Anna Delvey’s troubled time on ‘Dancing with the Stars’: How her hopes for redemption came to an end

Anna Delvey’s stardom has lasted less than a month. Four weeks of fame that she is already trying to stretch, even if it is through anger. On September 4, the very famous ABC program Dancing with the Stars announced the cast for its 33rd season. In addition to the Beverly Hills 90210 actress Tori Spelling, former NFL player Danny Amendola, NBA veteran Dwight Howard, Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher and actor Eric Roberts (the brother of Julia Roberts and father of Emma Roberts), the show made the surprise decision to pick convicted con artist Anna Delvey, or Anna Sorokin, which is her real name.

Delvey — who spent several years in prison — was set to learn choreography with the recently promoted dancer Ezra Sosa. However, Delvey lasted exactly two shows: the introductory one and the first round of eliminations, when she was sent home. Since being eliminated, she has not stopped criticizing the TV show.

There was no doubt that the 33-year-old’s participation in the show was going to cause a stir. The news of her casting revived interest in Delvey, who was once one of the most famous criminals in the country. Once again, she became a topic of conversation on TV shows, social media and among friends. The audience was at full capacity, and many even waited outside the Hollywood studios where the show is recorded. Talk show hosts and trending topics in social media fed into the public furor of seeing a sequin-clad Delvey dancing with an ankle bracelet, which controls whether she complies with her house arrest.

Between 2013 and 2017, when she was arrested in California, the young Russian-German woman posed as a wealthy heiress, with powerful connections on the New York scene. She ended up defrauding around $200,000 from hotels, airline companies and various creditors, and was on the verge of obtaining $25 million to supposedly open a social club. Her personal story and her high-profile trial inspired the 2022 TV series Inventing Anna, which was a huge success on Netflix.

Delvey was sentenced to between four and 12 years for her crimes. She served four years and now lives in New York, where she remains under house arrest due to complications with her immigration status, as she violated the terms of her visa. Delvey is now trying to obtain asylum in the United States. She did not waste time in prison (she made more than $300,000 in royalties from the series), and has kept even busier since her release in 2021. Delvey has appeared in Vogue and is working on projects, such as the podcast The Anna Delvey Show and the reality TV show Delvey’s Dinner Club.

Despite being forced to remain inside her New York apartment, or the premises thereof, Delvey obtained permission to film Dancing with the Stars in Los Angeles, more than 3,000 miles away. This is why she wore an ankle monitor, which right from the start of the show became another star of the program. Delvey said it was “light” and hard to notice while she was dancing. In her performances on Dancing with the Stars, stylists dressed up the ankle bracelet to match what she was wearing. The stage was set for her redemption, with Delvey reclaiming her celebrity status.

But this has meant that a notorious criminal was able to return to the spotlight, with her time behind bars viewed as glamorous. For The New York Post, Delvey’s participation on the show signalled that “pop culture has sunk to a new low.” Some commentators criticized her appearance; on The View, Whoopi Goldberg claimed it was a demonstration of “a two-tiered [immigration] system” that benefited the rich and powerful.

Conrad Green, the producer of Dancing with the Stars, defended the cast as “very appealing,” telling Variety that there was a lot of “good energy around them.” He said the show always looked for different types of participants and that Anna Delvey was “fascinating to a lot of people.” “A lot of people have watched the dramas about her life and have followed her story, so I think there is an inherent curiosity about her,” he told Variety a few days before the season premiere. “She’s a very valid and interesting part of that cast. Yes, she had the issues she’s had, but we’ve had other people on the show who’ve had criminal issues in the past. She served her time. I think it’s perfectly valid for her to be on the show, and I think people have been really curious to see how she performs.”

The curiosity over how Delvey would perform was obvious. So much so, that in the first show, broadcast on September 17, ABC saved Delvey’s performance until last. “I’ve reinvented myself many times, and this time I’m going to be a ballroom dancer,” said Delvey, after her first performance, which the judges rated as average.

In the second show, a week later, she didn’t even make it that far. The judges voted her out along with Tori Spelling. When the presenter asked Delvey what she took away from her time on the show, she replied bluntly: “Nothing.” In a later interview on Good Morning America, she was even clearer when asked what her favorite part of the experience was: “Being eliminated.”

Days later, Delvey continues to criticize her time on the show, but without clearly explaining why she felt uncomfortable or did not enjoy the program. “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,” she told NBC News. Of course, the cast is full of stars of different caliber and of different ages, precisely to attract a wide audience. “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,” she added.

Perhaps the biggest clues about why she is so angry are in what she said during Spelling’s Misspelling podcast a few days later. Delvey complained again that she took nothing away from the experience. She said show tried to “build” her up, by asking her to smile more and giving her certain advice, only to drop her.

“It felt like they put so much effort trying to get me on the show, like, make me feel comfortable just to… eliminate me this early,” she said, arguing that the double elimination was an attempt to embarrass them by eliminating them before Eric Roberts and Reginald VelJohnson. “It felt like a waste of time for me to do all this for them to just discard me so easily,” said Delevy. What is clear is that Anna Delvey likes fame, but she doesn’t like losing.

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