A Riad of One’s Own

Marrakesh · La Mamounia · 2017 · Bonus

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

In May 2017 a fake German heiress flew three people to Marrakesh for a holiday she said she was paying for, and put them in a private villa at La Mamounia at roughly seven thousand dollars a night.

Her cards declined, and declined again. Partway through the stay the hotel wanted a card on file, and the friend who had come along — a magazine photo editor — handed over her own, and then her employer’s corporate American Express. By the end of the weekend she was carrying about sixty-two thousand dollars: the villa, the flights, the meals, and a private tour of the Majorelle Gardens that her host walked away from, leaving her to settle the bill on the spot.

Two years later that weekend was the most vivid testimony at Anna Sorokin’s trial in Manhattan — and the count the jury acquitted her on. She went to prison for four to twelve years for everything else she did in New York. Nobody was ever convicted of anything that happened in Marrakesh.