When Andrea Bartzen moved to New York in the late 1990s, it may have looked like she was living out a season of HBO’s then-new Sex and the City. She was a single 33-year-old from Ohio, and within a few years, she had moved in with a boyfriend who worked in finance, briefly sharing an apartment near — if not quite in — the West Village. She spoke of spending a summer hanging out with Gary Lutnick, the brother of Howard Lutnick (who is now Commerce secretary in the Trump administration), and claimed to work in pharmaceutical advertising at houses like Publicis and McCann. By the mid-2010s, she looked the part of a corporate-ad girlie of the era: bubbly with a perennial blond dye job and a closet full of short work dresses. She would commute from the office to drinks on the Upper East Side or the occasional socialite-studded charity benefit. She said she went to MIT and worked in biotech. “She was on top of the world,” said an acquaintance who met Bartzen at one of those uptown events and has continued to see her at parties over the years. “Buying people drinks and cigars and being very generous, always had groups of people around, and very smiley and happy.”

What her party friends didn’t know was that Bartzen couldn’t keep a job and couldn’t afford to be picking up the tab. By 2014, Bartzen was so desperate for money that she took a housekeeping job from Anna Rothschild, a celebrity publicist she’d met through a mutual friend. Rothschild paid Bartzen about $20 an hour to unpack boxes and tidy up her new apartment. “Ever since the day that I met her, she was broke,” said Rothschild.

Rothschild lost touch with Bartzen soon after, other than spotting her occasionally at a party. But around 2019, Bartzen — who by then owed the State of New York nearly $20,000 in unpaid income taxes — came to Rothschild for help. “She begged me,” said Rothschild. “She was legitimately homeless — she had no money, no job, and no place to live.” Rothschild had an empty apartment in London, located on Charles Street in Mayfair, that she was trying to sell. She told Bartzen she could stay there for free so long as she cleared out for showings. 

A few weeks later, Rothschild received a call from her real-estate agent: “Your friend is in your sitting room with her legs open while I’m trying to show the flat.” Bartzen, according to what the Realtor told Rothschild, was not wearing any underwear. “She didn’t want it to sell,” Rothschild said. Four months later, Bartzen was still in the apartment. Finally, Rothschild returned to London and personally kicked her out. “I was fuming when I came back,” said Rothschild. “The place was filthy. Everything was just trashed.” She told Bartzen she had to go. “I would have thrown her stuff out the window,” said Rothschild.

By then, Rothschild had begun to question Bartzen’s story. She asked Bartzen if she’d really graduated from MIT; Bartzen then claimed she’d just taken a class there. “She said she’s like 20 years younger than she is,” said Rothschild. (Bartzen is 59, but on Facebook, she had listed a birth date in 1980, which would make her 45.) “Everything that I have found that has come out of her mouth has been totally fabricated.”

Rothschild cut ties with Bartzen and was surprised to see that, despite the lack of a home or a car, Bartzen soon popped back up in the Hamptons. By the summer of 2021, she was a regular at yacht and cocktail parties, typically wearing short, body-hugging dresses with skin-revealing cutouts.

As Hamptons summer ended, Bartzen followed the leisure-class migration to Florida. In February 2022, a woman who worked as a Pilates instructor for wealthy clients agreed to rent a studio apartment in the Roney Palace in Miami Beach from Bartzen, who told her she was the owner. Things quickly got weird. Bartzen kept dropping by unexpectedly. One night, the Pilates instructor came home to find Bartzen asleep in the other bed, a candle burning in the closet. “Don’t blow it out. I’m doing a spell,” Bartzen told her. The next morning, she went down to the management office to ask why her landlord seemed determined to be her roommate. “She?” the manager said, confused by the pronoun. The owner was an Italian man named Andrea whose surname also started with B. Bartzen, the tenant learned, had briefly sublet the apartment in the past and had apparently exploited her knowledge of the door code and the similarity of her name to impersonate the owner.

The real owner was livid. “Andrea, this is an additional crime to the already long list you have already committed,” he wrote to Bartzen after learning she’d been renting out the unit. “We will move full force with the law against you.” The Pilates instructor was also considering her legal options. In early March, she went to court to take out a restraining order against Bartzen, but it was never served. “It was hard to find her because she didn’t really have a home,” she said. “I call her ‘the poor man’s Anna Delvey.’”

Delvey, who posed as a German heiress to fool New York’s elite, had become a household name among many of the people Bartzen was trying to hang out with. They were on high alert to watch out for Delvey’s type. Yet Bartzen, who was older, and decidedly less cool, slipped past their defenses.

Bartzen, however, was developing a reputation. Back in New York after Miami, she seemed to show up everywhere — charity galas, restaurants, designer-boutique events — without an invitation. Often, she would come in late, after the organizers had stopped checking people in, or wait outside until she saw someone she knew. Tickets for these events can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Bartzen rarely paid her way, according to many event organizers, publicists, and staff I spoke with. “She’s been around for years. She’s like a major party crasher in the Hamptons,” said a society-party regular who has seen Bartzen at events for at least a decade. But these are genteel affairs, where, once you are in the room, no one is going to second-guess your presence. More often than not, even event hosts who knew what she was doing let her stay. “She turns on this syrupy kind of nice,” said a person who has interacted with her over the years. “You can’t really be nasty to her.” The more Bartzen showed up, the more she seemed to belong.

“She’s one of those ladies that plans out a spreadsheet — like, she has to be at an event at 9, 11, 1, 2, 3,” said the acquaintance, who also spent time with Bartzen in Palm Beach. “Almost like it was air to breathe.” Sometimes Bartzen was inexplicably at the Colony, the trendy, and famously pink, Palm Beach hotel. “She basically came to my table and ate the rest of my lunch I hadn’t finished,” said a person who ran into her there. In July 2024, Rothschild spotted Bartzen pacing in front of the VIP entrance to the annual Polo Hamptons. Then suddenly she was inside. “She was just walking around by herself,” said Rothschild. “Nobody goes to polo by themselves.”

Not every host turned a blind eye to her party crashing. That summer, she was kicked out of at least two Hamptons galas: an animal-charity fundraiser she snuck into and a cancer benefit to which she pretended to have bought a ticket. Later that summer, Bartzen attempted to sit down at real-estate executive Dottie Herman’s table at a private dinner at Le Bilboquet in Sag Harbor, leading to a tense standoff with Herman until Bartzen finally agreed to leave.

It didn’t seem to matter to Bartzen whether she was invited or not. Once inside, she would make the rounds, posing for party photographs with the most noteworthy people there. “The only reason that Andrea Bartzen is in those pictures is because she jumped into them,” said the Hamptons society-party regular. By the time Bartzen set about planning the first big event of her own that summer, which she called the Global Passion Project, it looked like she already knew everyone who mattered. That perception was important as Bartzen targeted her new audience: the immensely lucrative — if often naïve and opaque — world of family offices.

On the society circuit, family-office events are their own subgenre of party. Family offices are essentially private wealth-management firms where the rich run their personal fortunes — something that becomes a practical option when a family’s assets reach the scale of a small hedge fund. Generally, family offices are considered legitimate when they manage upwards of $100 million.

In the Hamptons, the family-office circuit features attendees ranging from your average self-made .01 percenter (tech, finance, and so on) to the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of someone who built a fortune in the past. These are “next gens,” and among their number are many self-proclaimed socialites, influencers, heirs, and heiresses. But it’s a murky world. When you talk to someone who calls herself an heiress, it will often be impossible to figure out (via the media or public records or family obituaries) who their rich relative is or how they........

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