Heir Mail #29
Meng Wanzhou and Anna Delvey return to the places they call home (China and the national spotlight, respectively).
Hi hi hi! This newsletter has seen some new signups, so I wanted to set extremely unrealistic expectations by sending it out two weeks in a row, and at a weird time. What a choice to make! She’s unpredictable!
Command + F the bold words to find:
Anna Delvey’s first interview highlights: [file not found].
I don’t understand international relations!
Gloria’s little boy is out and about and telling tales of her panache.
From the rest of the alert: (once again) meet Jen Aniston’s psychic, can’t trust a fake cellmate, a big glass case for Deborah, “one big round,” a Squid Game connection, hate hate hate, and don’t we all kind of miss Ethan Hawke?
“'Fake heiress' Anna Sorokin: 'I'm not this dumb, greedy person,'” ABC7
The 2010’s most famous heiress — arguably — was a fake one. Paris’s heyday was clearly the aughts, and Anna Delvey captured our national attention in 2018.
That’s when Rachel Deloache Williams wrote a story for Vanity Fair (her former employer) about how her friend, a supposed heiress, had stuck the one-time photo researcher with a $62k bill for a hotel in Marrakech1. The rest came tumbling out after Anna overextended herself on Venmo to pay Rachel back. It turned out German rich kid Anna Delvey was really Russian regular kid Anna Sorokin, living an expensive life based on some strategic lies. Anna was convicted of theft of services and grand larceny, went to prison, got out, kept calling herself Delvey, and then got picked up and is currently being held by ICE.
Anna in April, before she was forced to abandon her ‘gram. | @theannadelvey’s Instagram
If you already know all that, most of which we’ve gone over in this newsletter, there isn’t much new in 20/20’s special: The Sinfluencer of Soho2, which features Anna’s first TV interview. About midway through, they reveal her lawyer’s presence (of course), who instructs her not to answer any questions that would tie her to the fraudulent bank records or even say anything particularly colorful.
At one point she asks correspondent Deborah Roberts if she feels like she’s being scammed; at another she’s not dumb (true) or greedy (false).
It’s hard to fault someone for cracking the code— that the very rich necessarily don’t have to have money — and using it to their advantage. It’s easy to get loans, or comped hotel rooms, or whatever else when people assume you could pay for them. Nothing comes with more freebies than being wealthy.
There’s the problem that she actually scammed people who couldn’t easily afford it, but a jury apparently did not find Rachel sympathetic. And in truth, Rachel’s fine: AmEx protected her from the hotel charges, plus she sold a book about the whole thing. That’s the relief of being even upper middle class.
While in the past I’ve found her bravado fun, lately I find her whole deal dated. Maybe it’s because she came out of jail spinning basically the same story, without any adjustment of vibes to meet the pandemic moment. I know Anna’s Shonda miniseries hasn’t even come out yet, and we’re only experiencing the trial of Elizabeth Holmes right now3, but the Summer of Scam feels like 20,000 years ago. Everything just seems fundamentally different now. Not better, obviously, but all these semi-Girl Boss scammers feel quaint, of their time.
The scams that have come to light in the last few years are less like “lady not actually already rich!” but instead like “the false promise that we all have a collective future,” and “the laughable concept that your job isn’t being exploited, or exploiting others, or both at once,” and “the lie that Americans might ever want to protect each other.” Maybe it’s just hard to get excited about someone stealing from the rich when they’re not remotely Robin Hood. Anna’s out for herself and while that idea is deeply, deeply relevant right now, it’s certainly nothing unique.
Estimated Net Worth: NickiSwift guessed in April that Anna would have $97,000 after she paid her victims out of her Netflix earnings. That was pre-ICE, though.
“China releases 2 Canadians in apparent 'prisoner swap' hours after Huawei heiress is freed,” The Print
Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou has been released from Canadian house arrest, where we last encountered her having an extremely nice Christmas and basically ignoring Covid.
Wanzhou, as a refresher, was under watch because she didn’t tell HSBC ~the whole truth~ about her company’s relationship with an Iranian subsidiary, putting the bank at risk for sanctions.
