Netflix’s semi-fictionalized account of Anna Sorokin’s self-insertion into America’s 1% is addictive because the viewer secretly begins to admire the young fiendish heroine, at least for her technique and the American cultural rules she so cleverly exploited with her technique.
How exactly does a lower-middle-class, ethnically Russian German expat with no inherited wealth, no lines of credit, nor any other liquefiable asset get hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of designer clothing, jewelry, luxury hotel suites, and almost obtain a $40M commercial loan to build her very own sui generis social club for the nouveau riche Manhattan techno-finance set?
At the same time that Anna’s malevolent technique hooks the viewer, it also becomes pretty hard to watch. Almost everyone caught in her slimy, synthetic web is so incredibly unsympathetic for one reason or another. Most of her victims just do not merit much pity at all, either. A social climbing commercial loan officer at Bank of America who lives beyond his means? Please. Let him commit reputational suicide. I have fresh popcorn.
The bilking of very wealthy socialites in Manhattan is not the reason you should watch the Netflix series or study the case of Anna Sorokin (dba Anna Delvey). You should study this case because the media, including Jessica Pressler’s original story, failed to decode her technique as a master sociopath and share what it reveals about how easily anyone can scam the powerful in America’s most wealthy cities. Anyone. It does not matter who the rich person is, really, as long as they stand committed to the status-signaling networking subculture of the 1%. Anna’s targets were not objectively more gullible, simple-minded, or low IQ than anyone else in America or even among the 1%. Similar, well-heeled folks walk around every day, exposed by their own obsession with cultivating massive amounts of in-person weak ties and their enjoyment of surface-level status signaling, mirroring, faux flattering, and stroking. The minute a powerful person caves to the latter behavioral norms, they become easy prey.
If you desire to be invited to private social clubs for the wealthy, you are at risk automatically. This is what many of us forget.
It’s easy to judge and mock her, but Anna is a master. She is a confident poseur, a connoisseur of pretense, and a skillful wearer of urban masks. She simply has no conscience at all.
And oh, how America is the ultimate cultural space to pull off what she did. Spoiler alert: we should be slow to condemn her lack of ethics, very slow in a nation where unethical capitalism is the norm, where transactional, reciprocal ‘using’ of strangers is acceptable in everyday business. LinkedIn has turbo-charged this behavior for better or worse. I’m always on guard in my own business.
The 10 Steps
So, how exactly did Ms. Sorokin perform convincingly as a German heiress in front of Manhattan’s working rich? After all, bankers, CEOs, landlords, etc., are ostensibly intelligent, have post-grad degrees, and routinely screen out hundreds of clients, applicants, and fans from their social networks every year. Screening out chumps is supposedly a major skill they learn. Saying ‘no’ to invitations is a daily occurrence for them. These are not naive, wonderstruck suckers.
From the written accounts of her exploits, Anna did remarkably few things in terms of patterned deceptive behavior. She did not concoct some James Bond-esque plotline through which to screw over the rich and enrich herself. Her con rested on a thin foundation of fairly basic bullshit status signaling and one massive, Hollywood-grade lie. The simplicity of her technique genuinely surprises me, given the amplitude of the ‘shock’ and ‘gasp’ reaction in the media. Seriously?
Americans just do not accept how easily we are all prey to a cunning sociopath, someone who gets off manipulating people as an end to itself. (My Asperger’s is probably a superpower here because I am totally immune to flattery of any kind, a prime technique of any decent sociopath).
What Anna pretended, she apparently pretended consistently and without hesitation or nervousness. It was therefore a masterful performance that didn’t invite doubt as it would for most middle-class women at her young age. She was triply disadvantaged to network honestly among the 1% of Manhattan, except as an object of charity (an angle she absolutely utilized early on).
She bilked inherited money AND the more commonplace and more insecure nouveau richer. She fooled them all. And she did it by staying on mission, saying as little as necessary about her background, and constant signaling.
Based on my study of early media reports and the skeleton of Netflix’s painstaking, long-form dramatization, here are Anna’s 10 Steps to conning America’s rich (inferred by me):
Use large cash tips in public to sustain an impression of yourself as super-rich (and generous) — who doubts the motives behind such largesse in America?
Speak with a European accent - a near-perfect signal of sophistication in front of nouveau riche American money — there is so much more old money in Europe, right, so this makes sense, that’s she’s German…or is it Russian…or Czech…?
Speak loosely of family money without getting into specifics that could easily be verified — America’s much larger nouveau riche has trained us all not to probe into anyone’s background; who cares where you came from, Dick Whitman? You have the clothing, the car, and the address. Boom!
