Anna Delvey and the Case of the Missing Bunnies
Last Monday afternoon, Terry Chao and Jenna Goins were searching under the wood-paneled Endale Arch on the northern side of Prospect Park, working on a tip from a community forum that there was a domesticated bunny loose in the area. They arrived just in time. Prospect Park is no place for an indoor rabbit. “There are hawks and raccoons that have rabies and hundreds of off-leash dogs,” Goins says.
After about 20 minutes of looking, they found a floppy-eared harlequin — bunny-world lingo for calico — hiding behind a tree. “He was super-scared,” she says. They also found evidence that someone had abandoned the pet there: a bowl of water, a box and blanket, a nibbled-on carrot. They named him Parker, after the park.
Their work wasn’t over. Three days later, Chao and Goins were out again on another tip that there was a second bunny on the loose by the same arch. This bunny, a harlequin with perky ears, was a little more bold, dodging their efforts and using the brush to hide out. “We were in the bushes,” Goins says. “I was pulling twigs out of my hair for the rest of the day.” It took them about 40 minutes to catch Moon, whom they named for his round face.
Chao figured something was up. An avid community poster and bunny aficionada living in Crown Heights, she says she only sees posts for abandoned bunnies in Prospect Park a few times per year. Her husband even suggested it might be the same culprit.
Who that culprit was became clearer on Saturday when someone alerted her to a post of a photo shoot by Anna Delvey. As part of her post-prison pivot as an influencer, the socialite fraudster had posted a photo of her in her ankle monitor with two bunnies on a leash at the entrance to the Franklin Street 1 stop in Tribeca. One of the bunnies at her feet was a floppy-eared harlequin. “I was like, ‘That’s a hundred percent Parker.’” In Delvey’s pinned stories on Instagram, there was a bunny that looked just like Moon — as well as a third bunny, gray with pointy ears.
By this point, Chao and Goins had granted custody of Parker and Moon to their friend and Chao’s neighbor, a fellow bunny lover named Jennifer Babcock. She then posted a photo of the rabbit in question on Instagram, bringing their claim that the bunnies were dumped to Delvey’s attention. At first, Delvey was defensive. She claimed in a comment that the person who sourced the bunnies had informed her that the animals were safe. Then she threatened Babcock in a DM that she would contact her employer if she did not take down her post. “At this point, your actions constitute both harassment and libel,” Delvey wrote.
It all came together when Chao saw that Delvey had tagged a hairstylist named Christian Batty in the shoot. Two days before Delvey took pictures with the pets, Batty had reached out to Chao on a bunny forum, scouting her “personal rabbit that I own,” says Chao. For the shoot, she says Batty was in search of a white rabbit, just like her pet Boba. “I was like, ‘Well, my bunny’s not white — he’s kind of a mix of cream and tan,’” she says. Batty offered her $100 to borrow the bunny for the day, but Chao declined. But close-reading the photos, Chao saw that Delvey had posted the same blanket and box they found in Prospect Park. Chao made the proof public in a thread on a Reddit page dedicated to Delvey.
Online backlash for famous people involving potential acts of animal cruelty is swift. And with the evidence and the negative comments piling up, Delvey stated that she had no knowledge of how the animals came to her and put the responsibility on Batty. “I later discovered that, instead of borrowing animals from a legitimate source, he had obtained them via Facebook Marketplace and intended to release them into Prospect Park, a plan of which I had no knowledge,” she wrote in a statement on Monday. “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.”
Over the phone on Monday, Delvey said that the entire shoot was an off-the-cuff idea. Why bunnies? “I don’t know,” she says. “We just randomly came up with the idea.”
Batty did not respond to requests for comment, but came clean in a post on the Facebook page “NYC Bunnies.”
“The truth is, I did abandon them in the park,” he wrote on Sunday. After the shoot, he “panicked” when he realized he would have to take the bunnies back; he claims the woman who he got them from in Yonkers did not respond to his messages about returning them. “At 19, with no experience caring for animals, no pet-friendly housing, and no knowledge of available resources, I felt overwhelmed and made the worst possible choice,” he wrote. “Believing, mistakenly, that there were existing rabbits in that area, I released them there, thinking that was my best option. That belief was wrong, and I regret it deeply.”
The bunny saviors are not letting Delvey, who orchestrated the entire shoot, off so easily. Chao cites several things she says Delvey and company did wrong, from putting them on leashes — “they have very fragile skeletons” — to holding them upside down. “That’s a fear tactic and it trances the bunny,” she says. “Everything screams, ‘I know nothing about rabbits.’ This is for attention. The fact that she’s saying she doesn’t know anything about this is just damage control.”
By Sunday, there were more community posts of a third rabbit on the loose in the area where Batty admitted to dumping the bunnies. Chao and her friends returned to the park, and found, in the same place, the gray, pointy-eared guy from Delvey’s shoot. They named him Joaquin.
On Monday afternoon, the three bunnies were reunited in Babcock’s apartment under a print of a famous 12th-century Japanese illustration of a bunny and a frog hanging out. It turns out it was a family reunion: Parker, 1-and-a-half, is the father to Joaquin and Moon, both 1. Moon did not sit long for his photo, though Joaquin and Parker got close, the father flopping his ear over his son’s face.
Babcock, Chao, and Goins own rabbits, so they are looking for new homes for the three pets. Moon and Joaquin already have fosters, but Parker will be the celebrity guest at an All About Rabbits Rescue event in Manhattan on Sunday. “He is very sweet and playful,” says Babcock. “He loves digging. He loves snuggles.”