A Riad of One’s Own

Marrakesh · La Mamounia · 2017 · Bonus

This bonus episode involves financial exploitation and coercion. No violence.

Marrakesh, 2017. A fake German heiress flies three people to Morocco for a holiday she says she is paying for, and puts them in a private villa at La Mamounia at roughly seven thousand dollars a night. Then her cards start to decline.

By the end of the weekend her friend, a magazine photo editor, is carrying about sixty-two thousand dollars on her own card and her employer’s corporate American Express. Two years later that weekend was the most vivid testimony at Anna Sorokin’s trial in Manhattan, and the one count the jury acquitted her on. How did one weekend cost so much? Why did the friend keep paying? And why was no one ever convicted for what happened in Marrakesh?

In this bonus episode of Blood & Mint Tea: True Crime from Morocco, we follow Anna Delvey’s La Mamounia con from the villa to the Majorelle Gardens to a courtroom in New York.

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