Play the pitiful daughter-in-need with older financial gatekeepers (e.g., Alan Reed) and with older female socialites (one of whose credit cards she misused to acquire her initial wardrobe) - there is an old form of ‘feminism’ among wealthy American women: help a younger, ambitious daughter figure get her start and fit in. Arm her to seduce the man-splaining gatekeepers.
Manipulate all naïve, wonderstruck gatekeepers (hotel concierges) to penetrate elite social networks through the ‘kitchen entrance.’ - Anna’s key wonderstruck targets were all men, mostly her own age.
Use power flirtation to override standard objections of younger male gatekeepers (bankers) with powerful networks of young, naive, partying rich kids - some rich men feel entitled to trade sex for exceptions to the usual access rules IF the woman in question lacks Anna’s confidence and charisma. Sex is extracted from the weak female, not Anna. By not trading sex, apparently, she comes off as powerful and important.
Dress impeccably in the latest, insanely expensive fashions and accessories, and wear what the rest of us can not afford to rent, let alone wear. — this is mostly a matter of doing your fashion homework in the proper specialty shops. The rest is garden variety credit card fraud.
Display extremely nasty East Coast verbal classism as a defense mechanism to suspend onlookers’ disbelief — only a truly rich bitch would be this nasty so openly in public, right? She’s so rich she cares not one breath about anyone who condemns her behavior.
Play constantly to the collective narcissism of the Manhattan rich and their specific, pre-existing fantasies of social influence. Aren’t ALL the 1% influencers?
Deploy all of the above to build a new elite social network with yourself at the hub…of the fake club - This is the networking equivalent of extremely high-quality self-publishing. Hell, isn’t that what I’m doing right now? Maybe I’m a closet sociopath?
The Two Cultural Rules Anna Sorokin Exploited
So, why would well-off folks be so easy to con with the above 10-step tactical playbook?
No one Anna Sorokin bilked or misled appeared to care about her as an individual initially. We know this because, like so many of us, her victims did not slowly approach with deep northern New England skepticism and ask a hell of a lot of deeply personal questions for which a mountain of lies becomes impossible to sustain. She was one of the thousands of well-dressed rich girls prancing around Park Avenue and one of the thousands of well-dressed, rich business people with an angle to pitch. Yet, she was actually not that conspicuous and, for men, vastly less visually interesting than the thousands of aspiring, leggy models from the upper-midwest hanging out in specific Manhattan cafes to this day. Anna used words and clothing as her signaling tools but, physically, is neither “hot” nor “a model” to use Ashley Mears’ insightful distinction. At most, she was a cute, young curiosity with out-sized ambitions. Harmless. Easy to underestimate.
Here’s where the story has not been unpacked well at all.
Anna needed an initial entry point into the elite social networks of primarily nouveau riche, people she could recruit for her own network of influence. This is as simple as sliding in through the backdoor to just one social club event. New faces do not raise alarm in these social worlds, they invite curiosity - a curiosity fed by capitalist (and philanthropic) possibility.
Why?
America’s urban elite is mostly composed of the ‘working rich,’ folks who got there by acquiring educational pedigrees, entering lucrative professions (finance, real estate), and engaging in highly transactional ‘ledger-keeping’ of favors and voluntary return favors (the optionality of the return favor makes them impressive and memorable). Life and business become a game of titillating favor exchange. Everything could be a future deal. Most everything is seen as negotiable to the aggressive end of this crowd. This constant, frothing exchange creates routine openings for those willing to play concierge to the out-of-town rich.
This makes any luxury hotel concierge a secret back door in. Their job is to be deeply in the know. America actually has an army of non-rich folks who traffic in private networking information, creating a back entrance for anyone aggressive enough to use these intermediaries. Concierges are just one group of them.
The one person who did the most for Anna initially was a black, middle-class female concierge at an independent hotel who had the connections to get her into elite clubs where the local deal-makers hang out. The hotel she worked for allowed her to acquire social capital she (and Anna) did not qualify to possess.
To get this person to work for her, Anna had to stay at the hotel (which she could not afford) and practice a particular kind of ‘I dare you to question my wealth’ approach to the con. And who would be least likely to doubt this in-lobby performance?; a doubly subordinated American (black + female) with her own unrealized ambitions. They needed each other just enough to form an unlikely bond between aspirational outliers.
This bond is my best explanation for why her hotel concierge buddy is the only one she grifted and repaid. The only one I could document. Anna may be a clinical psychopath, incapable of human empathy and remorse, but this did not prevent her from acknowledging the immense gift this humble concierge gave her entire project.
Sociopaths understand reciprocity perhaps better than many of us. Reciprocity does NOT require empathy to function. This should terrify us in America, where strangers get tangled up with strangers based on amazingly shallow understandings of each other all the time.
