The strange double-lives of Corallee Collins-Annan

This week, Corallee Collins-Annan was staying in a palatial upstate New York lake house, and jet-skiing on Lake Chautauqua, a lifestyle that would fit a hardworking ex-pat lawyer working for a Boston legal firm on serious criminal matters.

But back in New Zealand, former friends and classmates at AUT’s law school were watching her TikTok videos in amazement. “She’s living her best life in America,” said one.

They tell a different story to her carefully-curated social media presence. There’s the question of money missing from the University mooting club’s accounts. Alleged debts to fellow students, and unpaid rent; a loan to a former boyfriend never repaid.

There’s the other questionable claims: that she was a longstanding confidante of several high-flying King’s Counsels, had appeared in several cases despite only being a law student, and that Penguin had commissioned an autobiography and Netflix a documentary about her remarkable rise from a traumatic upbringing, as the daughter of a Mongrel Mob drug dealer, to a legal superstar.

And there’s the fact that Collins-Annan hasn’t actually completed a law degree, despite enrolling at three different universities.

“Depending on your age, this is either a Walter Mitty investigation, or an Inventing Anna story from Netflix,” says Associate Professor Khylee Quince, the dean of the AUT law school. “She really is a fantasist, is how I would sum it up.”

Collins-Annan herself would actually agree: after some back and forth, she admits to almost all of it, saying: “I’ve done some pretty shitty things, but I am not a bad person.”

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Anna Delvey, the confidence trickster subject of the Inventing Anna documentary, is a name referenced by almost everyone Stuff spoke to for this story.

Quince was shocked to read a New Zealand Herald story a fortnight ago lauding Collins-Annan as a high-flier who was completing her degree at the university remotely.

In fact, Collins-Annan had been formally removed from her degree for failing to complete work.

Quince asked the newspaper to remove the story, which it did, posting a correction that elements of the story were false.

Quince had two weeks earlier sent Collins-Annan a letter of demand over money missing (between $4,000 and $10,000, depending on who’s talking) from the accounts of the student mooting society, of which Collins-Annan was president in 2022. “Rather than run and hide, she has doubled down,” said Quince.

The story upset several former classmates of Collins-Annan, who all wanted to remain anonymous for fear of damaging their fledgling legal careers.

One who described themselves as formerly a good friend, said: “I am utterly shocked and disgusted at the lies in it.”

What isn’t in dispute is Collins-Annan’s troubled upbringing in Hawkes Bay, where her mother dealt drugs for the Mongrel Mob and newspaper reports detailed a police raid on the family home.

She originally enrolled at Auckland University, then transferred to AUT in 2019. She completed her first year, and became heavily involved in university mooting competitions, as well as, she told fellow students, clerking for various prominent lawyers.

Quince said Collins-Annan completed one year’s work, and then did little for the following two years. “She made slow progress… we are very generous on extensions and allowing students to complete if they have good reason for putting off sitting an exam or assessment, and Corallee strung that out as long as she could.”

Quince said Collins-Annan wasn’t a good student, but excelled at mooting competitions, “not surprising she was good at that, because it is acting… you don’t need to be good at anything other than role-playing being a lawyer”.

One observer said that it seemed that Collins-Annan saw doing actual study as a “barrier to her career, rather than the doorway”.

Fellow students described Collins-Annan as highly charismatic. “She makes you feel like the most important person in the room,” says one former boyfriend.

A former student says: “She started off really nice, maternal, she would take you under her wing and part of her squad – she was someone you wanted to be around.”

But students say they became fearful of her because she traded heavily off her legal connections and was a dictatorial leader of the mooting society, leaving them worried getting offside with her could damage their careers.

“These are people we all look up to, so to see her walking among them… painted her out to be this law student megastar. Everyone really looked up to her and thought she was so cool,” said one. “But it was a lie.”

Another said: “She embellishes herself to such a degree… I can vividly remember her telling me she had been in a settlement conference where the other side offered to settle for $1m, and she says ‘I said triple it, or we can’t have this conversation’.”

But another says that while she is a “compulsive liar about everything, even little things” that “she has genuinely done some really impressive things. At times, she was a really good friend.” The friend said Collins-Annan’s childhood had clearly had an impact on her behaviour. “I don’t [want her] hung out to dry without any empathy for her…. I wish her the best and I hope she stops doing this, or she will have a lonely life.”

