The Imitation Game

When a well-connected Vanity Fair photo editor met a European heiress they became fast friends, but it all fell apart when the heiress turned out to be a con. Genevieve Gannon reports.

- Genevieve Gannon

Rachel watched, intrigued, as the new girl at the table ordered another bottle of imported vodka, and swept her tangle of auburn hair away from her face. Anna Delvey’s European accent was hard to place. There was a rumor she was an heiress of some sort – German, or Russian? Her manners were intriguing, as was her appearance. Anna’s eyelashes were long and dark but her face was unexpectedly make-up free. In a city like New York, where excess rules, the heiress’s style was markedly pared back. However, those who paid attention, as Rachel did, would notice her simple strappy shoes were Gucci and her thick lashes were expensive extensions. As the pair fell into an easy conversation that first night, in a dim bar on the Lower East Side early in 2016, Rachel was flattered by the stranger’s attention. She had no reason to question Anna’s motives. But her natural desire to please left her wide open to the chaos the fake heiress was about to unleash.

“For a lot of our friendship I knew there was something not quite right about Anna but it never occurred to me that the not-quite-right went that deep,” Rachel says two years after her friendship with a volatile social climber nearly destroyed her life. Speaking exclusively to The Weekly ahead of the release of her memoir, My Friend Anna, she details the odyssey of excess Anna led her on, and the nightmare that followed when it all came undone.