Anna Delvey hit back at ex-Dancing With the Stars pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy on social media.
The convicted con artist, who is competing on Season 33 of DWTS, took to her Instagram Story to respond to a TMZ article screenshot posted by fashion publicist and Delvey’s pal Kelly Cutrone.
“DWTS Maksim Chmerkovskiy Anna Delvey’s a S****y Dancer!!” the TMZ headline read.
“I thought this said SEXY!!!” Cutrone wrote over the screenshot, tagging Chmerkovskiy. “Did you mean Sassy or are you so pathetic that you cannot get on a show you have to attack someone? No one cares about your opinion. Dance yourself into a new reality.”
In response, Delvey—whose real name is Anna Sorokin—reposted the 58-year-old’s message to her own Instagram, tagging Cutrone and TMZ’s accounts and adding a red heart emoji.
In a follow-up message posted several hours later, Delvey, 33, added, “Who’s this Maksim person? He must be poor.”
Newsweek reached out to Chmerkovskiy’s representative via email for comment.
On Monday, Chmerkovskiy took aim at the fraudster during an appearance on The TMZ Podcast, calling her a “professional liar.”
“You’re gonna bring that person and say, ‘Here’s a platform that a lot of people waited their entire actual career, you know, to be a part of,’ to also get a moment of a personal story [where they] can say, ‘This is who I actually am.’ Will I believe anything that this lady says? Absolutely not,” he said.
Chmerkovskiy, who competed on DWTS for 17 seasons, continued, “She wasn’t great, she was very kind of standoffish in a lot of things. You can blame the nerves and say, ‘Hey, everybody’s human and this person is not used to that stage.’ Bull****. Hold on a second—didn’t she con people into believing she was, like, fully fashion this and social like that? And that takes a lot of guts. It takes a lot of, you know, self-control to present yourself a certain way, even if you’re so nervous. I don’t buy this ‘she was nervous’ stuff. She’s just a s***** dancer and [her] personality is not really going to help her in this competition.”
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t even get to see the why she got on the show, you know?” the 44-year-old added. “So then why isn’t that coming through in droves to offset for the fact that there’s all this other stuff going on?”
Dominik Bindl/Getty Images; Inset Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
In 2019, Delvey was convicted of swindling hotels, banks and friends out of hundreds of thousands of dollars after convincing them she was a German heiress. She was found guilty of eight theft-related charges including attempted grand larceny in the first degree and theft of services. After serving nearly four years in prison, she was released in February 2021 and taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for overstaying her visa. In October 2022, she was released from ICE custody and is currently on house arrest as a result of her immigration case, which is why she wears an ankle monitor on Dancing With the Stars.
Cutrone—who appeared on MTV’s The Hills and The City—and Delvey recently produced a handful of New York Fashion Week shows together and were even roommates. In an interview with Vanity Fair earlier this month, Cutrone described their friendship as “Ab Fab meets Thelma & Louise meets Batman and Robin.”
“We were like frontline soldiers together,” she said. “We’re bonded now in trauma and dreams and redemption.”
In the same interview, fashion designer Shao Yang shed further light on the pair.
“Anna looked up to Kelly as the person she wanted to be when she came to New York, and as soon as Kelly met Anna, she basically fell in love with her,” Yang told the outlet. “I think having them two together is, like, literally a powerhouse.”
