Anna Sorokin says she got hundreds of death threats over bunnies abandoned in Brooklyn park
Anna “Delvey” Sorokin says she has received hundreds of death threats since she was accused of dumping pet rabbits she posed with for a photo shoot in a New York City park.
Sorokin, the fake German heiress who stole tens of thousands of dollars from banks, posed alongside three bunnies on the streets of Manhattan’s posh Tribeca neighborhood last week. The bunnies were recognized and discovered in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park days later, prompting fierce online backlash.
But the headline-making New York City socialite — who vehemently denied responsibility for the discarded bunnies — said she’s particularly shocked by the strong reaction to the incident.
“It just seems to me like everything I do is just wrong,” Sorokin said. “I can never do right by these people.”
Sorokin shared screenshots of dozens of hateful messages she has received within the last few days to her Instagram account — which she called “unusable.” Some of them suggest that she should be killed or take her own life, including one that advises her to get someone to “make a carpet out of your skin.”
“It seems like a lot of these people, just because they’re engaged in animal rescue, they feel like they’re entitled to insult you or talk to you or say anything because they’re hiding behind this thing that they’re doing,” she said.
Sorokin, 34, whose life was depicted in Netflix’s hit 2022 series “Inventing Anna,” took the photos with the bunnies on Aug. 3 to create content for Instagram, where she has more than 1.1 million followers.
Shortly before the shoot, Sorokin asked whether any of her followers in the New York City metropolitan area had a pet rabbit she could borrow, she said.
Christian Batty, 19, a hairstylist Sorokin met briefly last year, reached out and offered what he described as a friend’s rabbits, she said.
Sorokin added that she paid Batty to provide the rabbits and for his Uber ride to return the rabbits to their owner in Yonkers — or so she thought. A screenshot of an Uber receipt Sorokin shared with NBC News shows the ride’s drop-off location was just south of Prospect Park, where the rabbits were later spotted.
Days later, she said, she started receiving messages on social media about the rabbits’ being spotted in Prospect Park. A Facebook user posted images of the domesticated bunnies in the park to a public Facebook group dedicated to rabbits, House Rabbit Society, and other users connected them to Sorokin’s photos.
Sorokin initially thought the posts were fake, but the flood of messages did not stop.
At first, Batty denied having dumped the rabbits, according to screenshots of text messages between Sorokin, Batty and photographer Jasper Soloff. Sorokin posted those messages on her Instagram story.
“Jasper had no knowledge or input as to how the bunnies were obtained or what happened to them after the photo shoot,” Soloff’s attorney, Gary Adelman, said in a statement.
Batty did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Hours later, Batty said, he did dump the rabbits, and he absolved Sorokin of any involvement, according to a statement on his Instagram account, which has since been taken down.
“When I realized the rabbits were being surrendered to me, I panicked,” Batty said in the statement, screenshots of which Sorokin provided. “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.”
“Believing, mistakenly, that there were existing rabbits in that area, I released them there, thinking that was my best option,” he added.
Sorokin pushed back against the notion that Batty’s age was an issue.
“He’s old enough to move to New York and live on his own. He should have enough common sense to handle rabbits,” she said. “We’re not, like, asking him to do anything that requires high IQ from him.”
Sorokin said she was concerned about how the incident might affect her pending immigration case.
A Manhattan jury convicted Sorokin in April 2019 on four counts of theft services, three counts of grand larceny and one count of attempted grand larceny after she was accused of defrauding banks and friends of tens of thousands of dollars.
Prosecutors said she persuaded friends and businesses to lend her money to afford a lavish lifestyle under the guise that she was the daughter of an oil baron or a diplomat worth tens of millions of dollars.
In 2021, Sorokin was released on parole, and she is fighting deportation. She has been required to wear an electronic ankle monitor and cannot leave a 75-mile house arrest radius based in New York.
“This time, I’ve done nothing wrong,” she said. “And I had the best intentions, and it’s really frustrating.”
The New York Times reported that the rabbits were rescued by blogger Terry Chao, who spotted them in the park. Chao could not immediately be reached for comment.
Sorokin said she donated $1,000 to All About Rabbits Rescue in the aftermath of the scandal. She also denied harming the rabbits by putting them on leashes, as some have suggested online.
“I don’t know, I’m not a bunny professional. I didn’t know the leashes were such a big deal,” she said. “We would put them down for, I don’t know, a minute or two, take a picture and pick them up. We were not walking them by any means. And they seemed to be happy.”