And okay, so: last time I wrote about this I was very sarcastically like, “oh wow, can’t see why that’s a big deal!” but this time, I don’t know, I can’t quite see this why this is a big deal? 4 (Huawei was also accused of stealing from T-Mobile but like… that can’t be it, right?) Like, that’s the thing that got a telecom CFO arrested? Don’t banks love to ride the high of almost getting sanctioned but then nothing happens? International relations, a little complicated, it turns out!
To learn more, I Googled “Is Meng Wanzhou’s arrest weird?” (it’s called research) and found a Guardian article that does say, “It was highly unusual for the prosecution to be directed at the chief finance officer personally and not at the corporation.” A little more reading shows that even if the fraud charges have merit — which considering she admitted to lying to the bank, probs — Former President Quiet-Part-Out-Loud apparently made the whole thing explicitly political back in 2018 by saying he would happily intervene if China gave him what he wanted on trade.
Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver, this year. | via Wikimedia Commons/China News Service
Anyways, Wanzhou’s release is a huge, huge deal in China, with state media live-streaming the whole thing, and crowds and flag-waving and et cetera. Her company happens to be integral to China’s 5G push. At the same time, two Canadian men who were jailed in China on espionage charges in what was widely interpreted at retaliation were immediately released on the kind of flimsy pretenses that CNN’s experts interpret as, basically, a flex. They say China was like “oh we’re totally holding these guys for legit reasons but oh you let our girl go? Here, have them back and next time maybe you’ll remember how nice and easy we can play.” It seems like locking up the rich lady was also a flex! Lotta flexing going on and I don’t know what any of it means! Was it all just about trade? Is this spy shit, happening in public? And seriously, do banks care about sanctions?
Estimated Net Worth: CBC says Wanzhou’s dad Ren Zhengfei is worth $3.2 billion, but reports about Wanzhou are a little less clear. Multiple random websites, including allfamousbirthday.com and Marifimines: NEWS & Reviews, put her net worth around $1.5 million which seems… low. BI says her and her husband own a pair of houses worth $20 million.
“Anderson Cooper Reveals Why He Won't Leave His Son a "Huge" Inheritance,” E! Online
“Anderson Cooper Says Gloria Vanderbilt Offered to Be His Surrogate,” The Hollywood Reporter
Anderson Cooper — son of heiress Gloria Vanderbilt — is arguably the most notable currently-living descendent of any of America’s robber barons, which is honestly kind of unimpressive on their end, when you think about it. Sure, the heyday for the industrialists of the Gilded Age was 200 years ago, but still, so much robbing, so much baroning, and the only guy we really know well is this cable TV anchor who’s indisputably at his best when he gets drunk with Andy Cohen three times a year on Watch What Happens Live. Of course there are still Hearsts running Hearst and Rockefellers donating huge sums of money — and truly rich families value their privacy, the most valuable thing in the world — but it’s not like no one else ever tried, and in terms of public notability, the next most familiar faces are Brothers and Sisters’ Balthazar Getty, Patty’s daughter Lydia Hearst, and Anderson’s surprise third cousin, Timothy Olyphant.
Anderson has written a history of his family called Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty5, and he’s currently on the attendant press tour. Thankfully, he’s talking a lot about his mom, which rules because in his telling she had the kind of wacky rich lady force field that prevents anyone — even your son — from telling you truths you don’t want to hear. That is what wealth is for.
Gloria, with Anderson’s dad Wyatt, in 1970. I think they got your number! | via Wikimedia Commons
“You couldn’t be ‘negative,’ meaning you couldn’t be realistic and tell her what you actually thought or try to talk sense into her,” Anderson told Stephen Colbert. “You had to be ‘supportive.’” Specifically, he couldn’t just tell his 85-year-old mom that she couldn’t carry a child for him, after her reality-warping powers extended to a gynecologist who told her it was physically possible.
In a separate interview, Anderson told podcast Morning Meeting that he always knew he wasn’t getting his mom’s money, and that he doesn’t plan to leave much to his own son. This is interesting for two reasons: one, because it’s always something when the wealthy take a public position on inheritance (duh obviously), and two, because Morning Meeting is the podcast for this newsletter’s clear and equal rival, Graydon Carter’s Air Mail. Anderson, in the spirit of equality, do an interview with this newsletter!!
