A lawyer hired by art world grifter Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, to fight her deportation and appeal her conviction in a $270,000 fraud case has sued Sorkin for over $150,000 in legal fees, according to court documents filed last week in the New York State Supreme Court.
Sorokin hired Audrey Thomas in 2020, after a string of fraud charges against Sorokin led to a conviction for grand larceny and theft of services. According to the complaint, while Sorokin paid Thomas a retainer for appealing her conviction and overstaying her visa, for which she faced possible deportation to Germany, she still owes Thomas over $152,000 in legal fees.
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Thomas also claims that Sorokin has tried to get out of paying the hefty sum by filing her own lawsuit, which alleges that the attorney has been withholding audio recordings of her deportation hearings from her new lawyer and hoarding a few of Sorokin’s personal belongings. Sorokin fired Thomas in April 2022 for “lack of progress in her criminal and immigration cases due to Thomas’ lax work habits,” according to The New York Post.
Last November, Thomas was disbarred for alleged financial crimes of her own. Court documents claim that Thomas used $630,000 in cash that was held in escrow from the sale of a client’s apartment in order to promote herself as a radio show host and the author of the book Ego Has No Place In The Law.
In 2019, Sorokin was sentenced to between four and 12 years in prison and was released on parole in February 2021. Just over a month later, she was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. She is currently under house arrest in Manhattan’s East Village after being granted a $10,000 bond and awaiting the court’s decision on whether she should be deported for overstaying her visa.
In an interview with The Messenger Wednesday, Sorokin said she was “trying to make the best” out of life despite the fact that being under house arrest is “pretty limiting.”
“Hopefully people will let me grow up and move on,” Sorokin told The Messenger. “I am just trying to focus on what I am interested in these days. I see this as a great opportunity to dive into new people, somebody that I would not know so much about.”
Last year, Sorokin held an art show of works she made while in prison, many of which featured herself wearing designer clothes. She reportedly made around $340,000 from the mostly pencil and paper drawings, the proceeds of which helped secure the bond and pay for her Manhattan apartment, which costs $4,250 a month.
Source: artnews.com