NEW YORK – The Russian diplomat’s daughter accused of being a spy is “embarrassed” by photos of her in the media and fears she will be deported, her lawyer said.
Attorney Robert Baum said he showed Anna Chapman, 28, some of the tabloid newspaper stories that have branded the redhead as a femme fatale and feature photographs from her Facebook page, showing the smiling Russian enjoying Manhattan’s nightlife, posing in front of the Statue of Liberty and mixing with businessmen.
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“She was embarrassed by some of the photos that were obviously taken from her Facebook pages,” the lawyer said. “The truth is she probably no different than your typical single 28-year-old woman in New York City. She runs a successful business, goes out at night. She dates men, enjoys a social life.”
Chapman is charged with conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, which carries a potential penalty of five years in prison. She was the first of 10 spy suspects arrested last weekend in the U.S. to be denied bail.
Baum said Chapman’s father told her to go to police with a fake passport an undercover FBI agent had given to her, leading to her arrest and solitary confinement. He said he may use that information to appeal the bail decision.
At a bail hearing Monday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Farbiarz said only that investigators on June 27 intercepted phone calls in which Chapman was “talking to a man who is advising her, who is telling her essentially to make up a story, to say that she’s being intimidated, that this might be some other criminal activity, and who advises her to get out of the country and to go to the police.”
Baum said he believed the phone calls cited by prosecutors were conversations between Chapman and her father, whom Baum described as a low-level embassy employee whose family was middle class.
Baum said Chapman told him she reached out to her father, Vasily Kushchenko, a day after an FBI agent posing as a Russian consulate employee asked her to deliver a fake passport to a woman working as a spy.
Baum is confident Chapman could post $25,000 cash.
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