Whether you see her as an evil mastermind or a creative entrepreneur who played Robin Hood with New York's rich and famous for her own gain, Anna Delvey's sentence was harsh when compared to male fraudsters like Fyre Festival organizer Billy McFarland. As revealed at the end of Inventing Anna, Delvey was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison, fined $24,ooo, and ordered to pay another $200k in restitution to her victims. If the tone of Shonda Rhimes' Netflix show is any indication of how the Queen of TV feels about Delvey's punishment, Rhimes has ruled that there was definitely some level of sexism at play — but Delvey was far from innocent.
In reality, it's still impossible to pin Delvey down. After adopting the persona of a German heiress and defrauding banks, hotels, and at least one private jet company out of more that $200,000, the con artist admitted to The New York Times that she would be lying if she said she regretted her behavior. "The thing is, I'm not sorry," Delvey said in 2019. "I'd be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything. I regret the way I went about certain things."
Despite her lack of regret, the fake heiress was released from prison in February 2021 on good behavior after serving three years of her sentence. After her release she returned to social media where she served up a masterclass in writing Instagram captions. "They already told you I own this lawless fucking city," she captioned an otherwise mundane shot of a street in New York City.
Immediately upon her release she returned to her VIP ways, checking into the NoMad hotel and plotting Anna Delvey TV, presumably as a way to control the narrative of her own story. After selling the rights to her story to Netflix, Delvey was paid $320,000, but due to a law in New York City that doesn't allow criminals to profit from their fame, a large portion of the money went toward paying her restitution. Per the BBC, her accounts were frozen until her victims were paid back before she could touch any of the money.
After paying back her victims, Delvey was still left with a tidy sum, and she appears to be using it to reinvent herself once again. In a 2021 interview, she told Insider she's working on a memoir that would include her thoughts on prison reform. "I feel like it's insane. To take people, to lock them up, take everything away from them, and just to expect them to reform," she said. "The same solution for everyone, no matter what you've done? When you're a criminal, it's such a different mindset, whether you kill someone, or if you sell drugs. The place where you're coming from is not comparable. They have this universal solution for everyone, and that should not be the case."
For the moment, Delvey's aspirations have been put on hold. Just six weeks after her release from prison, she was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for overstaying her visa. She has been in ICE custody since then as she awaits to hear whether or not she'll be deported to Germany.
In early February she wrote a scathing essay for Insider about her detainment. "Did I mention I'm the only woman in ICE custody in this whole jail? Tell me I'm special without telling me I'm special," she wrote in true Delvey fashion.
Image: Nicole Rivelli/Netflix