams, and a videographer, who she was hoping would make “a behind-the-scenes documentary” about the process of creating her arts foundation on a vacation. They’d wake up to massages, she said, and spend their days exploring the souk, lounging by the pool. Neff wanted to go, badly. But there was no way the hotel would let her take off eight days. “Just quit,” Anna said airily.

For a day or two, Neff considered it. But her mom told her she had a bad feeling about it. “Nothing in life is free,” she said. So Neff stayed behind, morosely following her friend’s journey on Instagram. “I was pretty jealous,” she said.

As she would find out, the pictures didn’t exactly tell the whole story. Two days in, after coming down with a nasty case of food poisoning, the trainer had gone back to New York early.

About a week later, the trainer got a call from Anna, who was alone at the Four Seasons in Casablanca and hysterical. There was, she sobbed, a problem with her bank. Her credit cards weren’t going through, and the hotel was threatening to call the police. After calming Anna down, the trainer asked to speak to management. “They were like, ‘She is going to be arrested,’” she said.

The trainer was torn: On the one hand, this was not her problem. On the other, Anna was her client, her friend, and someone’s daughter. Offering a prayer to the universe, the trainer gave the hotel her credit-card number and, when it failed to go through, made the requisite calls to her bank. When it still failed to go through, she went the extra mile: She called a friend and had her give her credit-card information. When that failed to work, the hotel conceded the problem might be on their end.

Later, the trainer would recognize this as a substantial gift from the Universe. At the time, she promised the hotel in Casablanca that Anna would make them whole. “Trust me,” she told them. “I know she’s good for it. I just spent two days with her in Marrakech.” When Anna came back on the phone, the trainer told her she was booking her a ticket back to New York. Anna snuffled her thanks. Then she asked for one last favor: “Can you get me first class?” she asked.

A few days later, a silvery Tesla pulled up in front of 11 Howard. Neff, at the concierge desk, felt her cell phone buzz. “Look out the window,” said a familiar German accent. The car’s futuristic doors slowly raised up to reveal Anna. “I’m here to get my stuff,” she said.

Anna was making good on her promise to leave 11 Howard. She was moving downtown to the Beekman Hotel, she told Neff, who watched her drive away in a car that she only later realized someone must have rented to her. Moving didn’t stem Anna’s mounting troubles. Not only did she owe the hotel, but, over in London, Marc Kremers, the designer she’d hired to do her branding work, was getting antsy: The £16,800 fee Anna had promised would arrive by wire almost a year before had yet to materialize, and now emails to Anna’s financial adviser, Peter W. Hennecke, were bouncing back. “Peter passed away last month,” Anna replied. “Please refrain from contacting or mentioning any communication with him going forward.”

In retrospect, her terseness was understandable. Things were rapidly deteriorating for Anna Delvey in New York. Twenty days into her stay, the Beekman Hotel, having realized it did not have a working credit card on file and having not received the promised wire transfer for her balance of $11,518.59, locked Anna out of her room and confiscated her belongings. A subsequent two-day stay at the W Hoteldowntown ended in a similar fashion, and by July 5, Anna was effectively homeless, wandering the streets in threadbare Alexander Wang sportswear.

Late one night, she made her way to the trainer’s apartment and dialed her from outside. “I’m right near your building,” she said. “Do you think we could talk?”

The trainer hesitated: She was in the middle of a date. But there was a desperate note in Anna’s voice. She made her way to her lobby, where she found Anna with tears streaming down her face. “I’m trying to do this thing,” she sobbed. “And it’s so hard.”

Maybe she should call her family, the trainer suggested. She would, Anna replied, but her parents were in Africa. “Do you mind if I crash at your place tonight?” No, the trainer said, she had a date.

“I really just don’t want be alone,” Anna sniffled. “I might do something.”

The date hid in the bedroom while the trainer made a bed for her unexpected houseguest and offered her a glass of water.

“Do you have any Pellegrino?” Anna asked. There was one large bottle left. Anna ignored the two glasses placed on the counter and began swilling from the bottle. “I’m so tired,” she yawned.

As Anna slept, the trainer’s spidey sense began to tingle. “I mean, I’m born and raised in New York,” she told me later. “I’m not stupid.” She texted Rachel Williams, who told her about what had happened at La Mamounia: Apparently, after the trainer returned to New York, the credit card Anna had used to book the hotel was found to be nonfunctional, and when Anna was unable to produce a new form of payment and a pair of threatening goons appeared in the doorway, the photo editor was forced to put the balance — $62,000, more than she was paid in a year — on the Amex she sometimes used for work expenses. Anna had promised her a wire transfer, but a month later, all Rachel received was $5,000, and her excuses had turned “Kafkaesque.”

The following morning, the trainer resolved to draw a clear boundary. After lending Anna a clean (and flattering) dress, she sent her on her way with a gratis motivational speech. But when Anna walked out the door, she left her laptop behind. The trainer was having none of it. She deposited the computer at the front desk and texted Anna that she could pick it up there.

That evening, the trainer got a call from her doorman. Anna was in the lobby. He’d told her that the trainer was out, at which point she’d asked for access to her suite. When he refused, Anna had resolved to wait for the trainer to return home.

“Let me know when she goes,” the trainer told the doorman.

But hours passed and Anna didn’t budge. “They were like, She’s still here. She’s texting,” the trainer recalls. “I was like, Oh my God, I’m a prisoner of my own house.” It wasn’t until after midnight that Anna finally left the building.

The relief the trainer felt soon turned into worry. “I started calling the hotels to see where she was staying, and each hotel was like, ‘This girl,’ she said.

She found out why later that month, when both the Beekman and the W Hotel filed charges against Anna for theft of services. WANNABE SOCIALITE BUSTED FOR SKIPPING OUT ON PRICEY HOTEL BILLS, blared the headline in the Post, which referenced an incident in which Anna attempted to leave the restaurant at Le Parker without paying. “Why are you making a big deal about this?” she’d protested to police. “Give me five minutes and I can get a friend to pay.”

But no friends arrived. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding, as Anna told Todd Spodek, the criminal attorney she hired to fight the misdemeanor charges. Maybe the poised young woman in the Audrey Hepburn dress who’d cold-called him on his cell phone repeatedly, insisting it was an emergency until he’d agreed to come into his office on a Saturday, really was a wealthy German heiress, he thought, as his 4-year-old pasted Paw Patrol stickers up one of Anna’s bare arms, and her credit cards had gotten jammed up, or someone had taken away her trust fund. Just in case, Spodek, whose everyday clientele includes grifters, dog-murderers, femme fatales, rapists, and cybercriminals, among other miscreants, had her sign a lien on all of her assets, one that would ensure he got paid. On her way out, Anna asked a favor. “I kind of need a place to stay,” she said. Spodek demurred. The last thing his wife wanted was for him to bring his work home with him.

