Tinder Swindler and Anna Delvey Victims: What You Haven't Heard.

“Tinder Swindler” victim Ayleen Charlotte speaks out for the first time since the record-breaking documentary, revealing shocking new details about the notorious conman and how she was swindled out of her life savings. In another first, Rachel Williams - victim of “the fake German heiress” Anna Delvey discloses her trauma, including death threats and the fallout after a vacation from hell. Don’t miss this exclusive conversation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, fam I'm Jada Pinkett Smith and this is the
Red Table Talk podcast all your favorite episodes from the
Facebook watch show in audio produced by Westbrook Audio and
I Heart Radio. Please don't forget to rate and review
on Apple Podcasts. It's a Red Table Talk exclusive. What
were the first signs something wasn't quite right? She fell

(00:22):
for the Tinder Swindler. Did you ever think, why does
we need money? She was duped by fake German heiress
Anna Delvi. It seems like you did want to believe
that this was happening. Hundreds of millions watched. Now the
stories you haven't heard. The real scam is the emotional abuse.
I just start busting into tears. I was like, I'll

(00:45):
never climb out of this debt. Any of us could
have been played in the same way. She was smart
enough to figure it out and get revenge afterwards. He
got so angry, I give you want or. They were

(01:12):
victimized by two of the most notorious scameras in the world,
the Tinder Swindler and Inventing Anna, and they are here
speaking out for the first time. There's a hot new
trend in the popular world of true crime fraud. These
captivating stories of scheming, betrayal, broken trust, and broken hearts

(01:32):
are everywhere. One of the most talked about, the Tinder Swindler,
dives deep into the twisted web of Simon Levayev, the
handsome and wildly wealthy son of a diamond mogul, or
so he said. Simon would match with women on the
popular dating app, whisked them away on private jets, and
show them his billionaire lifestyle. Little did they know it

(01:55):
was all a sham and paid for by the women
he swindled before them twenty dollars thirty dollars, so I'm
in his estimated depth scanned ten million dollars. One of
his victims, Aileen Charlotte, was a hard working, successful thirty
year old who managed a retail store. She says her
family was not well off. She was frugal and saved

(02:19):
every penny she earned until she met Simon. Wow, Aileen
Charlotte was in love with a Tinder swindler for over
a year. She's at the table for a first interview.
Thank you for sharing your testimony. Thank you so much.
Let's start with why were you drawn to Simon when

(02:39):
we met up for the first time. I really feel
like a connection. This really open conversation and he's like
a chameleon, traditorial chameleon. Yes, absolutely so, he's like literally
adapting to you. So you immediately have the feeling that
you're meeting your soul mate. Absolutely way, and that doesn't

(03:01):
happen often. No, we could talk about everything. We had
so much fun together. We laughed together, and then in
a very short time I fell in love. Yeah. Yeah,
we met each other in London or in Barcelona. We
traveled back and forth because I live in Amsterdam, and
it felt really comfortable and probably it's just super exciting.

(03:24):
I mean, you're living it up. I mean, I mean,
I'm not gonna lie. It sounds great. Barcelona living a highlight. Yeah,
it's a fairy It's honestly a fairy tale kind of feeling.
I mean totally. So, what were the first signs something
wasn't quite right. It was maybe after a year during
our relationship, he also moved in with me, and that

(03:48):
was the moment where he started to ask for money.
It was strange, but he already build up trust in
the time that you were together. Did you ever meet
any of his friends or family, Like, where did he live.
He didn't actually had a home. He traveled everywhere around Europe,

(04:11):
so that's why he was everywhere and nowhere. He pretended
to be the son of Lev Leviev, who's a diamond
mogul from Israel. And he talks about his family all
the time. He was talking about his father, how he was,
what kind of person he was. He even spoke about

(04:32):
his sisters, his brothers. He knew everything about that family.
It was did you everything to yourself? Like I thought?
I thought he was like super rich, like asking for
body right. Yes, absolutely, I had a very standard life
with only one credit card with not much of a maximum.

