虚构安娜

No.1

在豪华游轮上一个很势利眼的女孩问是不是在苏荷之家见过安娜，注意看这里安娜的神态中掠过一丝不安，但随即以“觉得随便什么人他们都会给会员身份”的理由圆过去了，并且顺便立了一下自己的清高以及拥有高贵独特品味的人设，外加当时的好闺蜜在一旁应和，这个小插曲便不了了之。

要知道苏荷之家（SOHO HOUSE）是一个世界顶级俱乐部，据说金·卡戴珊申请过无数次都没能加入......而这个俱乐部内装的供应商还为英国皇室（比如哈利王子和梅根的家）提供过浴盆，所以安娜没有去过苏荷之家只能有两种可能，一是她真的不够格，二是，如她所说，她不屑于去。显然这里第一种可能性更大。

No.2

紧接着一群人在甲板上喝酒，一个大佬听出安娜的俄罗斯口音，于是用俄语对安娜和蔡斯说了祝酒辞，蔡斯一头雾水显然没有听懂，大佬转而问安娜，安娜却表示自己听不懂，但是事实是安娜的确出生在俄罗斯，按理说她不可能听不懂的，结合安娜一直声称自己是德国贵族这一点，可以推断出这里安娜又在撒谎，以掩盖自己的身世。所以这里也为安娜的身份不明做了伏笔。

No.3

接下来就是很经典的这一段，安娜付不出钱被酒店扣下行李的桥段，这里的马脚很明显，连剧里的人物都开始怀疑她，最终还是倒霉蛋蔡斯跑来把钱付了，总之这一段看得我尴尬症都犯了……

No.4

蔡斯得知安娜的真名后，和刚刚shopping回来的安娜在阳台上对峙，问她的真实身份。结果安娜花言巧语一通操作，激情描述了自己的宏伟梦想，成功化解危机。

（这里我也是很服）

No.5

安娜和内芙谈心的时候无意中说起了自己小时候的事情，不小心暴露了自己曾经很贫穷的事实，结果安娜迅速圆谎，并顺势把自己塑造成了一个家有万贯财产但是偏要白手起家的励志女性。

No.6

在酒店工作的内芙遇到了自己老板的两个儿子，顺便提起了安娜，可对方表示并不知道老爸在和安娜做生意，并指出了如果是老爸的重要生意伙伴，为什么只住了豪华房而不是豪华套房这个一点，内芙转念一想，有道理啊，转头去问安娜，当然，安娜又是轻描淡写，扔出了“他已经帮了我很多，我不想再麻烦他”这样听起来又别扭又合理的理由。

这里内芙是当局者迷了，就像之前的很多人一样。住一套稍微便宜点的屋子就算是少欠一点人情了？这怎么想都不是有钱人的逻辑吧……

“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.”

“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

太敢了。

安娜不只是一个勇敢的、古代战士一样勇猛的追梦人，她的大胆，是冰面上砸下来的一块石头——虽然剧中并没有拍出这种彻底的、畅快的感觉

从一笔资金、一个工厂开始，财富逐渐积累，不断积累迭代，几百年后富有的依旧会是那些人。old money和old famous是网红明星掺不进去的一海。我们，再不过中产阶级——置购房产，红色特斯拉，海归的孩子们，那又怎样？你的特斯拉可以停满车库合成一辆新的宾利，大笔的信托可以作为一个小小的门票，那又怎样呢，old famous的增值、的未来、眼界，这是一个已经基本固定的圈子，人们评判人们凝视人们思考着你、你的资格是什么。安娜看到了这个冰面的痕迹，她狠狠的坠入、砸了重重的一拳，她变现人脉变现自己能力无所不及，她真的只差一点就赢了。

就像那个老故事，想要发财就先借上一个亿，一半用于这个一半用于那个，bang，你的阶级就固化了。但是从来没人告诉你该怎么借到这一个亿。

这是一个理想化了的故事，太多辞藻和文艺化抹平了它的捷径，可是——这件事、这个途径是可行的。在华丽已经随处可见的时候突出了的是细节，面料的光泽，花纹的走向，那些是金钱和涓流的世界打磨出来的品味，这和那华丽分阶级没有什么分别，世界依然是富人穿黑色，布衣穿白色那一套。

她的做法并不正确，但是这是一声雷声，小小的。更上面的人做出的事情往往都是为了粉饰，让人们接受现状，不断的自我说服。“我做不了这个，我没有学过”或者“不行的，我没有钱”，这些都是固化思维和自我否定。just do it，没有人会穿你的鞋来安慰你，你能做的只是冲，哪怕头破血流也要冲，更大的萝卜更丰腴的肉，冲就好了。