Anna again got in touch with the trainer, who did not invite her to stay but instead organized an intervention at a nearby restaurant, during which she and Rachel Williams attempted to get answers: about why Anna had done what she’d done, who she really was, if she’d ever planned on paying anyone back. Anna hemmed and hawed and dissembled and prevaricated and, as the women got increasingly angry, allowed two fat tears to roll down her cheeks. “I’ll have enough to pay everyone,” she sniffled. “Once I get the lease signed …”

“Anna,” the trainer said, summoning her last shred of patience. “The building has been rented.”

She held up her iPhone and showed her the headline: FOTOGRAFISKA SIGNS A LEASE FOR ENTIRE 45K SF AT ABY ROSEN’S BUILDING.

“That’s fake news,” Anna said.

Is “Fotografiska really get the building?” sighed the tiny, accented voice after the recording identifying the call as coming from Rikers Island, where Anna Delvey, a.k.a. Anna Sorokin, has been remanded without bail since October 2017.

As it turned out, Anna’s hotel bills were merely the first loose threads in a web of fraudulent activity, one that began to unravel in November 2016, after she submitted documents claiming a net worth of €60 million in Swiss accounts to City National Bank in pursuit of a $22 million dollar loan. The following month, she submitted the same documents to Fortress in an attempt to secure a $25 million to $35 million loan. After that bank asked her for $100,000 to perform due diligence, she convinced a representative at City National to extend her a $100,000 line of credit, which she then wired to Fortress. Then, apparently spooked by Fortress’s decision to send representatives to Switzerland to personally check her assets, she withdrew herself from the process halfway through, wiring the remaining $55,000 to a Citibank account that she used for “personal expenses … shopping at Forward by Elyse Walker, Apple, and Net-a-Porter,” according to the New York District Attorney’s office. Then, in April, she deposited $160,000 worth of bad checks into the same account, managing to withdraw $70,000 before they were returned, which is how she managed to pay off 11 Howard and, ostensibly, buy Neff’s T-shirt and the domain names of the managers of the hotel. (“They called me down to the office. They said, ‘Neff, did you know about this?’ And I started dying laughing. I thought it was a boss move.”) In May, Anna convinced the company Blade to charter her a $35,000 jet to Omaha by sending them a forged confirmation for a wire transfer from Deutsche Bank. It might have helped that she had the business card of the CEO, whom she’d met in passing at Soho House but who says he didn’t actually know her at all. Not wanting to leave Anna homeless after their intervention last summer, the trainer and a friend agreed to put Anna up at a hotel for one night, after having the hotel remove the mini-bar and giving strict instructions not to allow her any room service. She subsequently checked in to the Bowery Hotel for two nights, sending the hotel a receipt for a wire transfer from Deutsche Bank that never came. Rachel Williams, City National, and others also received phony wire-transfer receipts, which a representative of the bank identified as forged. Anna’s “family adviser,” the late Peter W. Hennecke, seems to have been a fictional character; his cell-phone number belonged to a now-defunct burner phone from a supermarket, New York found. (A living Peter Hennecke did not return calls for comment.) Later in the summer, with her misdemeanor charges pending, Anna deposited two bad checks into an account at Signature Bank, netting her $8,200, which is how she managed to take what she said was a “planned trip” to California, where she was arrested outside of Passages in Malibu and brought back to New York to face six counts of grand larceny and attempted grand larceny, in addition to theft of services, according to the indictment. “I like L.A.,” she giggled when I visited her at Rikers this past March. “L.A. in the winter, New York in spring and autumn, and Europe in summer.”

People looked over curiously. “She’s like a unicorn in there,” Todd Spodek, Anna’s lawyer, had told me. “Everyone else is in there for like, stabbing their baby daddy.” He had mentioned that his client was taking incarceration unusually in stride, and indeed, this appeared to be the case.

“This place is not that bad at all actually,” Anna told me, eyes sparkling behind her Céline glasses. “People seem to think it’s horrible, but I see it as like, this sociological experiment.”

She’d made friends, of course. The murderers were the most interesting to her. “There are couple of girls who are here for financial crimes as well,” she told me. “This one girl, she’s been stealing other people’s identities. I didn’t realize it was so easy.”

Over the course of three months, I spoke to Anna over the phone and visited her several times, occasionally bringing her copies of Forbes, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal at her request. Clad in a beige jumpsuit, her $800 highlights faded and her $400 eyelash extensions long fallen away, she looked like a normal 27-year-old girl, which is what she is.

Anna Sorokin was born in Russia in 1991, and moved to Germany in 2007, when she was 16, with her younger brother and her parents, who, after being independently tracked down by and speaking with New York, asked to remain anonymous, as news of their daughters arrest has not yet reached the small rural community where they live.

Anna attended high school in Eschweiler, a small working-class town 60 kilometers outside Cologne, near the Belgian and Dutch border. Her classmates remember her as quiet, with an unwieldy command of German. Her father had worked as a truck driver and later as an executive at a transport company until it became insolvent in 2013, whereupon he opened a heating-and-cooling business specializing in energy-efficient devices. Anna’s father was circumspect about the family’s finances, possibly out of a not-unreasonable fear of being held responsible for his daughter’s debts, which it was suggested to New York multiple times are larger and more wide-ranging than officially documented. “She screwed basically everyone,” said the acquaintance in Berlin, who passed on the names of several individuals who were said to have had amounts large and small borrowed or stolen but were too embarrassed to come forward. (Also paranoid: “I heard she commissions these stories,” I was told more than once, after I reached out to alleged victims. “They’re strategic leaks.”)

In any case, according to Anna’s father: “Until now, we have never heard of any trust fund.”

That said, he went on, the family did support her to an extent after Anna graduated from high school in 2011. She moved first to London, where she attended Central Saint Martins College, then she dropped out and returned to Berlin, where she interned in the fashion department of a public-relations firm before relocating to Paris, where she landed a coveted internship at Purple magazine and became Anna Delvey. Her parents, who say they do not recognize the surname, told New York: “We always paid for her accommodations, her rent, and other matters. She assured us these costs were the best investment. If ever she needed something more at one point or another, it didn’t matter. The future was always bright.”