(04:53):
But he built up this story. After gaining his girlfriend's us,
Simon would pilo more lies. He claimed he was in
a dangerous line of work and convinced a violent group
of his enemies was about to close in on him.
He would urgently demand cash from the women, saying it
was in hiding and using his credit cards would be

(05:15):
way too risky. Aileen drained her savings, then began to
max out her credit cards and applied for loans. The
more she gave him, the more he wanted. Aileen now
believes that at the time, Simon was secretly scamming at
least seventeen are the women while he was dating her. Wow.

(05:36):
When I look at it now, it's crazy, of course,
And and once you're in it too, you start to
create justifications in your mind because you've already established a
level of trust. So we had these photos that Simon
sent you. I'll tell us the story around that. He

(05:57):
said that there was an attack on its life and
his bodyguards saved him but got really hurt, very bad.
And I was so shocked. I was like, oh my god,
they are coming for coming for you, and maybe they
will also come for me. And then I started realized like,

(06:17):
oh my god, this is real. But now I know
the real story behind this was the was the real story.
He got into a fight in a club and someone
broke a bottle on his head and that's it right,
It was just like a regular bar fight. Wow. He
used those pictures for a lot of girls. Did you

(06:40):
have friends or family that questioned you about Simon or
did everybody feel like, oh, he's a great guy. Yeah,
because he sent me so much flowers gifts, and not
everybody knew that I was giving him money, so they
only heard my beautiful story so no one ever saw

(07:02):
those red flags. Yeah, yeah, I feel like the real
scam is the emotional abuse that comes before the real scam.
A lot of gas lighting, a lot of gas lighting.
And also they are love bombing you, love bombing, love bombing.
What do you mean by love bombing? That's a term
that I think Romney should explain it a little bit deeper.

(07:23):
So we have our resident RTT psychologist, Dr Romney. There's
the professional doctor Romany us dry break it down for us.
You are speaking my language, Aileen, Thank you so much
for sharing your story so eloquently. Some people will describe

(07:45):
love bombing like being in a fairy tale. It's an
overwhelming process of seduction. It's big gifts, it's grand gestures,
it's big nights out, it's going on vacation on your
third date. Yeah, okay. It's an indoctrination. It built not
only your love, but it builds your trusty. And he
doesn't give you time to think rationally. They keep on

(08:07):
pushing you and pushing you until you break and say okay,
I will do it, And then they would rather have
the money yesterday then tomorrow. And that's the problem. It's
fast and that means you don't have enough time to
lift your head and see those red flags. The longer
the love bombing lasts, the more likely you are to

(08:28):
get played. And all of that together is the architecture
of an emotionally abusive relationship. Absolutely so, how much money
did he scan off of you? He defrauded me for
over one hundred thousand dollars. Got the money part, it's
not even the worst thing he did to me. Yeah,

(08:48):
it's the emotional part. It's more painful. It's more painful
than the money. How did you discover this Simon was
a fraud? We just spend a day in Prague, okay
together and we had a lot of fun. And he
dropped me off at the airport. I opened up Instagram

(09:11):
and there I saw his face on my feet and
I was like, okay, this is weird. And I saw
this whole article from a Norwegian paper. The bombshell article
exposed Alien's boyfriend as someone who was scamming women all
over Europe and had been for years. There was no
diamond fortune, there was no prince Charming, there was no

(09:31):
famous family. His real name was Shimone yahudah Hyad and
Israeli con man with a decades long criminal record. Aleen
was stunned to see him in photos with other victims,
all who, just like Aleen, claimed he seduced them with
private jets and expensive dinners, then tricked them into handing
over large sums of money. Wow, and I just start

(09:58):
busting into tears and oh my god, he's not real,
He's a fraud. I felt so in shock, and I
started reading it over and over again. And because there
were so many similarities in that article, I immediately knew
that it was true. The moment I read the article,
that's the moment I woke up right. It felt like

(10:20):
I was jumping out of a plane without any parachute,
in some kind of free fall. You have absolutely no
idea what will my future ever look like? So I
wish that flight would never end because I knew I
had to face reality the moment you land and your
phone start ringing again. So did you confront Simon? I