不要习惯于现状，不要固步自封，不要自我说服地安于现状，往盒子的外面看。

#虚构安娜# (Inventing Anna) (A-) 强推！一口气看完，实在是太神奇的故事！原本只是了解这个新闻，发现剧集里给出太多细节都是以前完全不知道的，全方位了解了始末，以及终于明白了：究竟为何那么多人会甘心情愿被安娜骗，有的甚至还不对她提出诉讼。

这是一个发生在纽约上流社会的真实故事。查安娜·德尔维是一个好精彩、好复杂的人物，太适合搬上银幕了，朱莉娅·加纳（ Julia Garner）演得太好，应该会入围所有电视相关奖项。安娜就是那种典型的极度渴望成名的人，虽然出身贫寒、身无分文，却可以凭借出色的衣着品味，狡猾的社交手腕，对有钱人世界的了解，以及杰出的演技，以“外国富二代”的身份迅速混入纽约上流社会，短短几年内就成为社交名媛。没有人知道她父亲的钱怎么来的，却都相信她绝对是有钱人出身。生活对她就是一场戏，最终演得连她自己都信了，无法回到现实。

也就是说，大脑潜意识里，她已经否定了真正的出身，分不清现实与她营造的故事，完全“变”成另一个人。

剧集从调查她的记者角度出发，通过对她和接触过她的人采访，不断揭开安娜的真面目。她始终寄人篱下，不是靠有钱人养着就是在酒店住下却一直赖账。虽然她确实骗走很多人的钱，但这些有钱人都没有及时揭发或指控她，是因为1）这些钱对他们来说不算什么 2）说出来反而让人觉得丢脸。直到安娜很失策地骗了一个Vanity Fair记者的钱，6万美元也许对有钱人不算什么，却是这位记者的一年工资，于是这位记者就没有放过她，一篇文章就让安娜的世界彻底崩塌。

这与好莱坞外国记者协会HFPA的倒台一模一样。以前他们挥霍的是电影公司、电影人的钱，这些人不在乎这些钱，但他们最后把其他美国记者、编辑得罪了，那么就完蛋了，一年的媒体轮番轰炸，不把你推下神坛不罢休。

这些故事告诉我们什么？别惹记者。

回到安娜，她之所以可以糊弄这么多人，是因为她掌握了有钱人世界的游戏规则和有钱人的心理。除了懂得很多金融、投资、艺术常识外，她非常自信，讲话傲慢霸道，学会了有钱人的腔调，又有时尚品味，随时“name droping”，让所有认识她的人在几分钟内就会感受到扑面而来的“有钱有势”气息，对她畏惧三分。有时即使是她的错，比如不还钱，她都能理直气壮，态度强势，以至于让别人觉得是委屈了她，不得不服软。即使面对很多强硬、看不上她的有钱人，她依然可以比对方气场更强大，以至于有钱人都不得不向她屈服。

其实概括总结她的招数就是：你强势，我就装得比你还强势，你横，我就比你还横，你傲慢，我就比你还傲慢。比如见到根本不认识的很有钱人，别人用的是谄媚和拍马屁去接近，她则相反，连正眼都不看对方，一上来就批评对方的品位差，几句话显示出她对这些有钱人不在乎，因为她自己就很有钱，品位更好，一下反而获得了对方的注意和尊重。

确实在生活中如此，相信大家心目中的有钱人都是“傲慢、自信”的，那些平时不友善，对你很冷漠、常常diss你人，是不是反而让你觉得她/他比你强？对对方畏惧三分，甚至不自觉地被对方摆布？典型的narcissistic manipulation.

最有趣的是，安娜演技太强，以至于被揭穿真相，很多人依然相信她，甚至记者以为她一定是出身不幸、遭遇了父母的虐待才变成这样，希望给她营造一个“被害者”的人设去解释一切。但最终，一切都很残酷、现实：安娜的父母就是普通蓝领，也没有对她做什么，从安娜出生她就是这样的人格，就是如此自命不凡。在早年很多故事总是把坏人“变坏”推给父母和童年不幸时，反而现实中的故事不断在告诉我们：一切都是从受精卵形成那一刻就注定如此了。也正因此，目前大部分的影视作品也开始强调基因的重要性。

安娜确实很聪明，她也确实注定不平凡，但是很多时候这类聪明的人就是败在急功近利上，因无法脚踏实地创造财富和成就，总希望走捷径、总希望cheating，最终因为很多内容是虚假的、只是建立在别人的“印象”之上，一旦被揭穿，往往好景不长。

