Anna “Delvey” Sorokin claims that since she was charged with dumping pet rabbits she posed with for a photo shoot in a Brooklyn park, she has received hundreds of death threats.
Last week, in the upscale Tribeca section of Manhattan, the fraudulent German heiress who embezzled tens of thousands of euros from banks posed with three bunnies. Days later, the bunnies were identified and found in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, sparking intense internet criticism.
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However, the well-known New York City socialite, who strongly denied any culpability for the abandoned bunnies, stated that she was especially surprised by the outpouring of outrage following the occurrence.
“It just seems to me like everything I do is just wrong,” Sorokin stated. “I can never do right by these people.”
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Sorokin posted on her Instagram account photos of dozens of nasty messages she had received in the previous several days, calling them “unusable.” She should be killed or commit suicide, according to several of them, including one that tells Sorokin to have someone “make a carpet out of your skin.”
“It seems like a lot of these people feel entitled to insult you, talk to you, or say anything because they’re hiding behind this thing that they’re doing,” she said, referring to the nature of animal rescue.
In order to produce content for her Instagram account, which boasts over 1.1 million followers, the 34-year-old, whose life was portrayed in Netflix’s popular 2022 series “Inventing Anna,” snapped the pictures with the bunnies on August 3.
She asked her followers in the New York City metropolitan region if they had a pet rabbit they could lend her just before the shoot, according to Sorokin.
According to her, Sorokin received a message from Christian Batty, a 19-year-old hairstylist he had met briefly the previous year, offering what he called a friend’s rabbits.
According to Sorokin, she paid Batty to bring the bunnies and for his Uber to deliver them back to their Yonkers owner. The Uber ride was dropped off close south of Prospect Park, where the bunnies were later seen, according to a screenshot of an Uber receipt that Sorokin gave to NBC News.
She claimed that a few days later, she began getting social media messages about the bunnies that were being seen in Prospect Park. A Facebook user shared pictures of the tamed bunnies in the park to the House Rabbit Society, a public rabbit-focused Facebook page, and other users linked them to Sorokin’s pictures.
At first, Sorokin believed the posts were fraudulent, but the barrage of messages persisted.
Screenshots of text communications between Batty, Sorokin, and photographer Jasper Soloff initially show that Batty denied dumping the bunnies. On her Instagram story, Sorokin shared such messages.
“Jasper had no knowledge or input as to how the bunnies were obtained or what happened to them after the photo shoot,” Gary Adelman, Soloff’s lawyer, stated in a statement.
A request for comment from Batty was not immediately answered.
In a message made on his now-deleted Instagram account, hours later, Batty claimed that he did dump the bunnies and cleared Sorokin of any responsibility.
In the statement, which Sorokin supplied screenshots of, Batty claimed, “I panicked when I realized the rabbits were being surrendered to me.” “At 19, with no experience caring for animals, no pet-friendly housing, and no knowledge of available resources, I felt overwhelmed and made the worst possible choice.”
“Believing, mistakenly, that there were existing rabbits in that area, I released them there, thinking that was my best option,” he said.
Sorokin disputed the idea that Batty’s age was a factor.
“He’s old enough to move to New York and live on his own, he should have enough common sense to handle rabbits,” Sorokin stated. “We’re not like asking him to do anything that requires high IQ from him.”
Sorokin expressed anxiety about the incident’s potential impact on her ongoing immigration case.
After allegedly scamming banks and others out of tens of thousands of dollars, Sorokin was found guilty by a Manhattan jury in April 2019 on four counts of stealing services, three counts of grand larceny, and one count of attempted grand larceny.
Under the pretense that she was the daughter of a diplomat or oil mogul with tens of millions of dollars, prosecutors claimed she persuaded friends and companies to lend her money so she could live a lavish lifestyle.
Sorokin was released on parole in 2021 and is currently battling deportation. She is confined to a 75-mile radius of New York-based home arrest and has been mandated to wear an electronic ankle monitor.
“This time, I’ve done nothing wrong,” she declared. “And I had the best intentions, and it’s really frustrating.”
After seeing the bunnies in the park, blogger Terry Chao saved them, according to the New York Times. Chao was not available for comment at this time.
Following the controversy, Sorokin said she gave $1,000 to All About Rabbits Rescue. Additionally, contrary to what some people have implied online, she denied hurting the bunnies by placing them on leashes.
“I’m not a professional rabbit, so I’m not sure. “I had no idea that leashes were so important,” she remarked. We would set them aside for, say, a minute or two, snap a photo, and then retrieve them. By no means were we walking them. And they appeared content.