Anna, in jail, told me: “My parents had high expectations. They always trusted me with my decision-making. I guess they regret it now.”

Over the course of our conversations, Anna never admitted any guilt, although she did say she felt bad about what happened with Rachel Williams. “I am very upset that things went that way and I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she said. “But I really can’t do anything about it, being in here.”

She expressed frustration about not being able to bail herself out. “If they were doubting — ‘Oh, she can’t pay for anything’— why not give me bail and see?” she challenged. “If I was such a fraud, it would be such an easy resolution. Will she bail herself out?”

She was frustrated with the New York Post’s characterization of her as a “wannabe socialite” — “I was never trying to be a socialite,” she pointed out. “I had dinners, but they were work dinners. I wanted to be taken seriously” — and the District Attorney’s portrayal of her as, as Anna put it, “a greedy idiot” who had committed a kind of harebrained Ponzi scheme in order to go shopping. “If I really wanted the money, I would have better and faster ways to get some,” she groused. “Resilience is hard to come by, but not capital.”

She seemed most interested in expressing that her plans to create the Anna Delvey Foundation were real. She’d had all of those conversations and meetings and sent all of those emails and commissioned those materials because she thought it was actually going to happen. “I had what I thought was a great team around me, and I was having fun,” she said. Sure, she said, she might have done a few things wrong. “But that doesn’t diminish the hundred things I did right.”

Maybe it could have happened. In this city, where enormous amounts of invisible money trade hands every day, where glass towers are built on paperwork promises, why not? If Aby Rosen, the son of Holocaust survivors, could come to New York and fill skyscrapers full of art, if the Kardashians could build a billion-dollar empire out of literally nothing, if a movie star like Dakota Johnson could sculpt her ass so that it becomes the anchor of a major franchise, why couldn’t Anna Delvey? During the course of my reporting, people kept asking: Why this girl? She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not? Watching the Rikers guard shove Fast Companyinto a manila envelope, I realized what Anna had in common with the people she’d been studying in the pages of that magazine: She saw something others didn’t. Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.

“Money, like, there’s an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know?” Anna said to me at one point. “But there’s limited amounts of people who are talented.”

Rachel 和 Anna

Rachel在名利场发表的原文：

“AS AN ADDED BONUS, SHE PAID FOR EVERYTHING”: MY BRIGHT-LIGHTS MISADVENTURE WITH A MAGICIAN OF MANHATTAN

BY RACHEL DELOACHE WILLIAMS

She walked into my life in Gucci sandals and Céline glasses, and showed me a glamorous, frictionless world of hotel living and Le Coucou dinners and infrared saunas and Moroccan vacations. And then she made my $62,000 disappear.

According to my closest friends and various suspect Internet sources, turning 29 on January 29, 2017 marked my golden birthday. At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I had a gut feeling about my 30th year: it was going to be special; it was going to be good.

It was a total disaster.

It began with Anna. In her signature black athleisure wear and oversize Céline sunglasses, she sat beside me in the S.U.V., pecking at her phone. Seemingly everything she owned was packed into Rimowa suitcases and stacked in the trunk, just behind our heads. We were running late. Anna was always late. Our S.U.V. hummed along the cobblestones of Crosby Street as we drove from 11 Howard, the hotel Anna had called home for three months, to the Mercer, the hotel Anna planned to move into when we got back from our trip. The bellhops at the Mercer helped us to off-load her bags (all but one), and they checked them away to await Anna’s return. Our errand complete, we climbed back into the car and set off for J.F.K. two hours before our flight: we were Marrakech-bound.

Anna taking an iPhone photo during a daytrip to Kasbah Tamadot Sir Richard Bransons resort in Moroccos High Atlas...

Anna, taking an iPhone photo during a day-trip to Kasbah Tamadot, Sir Richard Branson’s resort in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. Anna returned for a stay at Kasbah Tamadot after leaving La Mamounia.

I first met Anna the year prior, in early 2016, at Happy Ending, a restaurant-lounge on Broome Street with a bistro on the ground floor, and a popular nightclub past the bouncer one flight down. I was with friends in the lounge downstairs. It was a group that I saw almost exclusively on nights out, fashion friends, whom I’d met since moving to the city in 2010. We walked in as the space was kicking into gear, not empty but not crowded. Young men and women made laps through machine-pumped fog, scouting for action and a place to settle in, as they sipped their vodka soda through plastic black straws. We made our way to the right and back, where the fog and people were denser and the music was louder.

I can’t remember which arrived first: the expectant bucket of ice and stack of glasses, or “Anna Delvey”—but I knew that she had appeared and with her came bottle service. She was a stranger to me, and yet not unknown. I’d seen her on Instagram, smiling at events, drinking at parties, oftentimes alongside my own friends and acquaintances. I’d seen that @annadelvey (since changed to @annadlvv) had 40K followers.

The new arrival, in a clingy black dress and flat Gucci sandals, slid into the banquette. She had a cherubic face with oversize blue eyes and pouty lips. Her features and proportions were classical—almost anachronistic—with a roundness that would suit Ingres or John Currin. She greeted me and her ambiguously accented voice was unexpectedly high-pitched.

Pleasantries led to discussion of how Anna first came into our friend group. She said she had interned for Purple magazine, in Paris (I’d seen her in photos with the magazine’s editor-in-chief), and evidently traveled in similar social circles. It was the quintessential nice-to-meet-you-in-New York conversation: hellos, exchange of niceties, how do you know X, what do you do for work?

I CAN’T REMEMBER WHICH ARRIVED FIRST: THE EXPECTANT BUCKET OF ICE AND STACK OF GLASSES, OR “ANNA DELVEY”—BUT I KNEW THAT SHE HAD APPEARED AND WITH HER CAME BOTTLE SERVICE.

“I work at Vanity Fair,” I told her. The usual dialogue ensued: “in the photo department,” I elaborated. “Yes, I love it. I’ve been there for six years.” She was attentive and engaged. She ordered another bottle of vodka. She picked up the tab.

Not long after we first met, I was invited to join Anna and a mutual friend for dinner at Harry’s, a steakhouse downtown, not far from my office. The vibe at Harry’s was distinctly masculine, fussy but not frilly, with leather seating and wood-paneled walls. Anna was there when I arrived, and the friend came a few minutes later. We were shown to our table, and my company ordered oysters and a round of espresso martinis. Conversation went along, as did the cocktails. I’d never had an espresso martini, but it went down just fine.