(10:44):
just sent the article and he said, it's my enemies.
They paid those girls to create this article. He kept
on lying, lying, lying, would never say sorry or yes,
I did it. I knew I wasn't going to get
that out of him at it you were smart enough
to figure it out and get revenge. So how did
you end up doing that? I started going to the

(11:06):
police and they were so in shock, and they said, well,
we need to take time to process everything. And I
was still in contact with him. I still kept in
like on a leash because I didn't know what to
do exactly. I knew if I was getting any money
from him, it wouldn't come from him, it would have

(11:28):
come from other woman. And that's when I came up
with the plan. Yes, what was because I work in
the fashion industry and I knew all the clothes he
was wearing, and that was the only thing that was
real on him, his clothes. And that's when I realized, like, Okay,

(11:51):
if maybe I can get my hands on those items,
I can't sell them, and I'm going to keep the
money because I am drowning. Right. He was hiding in
Prague because the article came out and he didn't want
anybody to know where he was. But because he really
trusted me, I said, Okay, I'm going to fly to

(12:12):
you and I'm going to get two three suitcases. Just
let me see what you have and then I can
sell them and to give him the money. Yeah, what
you get Gucci for such a told Checkabanna Christian Lubuta.
Maybe I think tempers his glasses a golden iPhone. I

(12:35):
think I could like run a store with everything I had.
I left him with one trouser, two T shirts and
the one pair of underwear and a pair of shoes.
This is what I think. I think that's brilliant. It
is brilliant. Afterwards, he got so angry that I didn't

(12:56):
send him money, but I still had his stuff and
he needed to up so many things. He left me
with nothing. I still don't understand why he keeps on
pushing me, because he knew I had nothing, and he
knew that I was in so much debts, but still
it wasn't enough for him. That's what you narcissists. That's

(13:18):
more than a narcissist. I think that's a predator. But
I'm thinking to myself, is every narcissist a predator? Will
have Dr Romney come back on and tell us exactly.
Here's the best way I can put it for you.
All predators are narcissistic, but not all narcissists are predators. Okay,
that's what I was thinking. Yeah, right, Okay, so there

(13:39):
you go. You aren't going right there, and I'm like
Dr Willow. So Simon reached out to you after he
knew he was busted. We have some voice memos. He
would you have ever seen your family? You will ever

(14:06):
play with me? I give you? Then he sounds desperate,
sounds really desperate. Yes, So what we're hearing there is
that loss of control. When narcissistic people feel that they're
going to be caught, things escalate, They get agitated, they

(14:27):
get aggressive with their language, and there's even this sense
of menace. I'm gonna get you, I'm going to punish you,
I'm gonna get your family. They may not actually do
the thing they threatened to do, but they put it
out there. They get a really profound sense of power
and control just by scaring someone, and most of the
time it works. Yeah. Wow, you live in alone, he

(14:48):
knows where you live. All that kind of stuff. It's
ter terrifying. So kudos to you. Yeah. Yeah, I had
to be devastatingly heartbreaking to like have to sit and
watch this whole thing turned the way that it did.
It took me almost one and a half year to

(15:08):
build myself up again. You have so many emotions because
you lost the love of your life, you lost all
of your money, You're in big problems with banks when
when loans you can't sit in the heartbreak because there's
too many other things. It's probably very difficult to like

(15:36):
rebuild a trust in yourself again to know, like, oh, snap,
is this person like being really like to kind of
figure out what's sincere and what's not. You know, anytime
someone has been played or preyed upon by somebody whom
they believed they loved, it really creates a lack of
trust in one's self. Rebuilding that trust starts with building

(15:59):
upon the exist, staining good relationships a person has, and
staying safe in that harbor for a while. I tell
every survivor of any emotionally abusive relationship, while it was
a lesson, you didn't want to get. This relationship was
one heck of a teacher. Yeah, Like when you are
at school, first you will get the lessons and after

(16:21):
that you get the exam. But in real life, you
get the exam first, and then when you get get
the lesson. Wow, so real talk. To this day, Aileen
remains insignificant dead and has experienced serious financial fallout. The