Another said her childhood trauma had caused her difficulties in maintaining relationships, “but that’s no reflection of the [good] person she is fundamentally. She’s worked so hard to get to where she is from where she came from.”

Another said: “To some degree, I feel bad for her with her upbringing … I think though she really leans on that to make you feel that she’s an amazing person who rose from the ashes, and she’s probably not that person.”

Collins-Annan admits everything unravelled during her presidency of the mooting club during 2022.

A source involved in the University of Auckland mooting team said Auckland and AUT’s moot clubs had agreed to equally fund a $3000 prize pool for an August 2022 intra-mural mooting contest. “We got five months of every excuse [from Corrallee] under the sun,” they said. The money arrived in January 2023, after Auckland’s law department contacted Quince directly.

2023 Mooting Society president Will Taylor, who covered early events this year from his own pocket while gaining access to bank accounts, said they were disputing over $10,000 with Collins-Annan. He said last year’s AGM noted funds of $2000, but the bank account was empty when he gained access, with $4000 of invoices due.

He said Collins-Annan had told him she had funds set aside to refund the society, but then instructed barrister Matthew Phelps to act on her behalf.

Almost $3000 of that unpaid money was the cost of 10 students to attend the Criminal Bar Association conference. Collins-Annan arranged for the 10 to be sponsored to attend by senior lawyers. Taylor confirmed the Mooting Society received that money but the invoices remain unpaid almost a year later. One of the sponsored students said: “We would chase Corrallee and say ‘hey, you’ve got to pay these’ and she’d tell us another lie, give us another excuse and say it was all sorted.”

Taylor said it had been a difficult time for the society. “Fortunately the exec this year is really on to it.. We’ve still got a society to run and we are dealing with this.”

Collins-Annan says she wants to repay the money, but claims the amount in question is closer to $4,000. One friend said he doubted Collins-Annan ever intended the situation to get so bad, as “she was so passionate about the society”.

Quince said AUT was deciding between a police complaint, debt collectors or the Disputes Tribunal if she did not pay up. “I really don’t want her to get away with it.”

At the same time, Collins-Annan developed a chequered history when it came to paying her rent.

One student said Collins-Annan tried to take over her flat in 2022, but wouldn’t pay the bond and made excuses about her accountant and being busy on a criminal case, “so I pulled the plug”.

Collins-Annan did move into a Parnell flat in the second half of 2022, where her landlord and flatmate described her stay as “a bit of a nightmare”, saying she was late paying her bond, consistently late to pay rent, and one week presented with what appeared to be a doctored screenshot of a bank transfer to explain her missing payment. He eventually evicted her.

She then moved to Tauranga, where she described herself as a “junior lawyer” when answering a flatmate-wanted advert (claiming to be a lawyer when you’re not is, in some circumstances, a criminal offence). A former resident of that flat says Collins-Annan “never paid a cent the entire time”, and was asked to leave, owing $920.

The flatmate said Collins-Annan told her she was working for US and New Zealand law firms, and would study a law masters at Harvard. “I believed all her lies, and now I feel such an idiot,” says the flatmate. “She’s so convincing. She leaves just enough truth in it to be plausible.”

A former boyfriend said Collins-Annan also owed him $700 after messaging him from Boston to say she needed an urgent loan to buy a new phone after being mugged. She never repaid the money after giving him various excuses. “I’ve never met anyone like that. I wouldn’t say I am a stupid person, but I feel very stupid.”

Mea culpa

Collins-Annan is initially cautious, saying: “I think my publicist will kill me for calling you.”

She dismisses most allegations, saying she’d like to explain, but doesn’t know “that you have my best interests at heart’’; then she proposes an interview the following day.

Later, she asks for questions to be sent to her agent, former National Party candidate Jake Bezzant, who doesn’t respond. A screenshot she sends Stuff suggests Bezzant advised her not to comment because he didn’t think we had enough for a story.

But then she calls back, and this time issues a full mea culpa: yes, AUT kicked her out, yes, she took the moot money, yes, she owed the rent money, and the phone money.

”I knew this was going to come out, whether it was today or a few months, it would be inevitable,” she says. “I’ve had an innate fear my whole life I’d be exactly like my mum, and now I am… it’s not a nice moment.”

She says she knows her social media posts will grate with her detractors but claims her “publicity team” insisted on daily content.