生活中我还真认识这么一位，即使没有骗取这么多钱，但所用的手段是一模一样，很短的时间靠各种手腕爬得比别人都快，迅速获得权势，所有人都希望认识她，都希望成为她的朋友，都以为她很有钱，但也很快就各种原因失去了所得到的“权势”而跌落神坛。这样的人因为其实人设都是虚的，一旦失去了周围“有钱人”的保护，就什么都不是了，也没有人再愿意理她。但即使这样，她也采取了与安娜一样的办法再次获得别人的关注：从反派转为被害者人设，开始以被害者的身份控诉其他人，获得同情。无论如何，这类人的目标就是随时希望获得别人的关注。他们最怕的就是失去关注。

而如今这部剧的播出，其实是完成了安娜的愿望。她就是希望所有人都知道她，都被她折服。从这方面来说，就算她被踢出了纽约上流社会，她依然赢了。只是最初她希望是Jennifer Lawrence来演她，这个愿望没实现。但被选中的朱莉娅·加纳其实与她更神似，口音模仿得也很像，估计安娜最终也是很满意的。

本剧不仅细节很多，很全面，同时也随着安娜的案子揭开了真实的纽约上流社会全貌，剖析了有钱人的金钱游戏，也探讨了女性在男权社会下如何不断地为获得尊重和话语权而斗争。

安娜虽然是一个反派，却依然是一个斗士，她认为自己能如果是男的就不会得到这个结局，而作为女性，她要付出的比别人更多。但其实，她所使用的手段依然是塑造一个有钱爸爸，还是不断地在利用男性和弱者。她的故事与很多目前好莱坞筹拍的大女主影视作品一样，原本是女性披荆斩棘的奋斗史，但最终她们使用的手段与男性霸权者并无二致，也同样变得虚伪和贪婪。这是一个复杂的女性角色，但也特别迷人，无法简单概括。相信观众也会对她爱恨交织，既有畏惧也有同情。

这部剧把安娜如何骗过那些纽约上流人士的小心机拍的特别幼稚低级，每次遇到关键问题，剧情就稀里糊涂、蜻蜓点水划过去了，彷佛只要做个名媛人设，说一两句话就能搞定一切。手段就是用pua的方式对待身边人，pua大佬让他投资。剧情完全没有说服力。看完感觉完全不过瘾，隔靴搔痒。连小李子演的《猫鼠游戏》的皮毛都不到。

安娜主要骗到了她男朋友蔡斯，让蔡斯给她花钱，维持富裕的生活，她男朋友蔡斯也不是省油的灯，是个打着创业家旗号到处圈钱的骗子，以为安娜是个聪明有野心的家族女继承人，就在一起了。俩人臭味相投，一拍即合，不但互相骗，还一起对外骗。

不过，安娜骗的也不多，也就一百万人民币。

道理很简单，就像你去银行贷款，开始有5000本金，能贷到两万，把两万取出来再去别的银行贷款5万、10万… 可能都很容易审批，当你贷款500万的时候，就贷不出来了，压根儿通不过银行审核。所以你最多只能贷到10万，还款还不上，就直接over了。没什么难的。她就是包装一下自己，有身边上流人士圈内人做背书，再找其他有钱人借钱，有的富人好面子不差钱，不追着要而已，才能维持一阵子。后来还是因为坑了一个穷人的钱被报了警。

咱就是说，一般正常人绝对忍受不了信用卡被拒绝，被人在公共场合质疑的尴尬样子（况且剧中安娜信用卡被拒只会装死鸭子嘴硬，一点也不酷，没有任何招数）。正常人如果不付款，即使吃再美味的大餐，住再豪华的酒店，欠着一大笔自己根本消费不起的钱，也会寝食难安。这压根不是享受，是一种受罪。而安娜，无非就是比一般人脸皮厚，心理素质强。并不是她多聪明多高智商，而是她一直走的非正常人的路线，提前预支自己的信用，花点小钱获取身边人的信任去骗更多人，打破了常规相处之道。拆东墙补西墙，她这么做，早晚会栽。因为一旦补不上窟窿就会露馅。

有人说，她的项目差点儿就做成了，不，肯定做不成。没有信用，说谎成性，是做不了长久买卖的。

总之，安娜没那么牛b，这部剧拍的也很垃圾。媒体甚至把这个女人宣扬成“Legend”，岂不是太可笑了吗？

网飞首页推荐的封面上，女主角Julia Garner戴着Anna Delvey标志性的黑框眼镜，头发蓬松分叉——这正是我当年在铺天盖地的媒体报道上对这个纽约骗子名媛的第一印象——她的发质如同她的气质一般发毛。