(16:44):
Tinder Swindler is now netflix most watch documentary ever. While
Simon is the alleged villain, many turned the tables on
a Leen, calling her a gold digger and questioning her judgment.
As for Simon, he served just five months of a
fifteen month prison sentence for previous offenses. Authorities declined to

(17:06):
charge him for swindling a Lean or the other women,
claiming that from a legal standpoint, he had committed no crime,
but his troubles are hardly behind him. The real family
behind the Diamond Empire has filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit,
and he's wanted in Spain for reportedly using a fake
I d during a traffic incident. Simon has been banned

(17:29):
from Tinder, but remains active on social media and claims
to be pursuing a career in Hollywood. Wow Wow, So
Anna Delvey, another impostor, is now one of the most
famous scammers in the world. Inventing Anna as the dramatized
story of real life fraudster Anna Sorkin, who used the

(17:51):
fake name Anna delve imposed as a German heiress to
infiltrate the leite social circles, scamming banks, and hoped hells
out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of those
cons was Rachel Williams, an up and coming photo editor
of Vanity Fair who worked hard for her modest income. Rachel,
a supporter of the arts, was impressed with Anna's big

(18:14):
plan to transform a historic building in New York City
into an exclusive membership only club with rotating art exhibits,
pop up shops, and fine dining. Thy, Rachel, thank you
for coming. Hey, you want to tell us about your
experiences with Anna? Sure? Yeah. I met Anna in two
thousand sixteen, and we all believe she was from Germany

(18:36):
and working towards the creation of what she referred to
as an art foundation. And at first it wasn't a
very deep friendship. It was a fun friendship. But there's
obviously escalated in a very different way. Didn't she ever
tell you anything about her her life? She could be
sort of hard to read, and she was definitely one
of a kind. I ended up creating more empathy for
her because everything had a backstory. I don't know how

(18:59):
much of it it's true, obviously, So I would ask
do you talk to your parents much? And she would
have some explanation about them having a business arrangement more
than like a close relationship where I'd ask her about
past friendships and she would have an explanation as for
why they went very close anymore. So, Yeah, exploitable exactly,
And it created a what I now see as an

(19:21):
artificial feeling of closeness because I felt like, Oh, she's
confiding in me, like she doesn't have anybody else, And
was that the thing that you were drawn to? Like
right exactly? I think it was the combination of that
vulnerability coupled with the grand neuriosity of what it was
that she was trying to do. The Netflix series shows

(19:42):
Anna enjoying a glamorous life, living in hotels, partying and
exclusive nightclubs, and visiting luxury spas. As far as Rachel knew,
I want to be social LIGHTE never had an issue
paying her bills. Rachel thought she and Anna were best
friends until a dream vacation in Morocco turned into a
night damn tell us about this vacation started out as

(20:05):
she needed to take a vacation to reset her her visa,
and then she wanted to go somewhere warm, and she
was like, what about Marrakesh, and I was like, oh,
I've never been there, like sure, and if it's snow walled,
then she's like, here's law Mommonia. And I was like okay,
like this is where it's gone from reasonable to And
then she just forwards me an email, having already booked

(20:25):
the villa, and she says it's done, like I'm gonna
go here. Who else should we invite? So you get
to Morocco and what happens, Well, at first it's sparkly
and flashy and incredible, and it's the most amazing hotel,
very scene, and everything seems to be fine. But then
over the course of the week, it becomes clear that
Anna's having trouble with her credit cards not working anywhere.

(20:49):
I sort of leapt to try and help. I was like, oh,
you know, like she already only some money from leaving
New York when she accidentally checked her wallet in her bag.
So it started out adding to that tab. Now she
wanted to buy some dresses, so that one in my card.
She wanted to get dinner, that one in my card.
But then when it came to the hotel itself, she

(21:10):
had been pulled aside by managers several times, and then
we woke up on there are these two managers in
the villa and they were not going to leave without
a functioning card on file. I think the Netflix show
has it sort of like this very dramatic confrontation with
like the threat of violence we have received, No, just
give them something, you mustn't don't have anything my bank

(21:31):
on joke business with a Jersey country. Then Anna like
very like worked up, but like, what was actually more
alarming was that in real life Anna was cool as
a cucumber. She didn't seem to register the seriousness the risk.
Normal people have alarmed balls going off when you're being