Anderson’s spoken publicly about his relationship with inherited wealth a good deal in the past, and his desire to make his own money from a young age. While an ungenerous reading (and here’s one from Wealth Advisor: The Voice of the Financial Advisor Community) might point out that we don’t actually know what how and when his financial cushion might have caught him, and that there’s something a tad exhausting about a literal Vanderbilt protesting his advantages when he comes from a world that offers more than just money, but it also seems to be something of a trauma response. Specifically, to his dad’s death and his mother’s cavalier style of living. “When your dad dies when you're 10 years old, the world becomes a very different place and a very scary place and I wanted to know that I could survive in that scary world on my own,” he told Howard Stern in 2014, as per E! Online. “I knew my mom didn't have a plan.”
Estimated Net Worth: Gloria was rumored to be worth $200 million at her death in 2019 — from both her inheritance and her fashion line, queen of jeans — but Page Six reported that she passed with just about $2.7 million total, including the apartment we saw a couple of newsletters ago. Gloria was apparently a spendthrift (an endearing quality, sorry to her sons), and a bit of a scam target. Page Six notes that she “sued her lawyer and psychiatrist in 1993 for stealing millions of dollars and selling off her business interests without her permission.”
Celebrity Net Worth puts Anderson at $200 million, noting that he gets $12 million a year from CNN.
From the rest of the alert
Many months ago, the AARP’s scam podcast covered the story an Irish woman Marianne “Mair” Smyth who pretended to be an heiress and scammed a Shark Tank producer (it came up in this newsletter here). That producer is now making his own eight part podcast about the same event called Queen of the Con: The Irish Heiress. From the trailer there’s a detail I didn’t remember about her being Jen Aniston’s psychic, so: okay, why not, make it again!
ABC — Australian Broadcasting Company, here — recently produced a special and a podcast about long-missing, legally dead retail scion Juanita Nielsen (previously expounded on at length by this very newsletter here, but also the subject of a recent Mirror rundown here). The ABC shows featured a new interview with a guy named John Innes who claimed to have been a fake cellmate to/secret investigator of Eddie Trigg, the man suspect of physically killing Juanita (who, when arrested, called her “an out-and-out Communist”). Turns out John, maybe not so factual! The whole show and two episodes of the podcast have been removed from circulation.
Aussie Home Loans heiress Deborah Symond O’Neil is going to put her $200,000 AUD (~$145,317.00 USD) Dior wedding dress in a big glass case in her house, eventually. K!
Kim Lim, whose father Peter might have made his money in stocks and who herself owns a health company maybe, is engaged. To a mystery man, apparently! He proposed with a lot of flowers, and the Singaporean heiress and everyone congratulating her is like, “phew after ‘one big round,’ engaged” and I have no idea what ‘one big round’ is, but Asia One and I both love saying it. She is divorced, it could be that? As soon as I learn what it means, I’m going to use it all the time.
Lee Jung Jae, one of the big stars of Netflix’s new hot show Squid Game is dating a woman named Lim Se Ryung, a businesswoman whose dad is the chairman of Daesang Group, which is a huge food conglomerate. Themes! Of the show! I haven’t watched but this seems to be the implication of the article! Etc.!
The boyfriend who claimed he killed 22-year-old Anna Reed in a “sex game gone wrong” went to jail because no one fucking believed him. Good, kind of, I guess, I don’t know! Hate prison, hate a system that allows an abusive man to drag the woman he killed through the mud one last time on an international level, hate hate hate this man.
Apparently Elisabeth Shue plays an heiress in the newish Netflix show On the Verge, which I learned from an Irish Tech News review that referred to it’s creator — the co-star of Before Sunrise — as “Julie Delphy.” It went on to theorize that her character misses Ethan Hawke, but was most concerned with the fact that one character “was said to be Irish, but had absolutely zero Irish accent.” Same concern! I ended up watching it and it was… deeply strange!
At, 20/20 notes, a resort where Khloe Kardashian and Winston Churchill stayed. Separately.
As a headline writer who loves puns: oh no, that’s awful.
I also called her Meng when, by the semi-arbitrary house style of this newsletter, I should have called her Wanzhou. Weirdly disrespectful!
Book club??