我本来对这一类社交八卦就不太感冒，所以从未细读新闻内容，只是隐隐觉得这个连假姓氏都既不德国也不贵族的25岁小姑娘，能骗倒纽约上层社交圈，接触到的应该是社交圈里不太入流的new money。简而言之，没有底蕴识破她牵强附会的贵族背景；没有智力解读她不甚高明的自我包装；没有眼界看穿她似是而非的编造伎俩。然而，这部以记者Vivian揭露事件真相的过程为切入点的9集网剧，做足了功夫，把一个看似“狗血”的骗子故事（基于事实）讲得里应外合，高潮迭起，层层反转，这主要归功于编剧的结构布局——每一集侧重于一个当事人的叙述视角——虽然因人物参与程度不同，偶有拖沓、注水的嫌疑——总体来说，为这个关于一个女骗子的故事提供了context（背景，语境），即为什么全球最“高大上”的曼哈顿社交圈会被这么一个初出茅庐的德国移民二代骗得团团转，甚至连华尔街最“精明”的金融律师都在劫难逃。

全剧看完，不难发现，Anna在曼哈顿富人圈混得风生水起的主要原因就是：她很擅长融入。这种融入表面上看，是她坑蒙拐骗来的，比如伪造德国贵族背景，吹牛皮说有6千万美金的信托基金等着自己一到25岁就能兑现，明明是花别人钱、住别人豪宅、搭别人私人飞机和豪华游艇的leech（水蛭），却能心态自如，漫不经心，甚至对不够VVIP的待遇嗤之以鼻，直到所有被抱的大腿弃她而去，她也并未气馁妥协，而是进一步靠编织更弥天的谎言（选址牛逼的大楼，创建以自己名字命名的基金会，号称要做全球最高端的艺术、奢侈、富豪俱乐部），以期获得4千万美金的银行贷款……故事到了这里，Anna已经不是骗吃骗喝的小屁孩，如《天才普瑞利》那样从生活方式层面过几天富豪的日子，或是如《猫鼠游戏》那般纵横天下，潇洒挥霍，因为她自从有了华尔街资深金融律师的加持，那4千万美金的银行贷款居然并非天方夜谭。如果最后Anna可以证明自己确实有那个所谓的德国家族信托基金，是否贵族根本无关紧要，之前的诸项欠款会得到解决，恶意透支信用卡也不过是有钱人对钱“毫不在意”的风度使然——也就是说，如果Anna真的有金钱后盾，不管这钱是俄罗斯黑手党的，或是别的什么灰色来路，凭借她的“融入”手腕，她都可以在曼哈顿富豪圈占有一席之地。

似乎，这才是本剧的核心宗旨：在“高大上”的纽约，本来就充斥了各种骗子，每个人都是hustler，每个人都want something——记者想要的不仅是挖掘真相，更是依靠流量置顶的文章夺回自己失去的事业；前男友想要的不仅是一段关系，更是靠着理想投射中的贵族富豪女友，从中产阶级步步高升；金融律师想要的不仅是大笔佣金，更是人到中年的激情回春与权势的无限扩张；就连《名利场》的编辑、酒店前台、私人教练这三朵塑料姐妹花，也都各怀企图，她们更像我们这些普通人，有着正常的慕强心理，也经常在虚荣心与廉耻心之间艰难徘徊。

Anna的所作所为虽然不可取，但她为了金钱和地位的不择手段，那股狠劲和巧劲，正是纽约的灵魂所在，她很聪明地窥视到了纽约的灵魂（"She took a look at the soul of New York"），发现这太契合自己了。本片英文名是Inventing Anna，这恐怕有两层含义：第一层是Anna的self-invention，这个词在英文语境中有着奋发图强、改写命运的褒义含义；第二层是纽约的大环境促成了Anna的self-invention。我们别忘了，当Anna第一次离开德国老家，先去了伦敦中央圣马丁，遂即辍学来到巴黎，而后又辗转到了纽约。这三座城市是全球最顶尖的时尚中心（可见Anna对时尚的追求从未改变），同时，它们也都是老牌的资本主义中心，但纽约与其他两座城的不同之处在于，它没有太多的帝国主义痕迹，纽约的核心是金钱和利益，而血统和出身倒在其次。

作为一个在纽约、洛杉矶、伦敦、柏林都居住过的观众，我可以佐证的一点是，Anna的发质和口音都注定她不可能在欧洲混得开。可是纽约呢？纽约是最大胆的骗子能混得最开的地方。

或许，Anna原本甚至有一天可以成为美国总统。

从这个角度来说，Julia Garner的表演基于真实人物的特性，至少可以打8分。如果观众觉得，如此浮夸的演技不可能接近真实，那么只能说，我们对真实的理解还很肤浅。

朱晓闻

2022年2月于柏林

关注萨尔维亚之蓝（Salvia_Blue）这里没有最有价值的观点，也没有最领先的想法，最有价值的观点在历史中重复了千百遍，最领先的想法是经独立思考分析的结晶。这里有的是看似被遗忘的，鲜为人知的，极为小众的有趣的人、物、事。

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。