What is remarkable about Anna’s ‘con’ is that it mainly relied on what marketers call ‘snowballing’ her initial N.Y. social contacts (the old dame, the concierge, her investor-networked boyfriend). She used each new connection to create new ones and ‘market’ an embryonic identity as her counterpart’s super-rich European friend who had appeared to set up her thing in N.Y. It was a highly cynical example of accumulating what Robert Cialdini termed “social proof” (decades ago for a business audience).
By initially showing up at the right clubs and dinners, Anna appeared to be a player already. This initial social validation was literally about showing up in the right costume. Then, she used those initial venues to cultivate a laconic air of mystery that, again, Americans find fascinating (whereas the more ancient human reaction is to rip off the veil and demand answers!). She did not discuss anything in depth besides her “A.D. social club” project. She was ‘on brand’ all the time, it appears. Talk of elite ambitions in the right costume suspends disbelief very easily, like a well-cast film.
Americans are also gobsmacked by elite strangers with mysterious backgrounds. We also give them the benefit of the doubt if they come in harmless packages (young women), graduate students, etc. We easily underestimate the non-standard demographic in the mix. And we easily suspend disbelief if we think there’s an opportunity, an angle that interests us. And it’s not just the 1% who do all of this. Not at all.
So, the first cultural rule Anna exploited was how the rich have an above-average degree of FOMO about the emerging VIP in their midst.
This is a brief interruption to remind you to grab a copy of my new book, especially if you like this essay! The book is NOT about class or the rich..it is about our most hidden unconscious culture rules that make us unusually susceptible to being conned. A Yanomami tribal elder is vastly less likely to be ‘played’ than we are.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled post!
Possessing knowledge of the ‘new elite stranger,’ the ‘emerging VIP’ is actually a full-time job for P.R. agencies, talent agencies, and club owners in L.A. and N.Y. I wish I were joking, but some people have written books on it, like sociologist Ashley Mears.
But why are we so prone to believing an elite-seeming stranger’s B.S. in this country? Modern American capitalism has placed most of us in private sector jobs where we rely heavily on strangers or near-strangers to get: employment, new jobs, mentoring, network access to jump the resume pile line, etc. We are a society of weak ties, mostly strangers to the people we work with and interact with daily.
We no longer circulate in established, endogenous social worlds. And even though ‘old money’ continues to ridicule the nouveau riche, it’s the nouveau riche who runs this country now, much like the former Gilded Age. Hence, we are a country full of ways in to the elite.
In recent years, the hyper-transiency of white-collar workplaces has only increased the need for America’s elite to be stranger-friendly. Giving the benefit of the doubt is now considered an elite moral code in an urban world of highly transactional business relationships, a mosh-pit of personal brands vying for influence in select cities like N.Y., Seattle, Austin, Miami, Palo Alto/San Jose, and L.A.
The second rule she exploited was the truly ridiculous tendency of most of us to give new people the benefit of the doubt right away. Why? Why not assume the opposite in social settings where posing is the primary activity?
Anyone with big ambitions has to get used to doing precisely what Anna did — inserting oneself into established elite networks for which you don’t yet qualify. Posturing. Exaggerating one’s credentials. Signaling connections to more important VIPs, however tenuous. Snowballing one VIP connection into even more (i.e., social proof). I even did a small-time version of this for the publication of my best-selling business book (which shouldn’t have sold well at all, given my dull, white-collar anonymity at the time).
In a modern capitalist world undergoing near-constant change, it’s become essential for most adults to be ‘flexible,’ open to career switching, constantly looking for opportunities to improve themselves and make new social connections that could unleash new opportunities. This is as true for a receptionist as it is for the CEO.
(And people wonder why we’re anxious?)
We’ve trained ourselves to believe the surface bullshit of most elite strangers who command the bare minimum social proof (i.e., connection to other VIPs) and symbolic evidence of power (i.e., language and behavior). Why? Because we aren’t signing off on the bullshit by engaging in weak ties transactions of information or referrals. Even taking an introductory business call is a form of social validation.
Anna Sorokin’s sociopathy bubbles to the surface as distinct only when we discover she was selling a single, foundational (and false) VIP origin narrative as a European heiress. Most of us aren’t so brazen, but our highly stranger-friendly society exposes us daily to B.S. social claims like hers.
In individualist America, we are NOT responsible for enabling a con artist or crook as long as we did not know. “Oh, I had no idea!” we exclaim as if this absolves us of responsibility for suspending our disbelief in the interest of not missing out an on opportunity. We do not see our lack of probing into a stranger’s personal context as an ethical fault.
Maybe we should rethink the frenzy of ‘Who do you know?’ and ask instead, ‘Who the hell cares?’
WOW! The non-empathetic, the hard empty shell of the psyche knocking against the metal of their brain has always boggled me completely. Not the strategy - the hollow echo of this person' spirit living just around the corner....