From con artist to icon: Why do we love criminal celebs?

By now, most of us are familiar with the spectacular fall-out that came about after Russian con artist Anna Delvey bilked New York’s socialite set out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

We gulped down the nitty-gritty details of her crime spree – along with buckets of schadenfreude – while watching Shonda Rhimes’ hit Netflix series, Inventing Anna, earlier this year.

From left: Anna Sorokin, singer Justin Bieber and cookbook author Martha Stewart have all enjoyed boosted reputations, and bank balances, from crime or unlawful activity. Credit: Getty

We found out how Delvey, real name Anna Sorokin, pretended to be a millionaire German heiress with just the right accessories: Celine sunglasses, Gucci dresses and an accent that was a cross between a disdainful British debutante and a wire hanger.

Then we found out that Sorokin was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison, and was moved swiftly from partying with Macaulay Culkin at New York’s hottest spots, to Rikers Island.

And then about Netflix being sued by one of Sorokin’s former friends, Rachel Williams, for portraying her as a “lying, sponging, cowardly snob”.

“Anna ‘Delvey’ Sorokin almost ruined my life,” Williams wrote in February of her former friend, who she claims stole $US62,000 from her. “Now she’s being rewarded for her crimes.” She was referring to Sorokin pocketing $US320,000 from Netflix for her life story, and returning to social media to solicit more money for her adventures.

But now there’s more.

Sorokin’s being feted as a fashion icon in es magazine. The British magazine has put the convicted fraudster on the cover of its luxury “Watches and Jewellery edition”, out on Friday. “Starring one very special accessory …” the magazine teased on Instagram alongside a photo of Sorokin’s leg, which boasted a thick black prison monitoring anklet wrapped around her svelte ankle.

Attached to the monitor’s strap is a diamond-encrusted brooch in the shape of her initials. (Sorokin was released from prison last year, but is currently under house arrest in New York City while she awaits deportation proceedings.)

And there’s a video, in case we missed the message. Overtop a scene of Sorokin haughtily tossing books off a table is a sonorous voice-over: “If you’re job hunting, you’ll find a sample service test and books on jobs and interviews.” It sounds like part of a sermon from a 1950s instructional video originally shown to graduating high school students.

Why do we keep clamouring for what ex-celebrity criminals are selling?

The list is long. Author and former British politician Jeffrey Archer got a three-book deal, and a reported £300,000 in royalties, out of his 2001 perjury conviction. A Prison Diary, a memoir in three parts – credited to his prison number, FF 8282, rather than his name – took readers through the two years he spent in prison, after he’d used a fake diary in a libel case against a newspaper that claimed he slept with a sex worker.

Then there is Martha Stewart.

At 81, she’s still making bank off serving five months in a minimum security prison in 2004 for lying to the FBI. Just last year, Stewart was spruiking a ceramic nativity scene – shiny, cream-coloured figures of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the rest of the gang –modelled off a nativity set she made “when I was confined”. “They still have my [prison] number on the bottom,” she said on TikTok, showing off the original figures, before adding that the new remodelled versions would make “a really beautiful and special gift … with a little street cred”.

Cookbook author Martha Stewart and rapper Snoop Dogg, who teamed up last year to sell a new lighter, have reportedly bonded over their stints in prison.

Even Justin Bieber was fined $US10,000 for unlawfully abandoning his Capuchin monkey in Germany.

“Honestly, everyone told me not to bring the monkey,” the pop singer said afterwards, about his pet monkey, OG Mally, who’d been seized by German authorities in 2013 after Bieber attempted to bring him into the country without vaccination and import papers. The country offered to give him back his monkey, after he handed over the right documents, but the Biebs declined and Germany had to re-home him in a zoo.

The pop singer parlayed his regret into a photograph of himself smouldering on the cover of Seventeen magazine, alongside a headline that read, “I Was Disappointed In Myself”. He later, as one media outlet summed up the aftermath, “released an album of face-melting bangers”.

Certainly, the British fashion industry is amused by Delvey’s latest stunt.

“Is fabulous,” wrote Harris Reed, creative director of heritage couture brand Nina Ricci, known for its elegant, ladylike clothing. Famous British fashion blogger Susie Lau (better known as Susie Bubble) and stylists Katie Grand (founder of cult publications Love and Perfect) and Bay Garnett also liked the post.

Why do we let celebrities who’ve committed crimes off the moral hook when we’d tar and feather our relatives for far less?

We can’t resist the combination of glamour and relatability offered up by a celebrity stint in the slammer, says Dr Toni Eagar, a celebrity and consumer culture expert at the Australian National University. “There’s that tension between being able to identify with a celebrity, seeing ourselves as similar and liking them because we see ourselves in them, and we think we’d get along like a house on fire, versus the idealisation of the celebrity, [where we think] ‘I could never achieve that, they have all this stuff’,” says Eagar.

Ideally, a celebrity will be able to manage both. “Committing a crime, being stupid, humanises them in a way that is difficult to achieve otherwise,” she says.

But Australians are picky about which criminals they support?

“Australians have always had a soft spot for certain kind of criminals, outlaw figures,” says Dr Lauren Rosewarne, an associate professor at The University of Melbourne and researcher in gender and pop culture. “The very fact that we see Ned Kelly as an Australian icon ... there’s an understanding of him as someone who suffered [because of discrimination against the Irish].”

And yet many Australians, she says, complained to the Advertising Standards Board in 1999 when British train robber Ronnie Biggs, who lived in Australia for many of his 36 years on the run from the law, appeared in an advertisement for a transplant hair company. (“I’ve been involved in the greatest robbery of all time, off the top of my head,” he said in the ad, while tapping his head.) “Some Australians still viewed it as someone profiting from their crime.”

At least Delvey is clear where she stands. In a recent British magazine headline she said: “Sociopath? I see it as a compliment.”

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