We’ve all seen the pictures and videos of Anna Delvey, a convicted con artist, dancing with a bedazzled ankle monitor on Dancing with the Stars — and the tweets and memes that followed calling her an “icon.” What is happening? Have we already forgotten about Netflix’s series Inventing Anna? Let’s be honest, it’s weird to see criminals become celebrities.
Unfortunately, this has happened before — fans emerging to celebrate criminals like Gypsy Rose Blanchard after being in jail and idolizing damaging behavior. Apparently, though, we’re not seeing the error of our ways. ABC’s Dancing with the Stars took on Anna Delvey as one of this season’s stars. They claimed that Delvey is “an artist, fashion icon and infamous NYC socialite” in a press-release, instead of acknowledging what brought her to this status. To understand how she got here, we need to do a bit of a deep dive.
Anna Delvey, born Anna Sorokin, came to be known in NYC under this alias from 2013 to 2017. She was able to convince people, including friends and banks, that she was a rich heiress with millions of dollars to her name — but this simply was not the case. In April 2019, Delvey was found guilty on eight theft-related charges and was accused of grand larceny. On DWTS, Delvey still wears her ankle monitor and has to be flown back and forth from New York to Los Angeles because she can only be out of the state for so long before she breaks her parole. In keeping with her costumes, she decks out her ankle monitor as well (and ABC loves to zoom in on her sparkly ankle monitor).
The bigger issue here is the fact that we see these criminals as icons and continue to support them after they’ve done horrible things. Take Diddy for example; Sean “Diddy” Combs, American rapper, was arrested in mid-September for allegations of sex trafficking. So why are we seeing an uptick in his music streams? It comes down to the fact that his name is becoming idolized and his fans are banding together to support him despite the crimes he’s committed.
This also plays into America’s weird obsession with true crime, and even sometimes with criminals themselves. Can you even count how many films and series have been made about Jeffrey Dahmer? And when Zac Efron played Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile in 2019, did we really watch that movie for the plot? The producers knew what they were doing casting Efron as the horrid criminal, because how can we hate a man who looks that good? The internet loves a bad boy/bad girl archetype, something that is extremely prevalent in the way we view these celeb criminals.
Can we please stop moving on from criminal behavior just because the criminal is attractive? It’s weird, problematic, and ignores the bigger issues within our justice system as a whole. So the next time you think about tweeting on Anna Delvey’s “iconic” ankle monitor, just… don’t.
What's Your Reaction?
