

Many of Anna’s friends were rich enough that they didn’t miss even a few thousand dollars she might have owed them. It was grand gestures like these that allowed people in Delvey’s circle to overlook what turned out to be a habit of borrowing money from friends or asking them to put something she offered to pay for on their credit card, with a promise to pay them back - often, an empty promise. The next day, Neff said, Delvey paid her back three times the cost of dinner, in cash.Īnna Delvey Forever. According to Neff’s account, the waiter dutifully plugged in the credit card numbers, shaking his head each time the charges didn’t go through. Incredulously, Anna reportedly gave the server there a list of handwritten credit card numbers when the physical card she presented was turned down. Neff recounted to The Cut one occasion in which she got stuck with an expensive dinner bill after Delvey’s credit card was declined at a restaurant. “A little selfish of me,” she admitted later. “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. … 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.

“This is not a guest that needs my help,” it dawned on her. 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. Purple was totally washed and Vandal was for hipsters, while Delvey’s eyes would flit around behind her glasses. Over the next few weeks, Delvey stopped by often to ask Neff’s advice, slipping her $100 each time. In Anna’s world, being a “friend” usually amounted to some kind of transaction, and Anna appears to have essentially bought Neff’s attention in the beginning.

In keeping with her image as a cosmopolitan, itinerant socialite, A nna had been living at a high-end boutique hotel in Soho - 11 Howard - and had been staying there for a month when she befriended Neff, a concierge at the hotel and an aspiring filmmaker about Anna’s age. On Tuesday, New York Magazine’s The Cut published a deep dive into what was going on behind the scenes before the disastrous vacation, and why Anna was so eager to get out of town. We first heard about Delvey, now 28, in a Vanity Fair story written by someone she had swindled: A friend who thought Anna was treating her to a luxury vacation in Morocco, but instead ended up having to foot the bill - which was more than her annual salary. Or more accurately, her hunting ground.Īnna Delvey surrounded herself with people who were taken by her apparent wealth or had enough of their own that most wouldn’t question a declined credit card here or an unpaid hotel bill there as long as she flashed a wad of cash often enough that she could keep up the illusion of being impossibly rich. Anna Delvey went to all the right places, and knew the right people –.certainly the right people to prey on.įor a while, the twentysomething European woman with the murky backstory lived a fairytale existence in New York City, at least to the type of people who put a premium on social climbing and the performance of luxury - and plenty of those can be found in Manhattan, Anna’s primary stomping ground.