She says various lawyers she clerked for never paid her properly, and she needed money for rent, bills and food so took from the Moot Society, thinking she could repay it before she was caught. “I could have asked for help, I could have quit working in law and got a real job, and I should have done that. At no point did I ever think it was too late, or I couldn’t fix it…I was delusional and stupid.”

Her over-commitment to clerking work and mooting – including, she says, organising an elective course herself – meant her academic work fell away.

And yes, she says, she is prone to embellishing her achievements – although she says quite often, people simply didn’t believe she had, for example, acted as a McKenzie Friend (an in-court advisor) in a prominent trial or appeared at the Court of Appeal.

“I have a terrible lying problem,” she says. “It is something i am conscious of, I am aware about it, I speak to my therapist about it all the time … it’s some sort of borderline personality or sociopathic disorder.”

For example, several students said Collins-Annan talked of working for prominent defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC and even of a job offer to work for him post-graduation. Stuff has seen messages where she refers to being in court with Mansfield. She now says she only watched him in action.

Mansfield said he didn’t want to comment but his only recollection of Collins-Annan was through his ongoing sponsorship of university mooting clubs.

One friend said it had caused jealousy – and even a Law Society complaint – when Collins-Annan told them she gained special permission to assist barrister Peter Eastwood in a Court of Appeal case, and even addressed the court.

Eastwood doesn’t go that far, saying he simply had her sit alongside him to manage his files in a document-heavy case. “I think she’s great, she could have a great career,” he said.

The original newspaper article contained an anecdote that Collins-Annan had a job offer at a promiment law firm withdrawn when they learned of her mother’s background. She says now it wasn’t, a law firm, but with the NZ police prosecutors, and furnishes emails to support that suggestion.

Collins-Annan’s LinkedIn says she’s living in Boston “working exclusively on trial matters. Dealing with a range of misdemeanour and felony offences in District and Superior Courts”. She names the company she is working for as JSL. Two legal firms with a Boston presence with similar names (JuriSolutions and John S Leonard Law) both said they had no record of her.

Collins-Annan later said her employer was a barrister named ‘Joseph’ but didn’t want to say more as she relied on him for a visa. She admitted she didn’t act in court, and worked as a law clerk, not a lawyer. She says boasts to friends of a salary of $200,000 is what she could have earned had she graduated.

She says she is enroled at Harvard, but admits lying that it was for a law degree. She says it is a liberal arts course.

While the original article about Collins-Annan said she was completing her degree at AUT remotely, Collins-Annan said that was a mistake on the journalist’s part. Her LinkedIn page now says she is enrolled remotely at Waikato University, which said Collins-Annan had enrolled for this trimester, “but is no longer enrolled”. Collins-Annan said: “That’s not true. I literally sat an exam three days ago.”

Another LinkedIn CV line says she has been a law student mentor at Dentons Kensington Swan since March 2021, “helping four law students get through their first year of law school unscathed!”. Dentons Kensington Swan HR director Pip Kistler said Collins-Annan had never worked there and the mentoring scheme was a voluntary University programme. Collins-Annan now agrees with that.

Multiple students said Collins-Annan told them she’d struck a publishing deal with Penguin for an autobiography. In one message, she said she’d agreed a $40,000 advance, which would be extremely high in New Zealand publishing circles.

A source at Penguin said they weren’t publishing Collins-Annan’s book. “We have nothing to do with her. There’s no such person on our list…. we’ve been hearing about her for a long time.”

At first, Collins-Annan says she “actually swopped from Penguin to get more money”. The second time we speak, she admits that was a lie, and says she used an imaginary offer to leverage a deal with another publisher. She won’t name them, citing a non-disclosure agreement.

She stood by a claim that she was in talks with Netflix (who refused to comment) about a documentary, but admitted: “It’s not set in stone and I appreciate they could pull it away as soon as they see this article.”

Collins-Annan knows there will be repercussions. All lawyers must pass a certificate of good character before beginning to practice. “Obviously, I’m unlikely to be a lawyer in New Zealand now. A lot of people would contest my admission.”

Quince is one: she intends to alert the Law Society about the Moot Society dispute. Stuff understands others have complained; the Law Society said for privacy reasons they could not comment.

Collins-Annan thinks she might stay in Boston instead, perhaps study criminology or help children in foster care. She says she’s “grateful” Stuff is running this story.

So are those she’s left behind. “I’ve met so many people affected by this woman who still won’t take accountability and continuing to lie,” says one student. “This story needs to come out. I want people to know the real truth.”