Anna told us huffily that she’d spent the day in meetings with lawyers. “What for?” I asked. She lit up. She was hard at work on her art foundation—a “dynamic visual-arts center dedicated to contemporary art,” she explained, referring vaguely to a family trust. She planned to lease the historic Church Missions House, a building on Park Avenue South and 22nd Street, to house a night lounge, bar, art galleries, studio space, restaurants, and a members-only club. In my line of work, I had often encountered ambitious, well-off individuals, so though her undertaking sounded grand in scale and promising in theory, my sincere enthusiasm hardly outweighed a measured skepticism.

For the rest of 2016, I saw Anna every few weekends. As a visiting German citizen, she’d explained, she didn’t have a full-time residence. She was living in the Standard, High Line, not far from my small apartment in Manhattan’s West Village. Anna intrigued me, and she seemed eager to be friends. I was flattered. I saw her on adventure-filled nights out, for drinks and sometimes dinner, usually with a group, but occasionally just the two of us. Towards autumn of that same year, Anna told me she was returning to Cologne, where she said she was from, just before the expiration of her visa.

Nearly half a year later, she came back.

On Saturday, May 13, 2017, we landed in Marrakech. Our hotel sent a V.I.P. service to greet us at the airport. We were escorted through Customs and taken to two awaiting Land Rovers. After a 10-minute drive, we pulled up to a palatial compound and entered through its gates. At the front entrance, we were welcomed by a host of men wearing fez caps and traditional Moroccan attire. We had arrived at our singularly opulent destination. Miss Delvey, our host, opted for a tour of the grounds for her and her guests. We proceeded directly, not having any need for keys or a traditional check-in procedure, since our villa was staffed with a full-time butler and, according to our host, all billing had been settled in advance.

The vacation was Anna’s idea. She again needed to leave the States in order to reset her ESTA visa, she said. Instead of returning home to Germany, she suggested we take a trip somewhere warm. It had been a long time since my last vacation. I happily agreed that we should explore options, thinking we’d find off-season fares to the Dominican Republic or Turks and Caicos. Anna suggested Marrakech; she’d always wanted to go. She picked La Mamounia, a five-star luxury resort ranked among the best in the world, and knowing that her selection was cost-prohibitive for my budget, she nonchalantly offered to cover my flights, the hotel, and expenses. She reserved a $7,000/night private riad, a traditional Moroccan villa with an interior courtyard, three bedrooms, and a pool, and forwarded me the confirmation e-mail. Due to a seemingly minor snafu, I’d put the plane tickets on my American Express card, with Anna promising to reimburse me promptly. Since I did this all the time for work, I didn’t give it a second thought.

Anna also invited a personal trainer, along with a friend of mine—a photographer—whom, at a dinner the week before our trip, Anna had asked to come as a documentarian, someone to capture video. She was thinking of making a documentary about the creation of her art foundation, and she wanted to experience what it felt like to have someone around with a camera. Plus, it’d be fun to have video from the trip, she said. I thought this was a bit ridiculous, but also entertaining, and why not? The four of us stayed in the private villa together. Anna and I shared the largest room.

We spent our first day and a half exploring all that La Mamounia had to offer. We roamed the gardens, relaxed in the hammam, swam in our villa’s private pool, took a tour of the wine cellar, and ate dinner to the intoxicating rhythms of live Moroccan music, before capping our night with cocktails in the jazzy Churchill bar. In the morning, Anna arranged for a private tennis lesson. We met her afterward for breakfast at the poolside buffet. Between adventures, our butler appeared, as if by magic, with fresh watermelon and chilled bottles of rosé.

Anna was no stranger to decadence. When she returned to N.Y.C. in early 2017, after months away, she checked into 11 Howard, a trendy hotel in SoHo. Her routine dinner spot became Le Coucou, winner of the James Beard Award for best new restaurant that same year, which was on the ground level of her hotel. Buckwheat fried Montauk eel to start and then the bourride: her dish of choice. She befriended the staff, and even the chef, Daniel Rose, who, upon her request, obligingly made off-the-menu bouillabaisse just for her. Dinners were accompanied by abundant white wine.

Her days were spent at meetings and on phone calls, often in her hotel. She regularly went to Christian Zamora for $400 full eyelash extensions, or $140 touch-ups here and there. She went to Marie Robinson Salon for color, Sally Hershberger for cuts. She toured multi-million-dollar apartments with over-eager realtors and chartered a private plane for a weekend trip to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting in Omaha. All things in excess: she shopped, ate, and drank. Usually wearing a Supreme brand hoodie, workout pants, and sneakers, she embodied a lazy sort of luxury.

Anna checked into 11 Howard on a Sunday in February and that same day invited me to lunch. She’d texted me occasionally while she’d been gone, excited to get back and eager to catch up. I wondered if she kept in touch with other friends that way. She had a directness that could be off-putting and a sort of comical overconfidence that I found equal parts abhorrent and amusing. She isolated herself, and I felt privileged to be one of the few people whom she liked and trusted. Through past experiences, both personal and professional, I was casually accustomed to the lifestyle and quirks of moneyed people, though I had no trust fund or savings of my own. Her world wasn’t foreign to me—I was comfortable there—and I was pleased that she could tell, that she accepted me as someone who “got it.”

I met her at Mamo, on West Broadway. Anna had settled into the L-shaped booth closest to the door. Above her hung an oversize illustration of Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo, both holding guns, floating above a dark cityscape. “ASFALTO CHE SCOTTA,” it read, in caps-locked Italian. She had come directly from the Apple Store, where she’d purchased a new laptop and two new iPhones—one for her international number and one for a new local number, she said. She ordered a Bellini, and I followed her lead.

When we finally left, it was almost five o’clock. We walked towards Anna’s hotel and she invited me in for a drink. We passed through 11 Howard’s modern lobby, heading straight for the steel spiral staircase to the left, which swooped twice around a thick column, rising to the floor above. On the second level, we entered a large living room called the Library.

