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Editor: Alexandra D’Eon
Email: adeon@umassd.edu
America’s favorite con artist, Anna Delvey, debuted on Dancing with the Stars in mid-September. She was cast for the 33rd season of the show and partnered with Ezra Sosa.
In the premiere episode of the new season, she and dance partner Ezra Sosa danced the Cha Cha to “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter. Anna appeared adorned in a glittery purple, yellow, and blue dance costume with a matching bedazzled ankle monitor.
Their first performance together earned them a score of 18 out of the 30 possible points.
Delvey is now a household name after a docu-series about her crimes spanning from 2013 to 2017, released on Netflix in 2022 and titled Inventing Anna.
Anna Delvey’s real name is Anna Sorokin. She posed as a German heiress in New York, where she gained entry into the elite art and social scene of New York City. She is believed to have stolen about a quarter of a million dollars from businesses and people she befriended during her con.
In 2017, Anna was arrested by the NYPD in a sting operation. In 2019, she was sentenced to 4-12 years for charges including grand larceny, second-degree larceny, and theft of services. She was released in 2021 and granted house arrest after serving about four years.
Despite being a convicted felon, which we know doesn’t stop much nowadays, she was cast to join this year’s season of Dancing with the Stars.
On the first night of real competition, Delvey wore a dress with a sparkly pink bodice and a feathered skirt. Her performance was- interesting.
She and dance partner Ezra Sosa performed a quick-step routine to “Suddenly I See” by KT Tunstall from the movie The Devil Wears Prada. I’m sure the song choice was intentional as a nod to Delvey’s criminal past due to the movie’s themes.
In The Devil Wears Prada, Anne Hathaway is a struggling wannabe journalist who is working for Meryl Streep’s character (Miranda Priestly), who is the editor-in-chief of the magazine Runway. Hathaway’s character doesn’t impress Streep, who doesn’t take her seriously and uses her power over her to belittle her.
However, Hathaway’s character takes on a new persona by dressing differently, and slowly, her personality begins to change as well- which leads to advancements in her career, much like how Anna assumed a new identity to commit her con scheme.
During their performance, Anna appeared very stiff. Her body did not seem to flow with the rhythm of the music. She rarely smiled during the routine, her features set in an indifferent smirk during most of the performance.
At one point during their dance, Anna is dipped by her partner, which just looks very stiff and awkward. This performance earned them 17 out of the 30 possible points.
Following this attempt at a quick step, Delvey was eliminated from the competition- and she was not happy about it.
Anna gave an interview with NBC where she stated, “I feel that the show so obviously used me to drive up the ratings, that they never had any plans to give me any chance to grow and only cared about exploiting me for attention.”
Delvey felt as though there was never a plan for her to compete in the show; she just made an appearance to get people watching.
The statement she made to NBC that has been catching everyone’s attention, though, is her calling DWTS, “predatory.”
She said in her interview, “It was predatory of them to try [to] make me feel inadequate and stupid all while I did get progressively better yet they chose to disregard that.”
Anna, who quite literally made all of her money by preying on other people, was furious when it happened to her. She has made several other statements about how she learned “nothing” from experience and felt it was a “waste of time.”
To the rest of us, the opportunity to appear on a show as huge as Dancing with the Stars would be a life-changing experience- even if we got eliminated practically immediately.
In another interview with “Good Morning America,” Anna told them her “favorite part of the show was being eliminated.”
This appearance will surely be the beginning of how Delvey will thrust herself back into the spotlight now that she is out of jail. Let’s just hope she doesn’t get too carried away.