Fake heiress and convicted fraudster Anna Delvey is continuing to give back to society in her signature fashion: deficiently. Still living in NYC and sporting an ankle monitor, Anna had a “photo shoot” this week in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park (for a magazine? No, just for her Insta). Accompanying Anna in the notably unexceptional photos are three rabbits, each one affixed with a leash around the neck. The rabbits were procured by Christian Batty, the hairstylist whom Anna brought in for the shoot. Turns out Batty had picked up the rabbits from someone in the “NYC Bunnies” Facebook group looking to surrender them. Then when the shoot was over and Batty realized that the three domestic rabbits were still his responsibility, he did the cruel and unthinkable and abandoned them in the park. While Batty and Delvey and the photographer have all been playing the blame game, three women hopped to work to safely rescue all three Oryctolagus cuniculus.
Hare heroes: Terry Chao, Jennifer Babcock and Jenna Goins spoke with PEOPLE about what became a days-long effort to track down and safely capture the three domestic rabbits. …Chao, a vegan blogger, says that she first learned about one of the rabbits through a post in her neighborhood Facebook group, even before she realized it was one of the same animals featured in Delvey’s shoot. “We need to save this rabbit,” she recalls thinking at the time. She escalated the call in other online groups, where Goins responded, offering up her own wild-rabbit catching expertise and an X-pen, a type of enclosure for rabbits. A brown rabbit, which Chao later named Parker, was rescued in Prospect Park.
Rescuing the other rabbits: Chao caught word of a second rabbit — a harlequin-coated one — a few days later. “The bunny was a little hard to catch. He ran all the way up to the top of the Endale Arch,” she says. “And we were a little concerned that he might jump off and hurt himself.” However, with help from Jenna and her roommate Carolyn, they managed to corral the bunny, renaming him Moon. … The third rabbit, Joaquin, proved the hardest to find, as the group hadn’t been aware he was missing until they saw Delvey’s Instagram post. Chao says she found the same brand-new rabbit carrier from Delvey’s Instagram Stories in Prospect Park.
They were obviously domestic: Babcock, a rabbit owner herself, explained how they could tell the animals were domestic and needed rescuing in the first place. “You’ll never see a wild lop-eared rabbit. That is a recessive gene. So it was really obvious, for instance, that Parker, despite being brown, that he was a domestic.” …“I think a lot of people, for one, don’t realize that bunnies exclusively need to be living indoors,” [Goins] explains. “They’re not meant to be outside and they’re not equipped to handle the environment the way wild rabbits are.”
Anna’s lame response: Delvey had also previously taken to social media to share her side of the story, sharing a statement to her Instagram Stories about the situation, and recently shared a screenshot showing that she had made a $1,000 donation to All About Rabbits Rescue in New York. “As talent, it’s not my job to source or return animals, but as an animal lover, I can promise I will never work with them again without knowing exactly where they came from and how they’re getting home,” Delvey wrote. “I do not eat meat, and I had no involvement in the acquisition, transport, or return of these animals. I would never condone these actions.”
“As talent, it’s not my job to source or return animals…” TALENT??? This wasn’t like Anna Wintour contracting Delvey for a profile in Vogue; this is something Delvey did for her own Instagram!! And what would Delvey’s actual “talent” even be, causing chaos and rage in her wake? Sit down, shut up, and stare at your ankle monitor for a while, Anna. And oh, what a giver, the scammer who conned hundreds of thousands of dollars from people donated $1,000 for the rabbits. [insert Nancy Pelosi slow clap here] If you really want to barf, Anna’s full rebuttal is many slides. The first page is her paltry attempt at apologizing, but by the next page she’s already back to playing the victim, saying “I am deeply alarmed by the death threats and hundreds of vile, harassing messages flooding my social media,” before she goes on point the finger heavily to the photographer. I think it’s safe to say that what Anna is taking away from this inhumane, entirely preventable snafu is, “nothing.”