(21:52):
told you can't leave somewhere, especially in a foreign country. Yeah, exactly,
So I think that actually made me more stressed out.
She was like, I don't know why you guys are
making a deal of this, like the wires on the way.
I've taken care of it. Why are you being so dramatic?
You know, it's just such a so crazy Dr Romeny,
Dr Romeny, can you break it home down? For absolutely

(22:17):
what Rachel is dealing with here, that is much more
consistent with a pattern of psychopathy. So there's an interesting
comparison here. If you look at what Rachel went through
and that calm, cool response that Anna was having. The
psychopathic pattern is very calm, almost unsettlingly, So given all

(22:38):
that's going on, contrast that to what a Lean was
witnessing that really ramped up, escalated, agitated response. The narcissistic
pattern gets so much more agitated when the narcissists is
not getting their way. But what both stories had was
sort of this intensity in the sense of when it
had to happen, it happens quickly, and when things happened, asked,

(23:00):
we missed the red flags? Right. It doesn't always feel
like it's premeditative. She knew she wasn't going to pay
for it, but I don't know if she knew then
who was. But it's like they're always reacting as to
like what next, how can I further my agenda and
keep moving forward? And everyone else becomes collateral damage. Oh

(23:21):
so my eye was asked to put my card down
as a temporary hold because allegedly her wire was going
to arrive either that day or the next day. I
was leaving for a work trip, and when I landed,
I got a text to man it. Rachel says. The
text made it clear that Anna intended to temporarily charge
the full hotel bill to her account. Rachel texted back,

(23:41):
I don't know if the whole bill will go through,
just hoping we can get the wire, etcetera sort of
today because I'm nervous about my cards not working for
the weekend. Sorry to be a bother. The full amount
was over sixty two thousand dollars, more money than Rachel
made in a year. Wow, looking back, how could a

(24:04):
trip have cost cost sixty dollars over the course of
a week. Was there an assumption that she was putting
the bill for all of this? So, not initially because
I wouldn't have thought that, but something that Anna did routinely.
She'd always tried to up the Auntie. She escalated it
to I'm going to book this seven thousand dollar per
night villa. It became yes, she was covering that absolutely.

(24:28):
Once the sixty was charged to your card. Did you
have a moment of like, oh my god, like I
need to call her, what's going on now? I didn't
know the cost of the vacation and to that point too,
so I was kind of torn between gratitude and panic
and like confusion. It was kind of like, well, this
is way too big of a balance for her not

(24:50):
to be fixing it immediately she knows she's put me
in an incredibly precarious position, like this is wild, and
like she's going to fix it like tomorrow. Total, first,
that's not what happened. I started depending. Also, I didn't
know that my credit cards could support that kind of
a debt, so initially it just really left me sort
of spinning. Here's one of the things ambiguity leaves so

(25:13):
much room for chaos. It's like, when you are ambiguous
about what is happening, it's like, oh, I got this,
you know. It's like, well, what exactly of this do
you have? She's a friend, so there's a level of
trust there already. But if you're relying on somebody, yeah,
I'm really silent because I hear so many similarities. It's

(25:38):
crazy in a way that they all have a little
bit of the same character, how they how they move,
what they say, how to get everything. I feel when
you're in a relationship, you like brush it off. She
wouldn't do that. She I'm like, who would you that
to her friend? Totally, Anna put you in touch with

(25:58):
her accountant Bettina Wagner, as Rachel frantically waited to get
her money back. She was copied on an email from
Anna to her accountant. She wrote, Bettina, has this been finalized?
Please follow through on the wire transfer that's been overdue
almost two weeks now. Rachel's a personal friend and was
kind enough to use her credit card to cover my expenses.

(26:21):
Five days went by and Rachel still didn't receive payment.
What she didn't know at the time, Bettina was not
even a real person. Oh so Bettina is not even
a real person. So she was emailing herself well with
me and basically with me and copy but absolutely yeah, yes, yeah, wow,
you know she was returning to be her accountant. Yeah.