The room’s design had distinctly Scandinavian overtones. My eyes scanned the setup and paused on a photograph that hung in a frame across from the concierge desk, a black-and-white image of an empty theater—part of a series by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Light emanated from a seemingly blank, rectangular movie screen, casting its glow out from the center of the composition onto the empty stage, seats, and theater. Sugimoto used a large-format camera and set his exposure to be the full length of a film, hoping to capture a movie’s thousands of still frames within a single image. The result was otherworldly. Looking at his work always reminded me of Shakespeare, a play within a play. It captured kinetic energy, portentous and alive with emotion and light. The viewing experience was meta and inverted: I was the audience, looking into an empty theater, beneath a blank screen. Anything was possible, or maybe it’d already happened. Maybe it was all already there.

After that day in February, Anna and I became fast friends. The world was charmed when she was around—the normal rules didn’t seem to apply. Her lifestyle was full of convenience, and its easy materialism was seductive. She began seeing a personal trainer and invited me to join. The sessions were her treat, as she generously insisted that working out was more fun with a friend. We went as frequently as three or four times a week, often ending our sessions with a visit to the infrared sauna.

I saw Anna most mornings. During the day, she’d text me frequently. After work, I’d stop by 11 Howard on my walk home. We’d regularly visit the Library for wine before going downstairs to Le Coucou for late dinners.

Anna did most of the talking. She held court, having befriended the hotel staff and servers, with me as her trusted adviser and loyal confidante. She would tell me about her meetings with restaurateurs, hedge-fund managers, lawyers, and bankers—and her frustration over delays with the lease signing. (She was set on the Church Missions House.) She mused about chefs she’d like to bring in, artists she esteemed, exhibitions that were opening. She was savvy. I felt a mixture of pity and admiration for Anna. She didn’t have many friends, and she wasn’t close with her family. She said that her relationship with her parents felt rooted more in business than in love. But she was strong. Her impulsivity and a sort of tactlessness had caused a rift between Anna and the friends through whom I’d met her, but I felt that I understood her and would be there for her when others were not.

Anna was a character. Her default setting was haughty, but she didn’t take herself too seriously. She was quirky and erratic. She acted with the entitlement and impulsivity of a once spoiled, seldom disciplined child—offset by a tendency to befriend workers rather than management, and to let slip the occasional comment suggesting a deeper empathy. (“It’s a lot of responsibility to have people working for you; people have families to feed. That’s no joke.”) In the male-dominated business world, she was unapologetically ambitious and I liked this about her.

She was audacious where I was reserved, and irreverent where I was polite. We balanced each other: I normalized her eccentric behavior, as she challenged my sense of propriety and dared me to have fun. As an added bonus, she paid for everything.

It was late on Monday afternoon, after almost two full days in La Mamounia’s walled palace. It was time to venture out. Anna wanted two things: piles of spices worthy of an Instagram photo and a place to buy some Moroccan kaftans. La Mamounia’s concierge arranged everything: within minutes we had a tour guide and set off with a car and driver. Our van came to a stop and we stepped out one by one, fresh from our sheltered resort life, into the dusty warmth of the medina’s mysterious maze.

“Can you make this dress, but with black linen?” Anna asked of a woman in Maison Du Kaftan. Before the woman could reply, Anna continued, “I’ll take one in black and one in white linen and, Rachel, I’d love to get one for you.” I scanned the store’s racks as Anna tried on a bright red jumpsuit and a range of gauzy sheer dresses. I tried on a few things but, wary of the iffy fabric content and high prices, I soon joined the videographer and trainer in the shop’s seating area for glasses of mint tea. Anna went to pay. Her debit card was declined.

“Did you tell your banks that you were traveling?” I asked. “No,” was her reply. Then I wasn’t surprised that such a purchase would be flagged. Anna asked to borrow money, promising to reimburse me the following week. I agreed, careful to keep track of the receipt. We wandered the medina until dusk. Back in the van, we went directly to La Sultana for dinner. I paid for that, too, adding it to my “tab.”

On Tuesday, we were walking through La Mamounia’s lobby, leaving for a visit to the Jardin Majorelle, when a hotel employee waved Anna to a stop. “Miss Delvey, may we speak with you?” he said, as he tactfully pulled her aside. “Is everything O.K.?” I asked, when she rejoined the group. “Yes,” Anna reassured me. “I just need to call my bank.”

The next morning, I, too, was stopped as I passed through the lobby: “Miss Williams, have you seen Miss Delvey?” I sent Anna to the concierge. She was agitated by the inconvenience. You could always tell when Anna was agitated: she made almost comical huffy noises (“ugh, why!”) and typed furiously on her phone. She left the villa and came back shortly after, ostensibly relieved that the situation was being resolved.

We set off on a day trip to the Atlas Mountains and returned to Marrakech after dinner that same evening, re-entering La Mamounia through the main lobby. Two men stepped forward as Anna approached. They pulled her aside and she sat down to make a call, as the videographer and I lingered awkwardly to the side. (The trainer was sick in bed for the second day in a ro

It started with money,

as it so often does in New York.

这个故事始于金钱，就像你在纽约经常看到的那样。

这是Jessica Pressler文章的第一句话。

电视剧《虚构安娜》以Jessica Pressler 发表在 New York Magazine 上这篇文章《How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People》为基础，讲述了一个卡车司机的女儿通过打造人设融入纽约社交圈的故事。主创团队包括知名制作人 Shonda Rhimes（《实习医生格蕾》） ，导演大卫·弗兰科尔（《穿普拉达的女王》）、汤姆维里卡Tom Verica（《十二宫》），主演朱莉娅·加纳（Julia Garner）、安娜·克拉姆斯基（Anna Chlumsky）等。

剧集上映后，针对虚构安娜的评价多以PUA、诈骗、假名媛为关键词，也有不少观众将这部网飞新剧与同期上映的纪录电影Tinder诈骗王、小李子主演的经典犯罪电影《猫鼠游戏》做比较，然而虚构安娜展现出来故事内核并不完全属于犯罪题材，像剧中记者所说的，这是一个关于新时期美国梦的故事。很可惜的是，剧集既想最大程度利用“女诈骗犯”这一噱头，又想尽可能平权、阶级固化等时代热点，最终讲了一个四不像的故事，塑造了一个失败女性反面角色。

