Convicted scammer Anna Sorokin — perhaps better known by the pseudonym Anna Delvey, when she posed as a fake German heiress — released a country song on Friday while under house arrest.
The song, "What the Hell," is a collaboration between Sorokin, TikTok songwriter Brooke Butler and the band Audio Chauteu.
Representatives for Sorokin did not immediately respond to NBC News' request for comment.
Jared Gutstadt, the CEO of AudioUP who co-wrote the song with Butler and country songwriter Scarlett Burke, said Sorokin was essentially "the curator" of the single.
Gutstadt said that similar to the way he worked with other artists such as DJ Khaled, he sent demos for Sorokin to listen to and landed on a song that she became "the brand" for. Her voice is heard at the top of the song, where she says "My name is Anna Delvey."
"Songs are songs, I've written lots of them," Gustadt said. "But without a sort of brand where people could latch on to, you're competing with hundreds of millions of new songs coming out every year on Spotify."
Gustadt said the new song is set to get radio airplay, in large part because of Sorokin's fame — or infamy. "Typically you have to work really, really hard at radio to get on there. ... I think her name captures some people's imagination and attention."
The song will essentially serve as a theme for her podcast, “The Anna Delvey Show,” which launched in June. It's spearheaded by producer Sean Glass and distributed on AudioUp.
"This is the first time that people are hearing from her directly, allowing her to actually have a voice,” Glass said.
Sorokin's story was dramatized on the Netflix limited series "Inventing Anna," detailing her scheme to pretend to be a wealthy heiress and make her way into New York’s elite circles.
She spent more than three years in prison for defrauding and attempting to defraud banks and hotels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sorokin was released in October after posting bond and is currently under house arrest in New York City while facing deportation proceedings.
The fact that a convicted scammer like Sorokin can release a podcast to share her narrative raises complicated ethical questions, said Adam Golub, a professor at California State University, Fullerton, whose research includes the connection between true crime and popular culture.
“This is of a piece of this larger multimedia environment in which we live which affords criminals the opportunity to potentially (operate) their own PR campaign and get their story out there in a way that we’ve never seen before," Golub said.
"This was impossible years ago,” Golub said. “We have to ask ourselves, what are the ethics involved when we (allow) criminals to have a voice outside of the criminal justice system? We have to ask ourselves, what do we want to hear? Why are we interested in the first place?”