(26:43):
I just kept waiting for her to understand the magnitude
of the situation she had created, and they kept calling
out for like the good in her to recognize that
this wasn't okay. I thought that she was having a
fallout with her family. I thought she was having a
mental health crisis. I kept trying to buy her time.
I finally ended up going to the police after months

(27:03):
of stress, like just not sleeping, having panic attacks. Really
that was a big struggle. Here was a text between
you and Anna after she promised the money was coming,
and it says it will be there by Monday. If not,
I will send another one from a different account. It's
not a big deal, and you say it's a huge
deal to me. My job and finances are on the line.

(27:25):
I've been waking up at four am in a panic
and I understand that, Yeah, it's because every day would
be filled with promises and then they wouldn't come to
fruition that evening, so I would be up late. You know,
panic attacks just like really breakdowns of I'll never climb
out of this debt. It was just a huge life

(27:46):
step back. I didn't think I would be able to overcome.
And it seems like you did want to believe that
this was happening to you. Didn't want to believe that
she was doing this to you. I mean still wanted
to believe the goodness in her. Absolutely. I mean it
took a long time. That was a hard pill to swallow.
It's one thing to have someone steal money, but then

(28:07):
it's another thing to feel like someone you cared about
betrayed you so deeply, and it's so nonchalant about it.
When it finally started to hit you of what this
circumstance was really about. How did it affect you emotionally?
It was very destabilizing and disorienting. But beyond that, the

(28:27):
recognition that there could be people out there who lack
the ability to you have to care like pity is
what I think certain predators like this. In April of
twenty nineteen, and his laws finally caught up to her.
She was convicted of eight charges, including grand larceny, but

(28:50):
was found not guilty of stealing from Rachel. Anna served
less than four years in prison before she was released.
She has appeared on pod cast and reportedly signed a
deal to shoot a new reality series, but those plans
are all on hold as Anna is now in custody
facing deportation to Germany. As for Rachel, while some people

(29:12):
were sympathetic to what she went through, others were vicious. However,
American Express eventually agreed that Rachel was the victim of
fraud and forgave a sixty two dollar dead thank you.
Oh my goodness, four years seems like a very small
amount of years. Aileen and Rachel, thank you so much

(29:35):
for sharing your stories so vulnerably and so eloquently. These
stories played out in the media in such a big way.
It's so easy to say I wouldn't have fallen for that.
I can say confidently any of us would have fallen
for this. And we need to stop shaming the survivors

(29:57):
and recognize that not only would any of us be vulnerable,
every time we judge them, we further embolden the perpetrators
who engage in these scams. Yeah, women in this type
of situations feel so ashamed. They build up like this
big wall in front of them. But the moment you

(30:18):
start sharing, you also start healing a little bit. And
when you start opening up, it makes it so much
easier to process everything. Absolutely, I'm glad you shared that
because I feel like you're right. I feel like that
shame makes you disconnect in a way, and then you
get isolated, and then there's a whole lot of the problems. Yes,

(30:40):
and it maybe even get worse. What happened in both
of your stories is that your empathy was weaponized in
any kind of emotionally abusive relationship or predatory relationship, or
any kind of scamming relations and hip. The one thing

(31:01):
that's probably the healthiest part of us, our empathy can
actually be quite dangerous. Scammers, predators, narcissists. They all play
on people's empathy. The empathy becomes for them a sort
of weakness that they can exploit, that they can take
advantage of. I always tell people catch your justifications and

(31:26):
that the four most dangerous words in the English language
are benefit of the doubt. Yeah. Yeah, Dr Romney, you
always just break it on down in a way that
just makes it make so much sense. We needed that.

(31:49):
I learned so much today. Thank you. I think it's
going to help a lot of people. And I just
think for your courage and your testimony, thank you, Thank
you for having us. Who was the first person you
were able to be honest with about this. My mom,

(32:10):
it's always mom, always mom. Your mom goes baby, I understand,
It's okay. Kudos Tom, It's always her mom. To join
the Red Table Talk family and become a part of
the conversation, follow us at facebook dot com slash red
table Talk. Thanks for listening to this episode of Red

(32:31):
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