01

虚构安娜的原型与剧集

在60 minutes的采访中，主持人问Anna未来还会留在纽约吗，安娜毫不犹豫地回答：

采访中不想离开名利场的安娜，是网飞新剧《虚构安娜》主角的原型。2021年获得假释后，她把自己的故事以32万美元卖给网飞，在出狱后得以维系不错的名媛生活。

以记者薇薇安的调查为线索，安娜德尔维与安娜索罗金的故事在观众面前徐徐展开。作为一个因盗窃入狱的诈骗犯，《虚构安娜》的故事其实并不复杂。她的骗术仅限于伪造名媛身份，真正骗到手的也只有短暂的奢华生活与10万美元贷款。想把这样一个假名媛行骗的故事讲得有深度，就势必要挖掘安娜的犯罪动机，在犯罪者这一角色的塑造上下功夫。显然，网飞没有做到。

02

真正的罪犯永远不会假装自己在行骗

低劣的行骗手法

被誉为编剧圣经的《故事》中，罗伯特·麦基这样阐释反面人物塑造原理：主人公及其故事的智慧魅力和情感魄力，必须与对抗力量相适应。

说得直白一些，出彩的反面人物可以有缺点，但决不能是力量远不如对手的傻白甜。

从第一集开始，网飞就释放出了人们对安娜截然不同的两种认知：

一个愚蠢的社交名媛

一个年仅26岁就骗倒了大银行金融顾问、对冲基金、律师事务所、房地产开发商、慈善家、画廊、艺术品经销商、时装周以及纽约一大半社会人士的女孩

随着记者调查的深入，安娜这一角色逐渐显出全貌。为了让这个罪犯明星得到更多观众的关注，网飞花了大量镜头去展示安娜几乎是与生俱来的“名媛气质”、金融才能、艺术天分，也不遗余力地渲染她为创建ADF四处奔走的“辛苦付出”；另一方面，安娜在与人对峙的过程中多次暴露幼稚与自卑。

在酒店，安娜因无法支付房费而被酒店赶到大堂，面对质疑，安娜用家庭创伤忽悠了迷恋她的瓦尔，用理想、事业忽悠了创一代男友蔡斯。在剧中人物眼里，这当然是安娜应变能力的体现，但站在上帝视角的观众不难察觉安娜的惊慌。在后续的剧情中，面对来自银行、酒店等越来越多的质疑，无论安娜的表现是歇斯底里还是倨傲冷漠，她的借口始终只有两个：“银行会贷款给我的”，以及“我要做一项伟大而神秘的事业”。

这套借口对在真权贵与名媛圈之间的高管、话事人或许有效，但它无法成为真正的上流社会的敲门砖。她爱上的科技公司创一代是个跟她一样的骗子，搭上的人脉有时尚人士、基金会会长、热爱开派对的阔太、想播撒父爱的高管……而当内芙质疑安娜身份去找酒店老板的儿子们询问时，他们一致回答“她从未来过我们家”——安娜始终没有如她所设想的那样突破名媛圈，打入上流社会。

这套低劣的骗术对上行不通，对下也是一样。伟大的事业和神秘的家庭背景忽悠住了一众名媛和时尚人士，却没能哄住真正要上班还贷的瑞秋。不管安娜有多么强大的身份背景，瑞秋在眼前利益受损时，几经纠结还是选择了撕破脸皮，与警察合作设计抓捕安娜。

故事到这里本该以“假名媛锒铛入狱”告终，但或许是网飞艺高人胆大，剧集又释放出下一个疑问：如果安娜的身份是真的呢？

支撑这一疑点的当然不只是安娜带着浓重口音的英语，更有她面对宣判时也一如既往的自信。剧中，安娜对薇薇安说：你还是对我一无所知。这句话驱使薇薇安远赴德国，深访安娜的家人与成长环境，从一个俄罗斯女孩的童年入手，找出她犯罪的真实原因。

柏林之旅结束，安娜这一角色彻底定性：在移民区长大的一个立志进入上流社会的渴爱小女孩。

在剧集中，尽管安娜德尔维始终声称自己是一位本可以作出伟大事业的商场精英，坚持认为性别带来的不公待遇是她受到的最大阻碍，但她以建立安娜德尔维基金会为目标的行骗历程，缺乏真正的布局规划，更像是走一步看一步混吃混喝的二流子，其隐藏在名媛外壳、性别话题下那幼稚的骗局设计、低劣的诈骗手段才是失败的真正原因。

无论耍多少花活去包装安娜，诈骗始终是整个故事的地基，一个合格的诈骗犯，他所有的表现都应该是为骗局服务的，而不是假装自己在行骗。或许是本末倒置，或许是用力过猛，网飞既把安娜塑造成一个自信强大的艺术天才，又让她在多次与人对峙的过程中显露幼稚与自卑，既想塑造一个新时代独立女性诈骗王，又想深刻揭露她行骗背后脆弱、敏感的内心世界。这种自我撕扯，导致剧集最终将一个本可以成为金融诈骗女魔头的女性反面角色彻底塑造成一个耽于情绪犯罪的可怜女孩，正如千百年来人们对于女性犯罪者的惯有印象那样。

03

幻想症少女和她的“美国梦”

犯罪动机之一

美国梦是这样一种社会秩序，在这种秩序下，男人和女人不论他们出身如何，社会地位如何，都能最大程度地实现自己的潜能并为他人所认可和接受。

1931年，詹姆斯·亚当斯这样定义“美国梦”一词。与《Tinder诈骗王》《猫鼠游戏》不同，《虚构安娜》试图揭露新时代下的美国梦的破灭：当人口红利消失，不可突破的阶级壁垒、以貌取人的晋级规则，都加剧了不同阶层间资源的不平等。

这不免让人联想到那个做假名媛行为艺术的学生，以及在中式omakase评论区破防的食客。他们都将上层阶级想象为一群看重包装远胜价值的酒囊饭袋，认为像剧中的安娜一样，穿有品位的衣服，吃精致的食物，玩时尚圈最“性感”的概念，就可以突破阶级壁垒，融入上流社会。但在北上广深稍微打过几年工的人都清楚，如果按鱼形来勾画社会结构，鱼头那一小撮掌握着世界上大多数资源的人才是真正的上层阶级，是掌权者和决策者，安娜之流所瞄准的，则是他们和工薪阶层之间的“中间商”。这群中间商徘徊在上流社会边缘，把捡来的一两句话包装成商业风口，编造新概念，售卖给下游的工薪阶层，也就是执行者，进而层层推动庞大的社会机器运转盈利。他们赚的是售卖风口、投机倒把的钱，一旦捡不到东西可卖，就会跟剧中的蔡斯一样，凭空捏造下一个“性感”的概念，赚快钱。

