Anna Sorokin Faces Backlash Over Bunnies in Brooklyn

Anna "Delvey" Sorokin, infamous for her turn as New York's pretend German heiress, has found herself at the center of another social media uproar—but this time, it's about bunnies. Sorokin claims she's facing hundreds of death threats after being accused of abandoning three rabbits in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, reports NBC News.

• The drama began when Sorokin, 34, posed last week with the bunnies during an Instagram shoot in Tribeca, only for the same rabbits to later make an unsupervised appearance in the park, prompting a digital deluge of outrage.

• Web specialist Terry Chao spotted one of the rabbits in the park and recognized it as being one that had recently been put up for adoption online. "They went and got those bunnies for the shoot, basically as props, and then dumped them," Chao tells the New York Times. The bunnies "don't have any survival mechanisms like wild rabbits do." Chao and others helped gather the bunnies—named Parker, Joaquin, and Moon—and the animals have since been placed in foster homes, per Chao.
• Sorokin, who served time for conning banks and friends by posing as a wealthy socialite, insists she's not the villain here. She says she borrowed the rabbits from a 19-year-old hairstylist named Christian Batty, even paying for his Uber ride to return the animals to their owner in Yonkers. Instead, that ride ended near Prospect Park, and Batty—after initially denying any wrongdoing—admitted to abandoning the pets, saying he panicked due to a lack of animal know-how and a pet-unfriendly living situation.
• Sorokin posted screenshots of the vitriolic messages to her Instagram, lamenting that "everything I do is just wrong" and criticizing what she sees as the righteousness of the animal rescue community. She denies ever mistreating the rabbits, insisting the leashes used were harmless. Sorokin also donated $1,000 to a rabbit rescue in an attempt to patch things up.
• Now, dealing with the fallout both online and in light of her ongoing immigration woes, Sorokin continues to maintain her innocence: "This time, I've done nothing wrong," she says. "I had the best intentions, and it's really frustrating."
• Chao, meanwhile, says that this type of animal abandonment isn't uncommon. "The only reason this is getting so much coverage is because [Sorokin is] a known public figure," Chao tells People.