After years of prison and conniving her way into luxury, Anna Sorokin has New York talking about her again.
This time, it is not posing as a German heiress or being jailed for four years, instead the convicted fraudster has been left “disturbed” and “horrified” after three rabbits used in her photoshoot were found dumped in a nearby park.
Sorokin, who also went by the name Anna Delvey and is the subject of Netflix’s Inventing Anna, shot to infamy after a high-profile court case. The fraudster, who masqueraded as an heiress, swindled the wealthy in Manhattan with an invented trust fund.
But this latest saga involves a photograph on her Instagram account, in which she is pictured outside a Tribeca subway station with a black ankle monitor – stipulated under the terms of her 2022 prison release – and holding two leashed rabbits.
Days after posing for the photographs, social media users were quick to link the abandoned bunnies with Sorokin after the animals were spotted in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
“I felt ashamed and embarrassed to be associated with it,” Sorokin said of the affair. The 34-year-old said she was not responsible for the rabbits and was “horrified” to learn they had been dumped.
The first bunny, a one-and-a-half-year-old Harlequin lop, was found in the bushes by Terry Chao near a cardboard box used as part of Sorokin’s photoshoot last week. On Thursday, another rabbit was found near the same cardboard box, followed by a third on Sunday, near a black carrier bag, she told the New York Times.
The man who photographed Sorokin, Jasper Egan Soloff, told the newspaper through a lawyer that it was not his shoot and claimed to have no knowledge of how the animals were obtained or handled.
Another person involved in the shoot appears to have apologised and taken responsibility in a since-deleted Instagram post.
“When I realised the rabbits were being surrendered to me I panicked. 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,” he reportedly wrote.
“Believing, mistakenly, that there were existing rabbits in that area, I released them there, thinking that was my best option.”
He added that they were being fostered by someone in New York, while Sorokin said she offered to help rehome the rabbits when she learned they had been abandoned.
People on social media have accused Sorokin of animal cruelty. Many commenters decried her use of the animals as props, and warned against photographing bunnies on leashes on their backs, a position known as trancing that can be harmful to the animals.
“I do not eat meat, and I had no involvement in the acquisition, transport, or return of these animals. I would never condone these actions,” Sorokin told the website Page Six. After being convicted in 2019 on multiple counts of larceny and theft, she was released after nearly four years in jail and a further 18 months in immigration detention for overstaying her visa, and was told to refrain from posting on social media.