中间商们靠什么合作结盟呢？利益。无论是物质利益还是情绪价值，只要有利可得，这群人就像闻味儿出动的苍蝇一哄而上。正是因为这一点，安娜作为由nora引进的新面孔，凭借编造出来的家世背景、以假乱真的艺术品位，在他们中游刃有余，利用真名媛为自己背书，以巨额信托基金作饵，引人上钩。很多人认为银行高管的愚蠢不合理，猜测或许安娜为他提供了某些不可告人的服务以换取帮助，但我更愿意认为，这位高管瞄准了安娜在未来可以给自己带来的巨大价值，急于促成这笔买卖，他没有时间去核实身份，因为大鱼不可错过。

故事按这么个讲法，安娜已然不是头脑发达精于谋划的诈骗犯，而是一个见风使舵的投机者。她被包装出来的那些商业能力俗称“看人下菜碟”，也叫“见人说人话，见鬼说鬼话”。在北上广深的媒体、艺术行业，你每年都能见到大把大把这样的人才。他们自信、精明，逻辑能力、学习能力、社交能力都远强于你我，更善于窥探他人的内心，懂得如何有针对性地出招以获利。然而就像剧集里酒店老板的儿子们一样，真正在鱼头的人只需一两句话就可以戳破安娜之流的谎言，因为上流社会的圈子只有鱼头那么大，谁在内谁在外一目了然。

故弄玄虚、虚张声势，网飞制作剧集的手法与剧中安娜行骗的手法出奇地一致。对所谓的新时期“美国梦”的追问，最终流于表面，止步于对安娜劣质诈骗手法的包装，也因此让这个“幻想症”少女的犯罪动机显得格外可笑。

04

又或者，网飞也许本来就只想塑造一个拜金女呢？

犯罪动机之二

行骗，势必出于某种目的。即便是有“诈骗癖”，也是把这一情感满足当作诈骗的目的来推动骗局执行。抛开“美国梦”这一冠冕堂皇的借口，安娜的犯罪动机是什么呢？网飞借助剧情和人物，给出了以下两种解释：

1、安娜野心勃勃，想通过诈骗建立商业帝国。

2、安娜只是一个渴望得到关注和爱的小女孩。

这两种解释，看似自相矛盾，却完美契合了《虚构安娜》高开低走的剧情发展。

剧集从首集起就摆足了架势，借角色之口，反复强调安娜的商业理想、事业追求。但她为基金会四处奔走，却也只是“奔走”而已，她的第一份商业计划书因内容空洞被驳回，第二份计划书因为有高管的主管偏爱而勉强过关，这些都表明她离自己的心目中的商业女强人相差甚远。

安娜空有野心，却没有能撑得起野心的经商能力，口口声声说自己不是拜金女，却是实实在在沉迷于奢靡生活带来的物欲满足。在融资创业路上一次次审核失败后，她暴露了名媛外壳下的草包内核。

人是复杂的，人的欲望也是复杂的。一个诈骗犯当然可以是出于某种心理/精神问题接连行骗，也可以想要为世界做好事，做这些都说得通。但在塑造人物时，我们要做的不仅仅是揭示复杂，至少还要让人性的复杂符合角色，不是每一次行骗都能用“临时起意”来解释，也不是所有骗局都可以用一个“她沉溺于自己创造的角色”就草草收尾的。最起码，安娜德尔维还远不足以让观众沉溺其中。

又或者，网飞也许本来就没想打造女诈骗犯，只想塑造一个拜金女呢？

05

女性犯罪者角色的又一次失败尝试

传统犯罪学中，对于女性犯罪问题并没有过多论述。20世纪后，Ｗ·Ｉ·托马斯认为，女性犯罪是因为女性爱和性需要未及时得到满足，相应地，女性犯罪多为性犯罪。

从被酒店驱逐到大厅开始，女记者就时不时向观众透露安娜的家庭状况。她的父母到底是谁？她父亲是否有俄国黑道背景？如果她的故事是真的呢？

这一连串的疑问吊着观众看完了1-8集，在安娜入狱这一情节点，她的身份之谜被渲染到极致，可随之而来的解谜却完全配不上前面的悬念。普通的移民家庭，赚钱养家的父亲，和不知道如何跟女儿沟通的母亲，这跟安娜所说的两个版本*都不一致（黑道家族等），也实在是一个不够出彩的过于老套的“原生家庭”借口。当记者询问安娜时，她的母亲用这样一段话来回答：

“孩子只是由父母赋予了生命而非人格”

“孩子不是我们塑造的”

“把这孩子的父母想象成怪物更容易理解是吧”

翻译过来就是两点：

1、安娜长成这样跟我们没关系。

2、人们不愿意相信孩子本来就是歪脖子树，更愿意相信上梁不正下梁歪。

安娜母亲的这番话，与其用来交代安娜的犯罪动机，不如用来形容网飞这部剧的人物塑造。

人们更愿意相信女性犯罪者是因为情感上受到伤害才走上犯罪道路，把一个醉心于财富、地位的女诈骗犯想象成一个渴求得到关注的名媛更容易是吧？

一个受自我利益驱动的女罪犯，和一个为了得到爱和关注、以情绪/情感驱动的女罪犯，影视工厂网飞选择了后者。这一幕更体现出现实中女性的无力。我们透过安娜这一失败的女性犯罪者角色看到了社会中长久以来一直存在的观点：

一方面，我们似乎始终不认为女性在事业层面也是有野心的，不愿相信有利益驱动型的女性存在；另一方面，我们在某种程度上坚定地认为女性犯罪者无论犯罪手法如何，犯罪动机一定是情绪化的，而不是利己的、理智的、机敏的。女性力量，或者说平权，在网飞手中只是一个口号，一个流量入口。比起安娜，线索人物薇薇安、私人教练玛茜都要更有力量。

当越来越多的女性走上工作岗位，意识到自己并未与男性同工同酬同待遇，当越来越多的人发现女性正在通过教育、工作获取尊严与更好的生活，当“女性特质”逐渐被愈加丰富多元的性格、选择冲淡，David Frankel擅长的“小妞电影”就不再能引起人们的共鸣，那套只为爱而活的理论也不再能说服观众。

从惊天骗局引入，以记者的视角逐一追踪信息来源，核查故事的细节和真实性，《虚构安娜》的开局极大地拔高了观众的期待，吊足了胃口。现实、回忆多条支线交错，受害者、记者多种视角并行，配以精美奢华的时尚元素、紧密的台词与快节奏的剪辑手法，网飞竭力说服观众这的确是一场可与庞氏骗局相提并论的“惊天骗局”。可随后的每一个情节都在走下坡路，想要塑造一个骗人终骗己的病态反面主角，却又缺乏铺垫导致最后的情节愈加突兀。

