On the attempted intervention with Anna back in New York:
Once all of the women were back in New York, and Duke understood that Sorokin owed Williams $62,000 from the La Mamounia stay, Duke tried to stop the madness.
“I said to Rachel, ‘We’ve got to do an intervention. We’ve gotta face her. She’s got to tell the truth to both of us,’” recalls Duke. “She was playing me and she was playing Rachel. Rachel had gone to the police, and the police told her that there was nothing they could do.”
Duke says that Williams met her ahead of time so that they could walk into the restaurant together.
“She was like, ‘I’m so nervous.’ And she was crying. I said, ‘Enough. Stand in your power. Be a bad bitch. Did you do anything wrong?’ She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, then don’t act like it.’”
When both women faced Sorokin, Duke says that the con artist tried to act as though the Morocco debacle never happened, greeting them brightly. Says Duke, “This bitch was bold.”
At the table, Duke says that Williams dissolved into tears. “It could have been because she felt used. I get it. But she should have been a little bit tougher,” says Duke. “So I had to be the tough guy.”
Duke recalls Sorokin responding, “Why are you being so dramatic?” Says Duke, “I was like, ‘Shut the fuck up. This is bullshit.’ I just couldn’t take it anymore…. I said to her, ‘This is wrong and this is bad energy. You have the opportunity to do the right thing.’ She was like, ‘Look at what they’re saying about me in the paper, that I’m some kind of fake heiress.’ I was like, ‘Because you are!’”
Duke also brought a client to the intervention, which ended up being a disaster in itself.
“By the time I got there, [my client] had ordered rosé for [the table]. You know how some people have a couple glasses and they become a whole other person?… She was just a hot mess. She was behind Anna, pantomiming, ‘She’s a fucking bitch. She’s lying!’ Then on my other side, Rachel is crying. And Anna’s like, ‘What is this? What are you talking about?’”
“I went off and used language I would never use. I said, ‘Forget about my money. Let’s get Rachel hers. She has no money. She’s going to mess up with her job.’ Anna just said, ‘Well, look what they’re saying about me?’” Says Duke, “That’s someone who’s sick.”
On Anna interrupting her date:
Like the Netflix show depicts, Sorokin did really interrupt a hot date of Duke’s.
“I had broken up with a guy, and I hadn’t slept with a guy for many years. And I was back on the scene and meeting new people,” says Duke. When Sorokin showed up at Duke’s apartment, as inconvenient as it was, Duke could see that her client was in a legitimately bad place.
“She was beat down and said, ‘I’m afraid of what I’m gonna do to myself. I don’t know what to do. Where am I going to go?’” recalls Duke. “It was real. It was raw. This bitch was dirty. She had on the same outfit [from the day before]. Something wasn’t right. I said to her, ‘Why don’t you just go home? Let’s regroup tomorrow. We’ll figure it out.’”