作为过于成熟的影视工厂，网飞深谙能激起互联网流量的热点，“不完美受害者”瑞秋、凤凰男律师、陷入职场与生育困境的新时代女性、新时代美国梦……过于重视身份、标签，反而将原本复杂的人塑造为扁平化的角色，混乱的话题不仅无法引起观众的共鸣，更是彻底毁掉了一个本可以讲好的故事。毕竟对这个故事来说，再深刻的社会洞察都是建立在“诈骗”这一原型基础上的，诈骗手段的低劣、诈骗动机的浅薄，让一切浮于表面的口号失去根基，显得声嘶力竭。

-完-

很多人喜欢带着对人性的乐观态度分析人物，但凯西、瑞秋、内芙都身处纽约这个名利场，不会做无利不起早的事，对安娜的复杂情感或许会影响他们的态度，但绝不对是动摇他们做判断的根本原因。

对瑞秋来说，安娜的骗局触碰了她的根本利益，却没能给她对应的回报。她拥有利己主义者的强大优势，即哪怕深陷困境也要想尽办法扭亏为盈。而凯西与瑞秋不同，她的工作更依赖口碑，一方面，安娜是她的客户，无论做了多糟糕的事，大众可以评判，但她不可以，因为那样会失去其他客户的信任；另一方面，凯西已经形成了一套成熟的价值观，安娜只是她众多名流客户中的一个，不足以煽动她成为追随者。

至于内芙，她对安娜的好感建立在“她从未欺骗我”这一事实基础上。可能是出于对内芙追求电影梦的欣赏，安娜没有骗这个看上去有点单纯的女服务生。但正如她男友所说，她的电影梦始终是嘴上说说，并没有真正付出过行动。反而是在安娜入狱之后，她开始帮助其打造社交名媛的形象，执行力比追求电影梦时强太多了。

值得注意的是，无论是《虚构安娜》，还是经常被拿来与之比较的《Tinder诈骗王》，其原型都在出狱后依旧过着不错的生活，而他们的受害者却仍要偿还贷款。在《虚构安娜》播出后，SNL紧随其后发布了恶搞视频： //b23.tv/lINCwnx

参考资料：

[美]罗伯特·麦基：故事-材质、结构、风格和银幕剧作的原理

[美]尼古拉斯·莱曼：“下一代”处于危机中的美国梦

林毓敏：现代化背景下女性犯罪问题及其应对——女性犯罪与女性社会角色转变

相关资料链接：

剧集信息：

//movie.douban.com/subject/30246397/celebrities

洁西卡普斯勒（Jessica Pressler）的《纽约杂志》专文〈安娜德尔维如何骗倒纽约派对圈〉（How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People）

//b23.tv/5EymNZJ

Anna Sorokin采访视频

//mp.weixin.qq.com/s/1w0gZ77bUaqbDLWTlSDbQw

我们找来了纽约的专栏作家SIMON VAN BOOY来聊一聊纽约上流设计俱乐部的那些事

相关题材作品：

了不起的盖茨比

Tinder诈骗王

猫鼠游戏（小李子主演的电影）

妙警贼探（孔雀主演的美剧）

大诈欺师

虚构安娜 (2022)

7.1

2022 / 美国 / 剧情 / 大卫·弗兰科尔 艾伦·库拉斯 恩辛哈·斯图尔特 汤姆·维里卡 戴斯·冯·施勒·梅耶 / 朱莉娅·加纳 安娜·克拉姆斯基

1. 安娜原型2021年2月11日释放，距离开播日正好是一周年，不知道Netflix是不是特地选了这个时间点。

2. 国内能搜到的新闻都说安娜是因为辗转几个hotel后在餐厅不付钱被捕的，wiki上跟剧里一样是被瑞秋和检察官合作引出戒断所被捕的，所以应该是被捕了两次，第一次就是跟律师Todd认识被放出来但是没按时出庭的那次吧。

3. Ep8的节奏有点拉胯不过ep9又拽回来一些，很喜欢中间一集一个人物从不同的角度来显示安娜的一个侧面，以及面对不同人的不同骗术。对法尔这种时尚界小年轻只需要品味和个性就能拿下，对女企业家诺拉需要乖巧、崇拜、一些个性一些学识一些女性身份认同一些挑拨离间，代理人艾伦→青春、野心、愿景和金钱；奈芙→梦想，奋斗，交易和友谊；凯西→几个人物里最游离的一个，主要是金钱，剧里安娜自称要自杀的时候似乎trigger到了凯西，估计也是有一些交心的成分；瑞秋→寄生虫

4. 其实剧对于瑞秋的态度还是比较中立的，尤其是大篇幅展现被迫留信用卡的惊恐和等待安娜还钱期间的恐慌焦虑，虽然之后卖故事卖版权赚了不少但是这段时间的折磨应该是真的，看得我都共情了，回想起有段时间穷得要死的日子，没钱的感觉实在太可怕了。。。现实里这个charge也是被评审团判无罪，理由是安娜为瑞秋做得足够多了。剧里去旅行那一段其实有暗示瑞秋不是一般的吸血鬼，而是在蹭吃蹭喝蹭礼物的同时还不断贪婪的索求更多，能订一间套房非要两间，点餐能选更贵的套餐绝不选便宜的，还有她心心念念想去的ysl花园，精心做过功课的人能连花园门票价格500刀也不知道？ 5. 其实电影的幅度也差不多能讲好这个故事，不知道Netflix咋想的，估计版权费花都花了干嘛不多拍点。

6. 茱莉亚加纳金发一批小风衣一穿好美，有点真·德国富二代小公主的架势，原型外表是普通女孩还带着点婴儿肥，反而更佩服她的手段了，什么时候出自传？？？

7. 薇薇安的演员预计一定会收到很多吐槽，但是在预告里看到Anna Chlumsky的时候还是很惊喜～《副总统》完结之后就没再看到她了，表演方面时常觉得又看到了《副总统》里有点神经衰弱的Amy，但同样的表演方式放到这部剧里就有点用力过猛。

8. Todd和薇薇安最后好像一对中产离婚夫妻，作为两个世界上可能最了解安娜的人这算不算反向斯德哥尔摩症。