Influencer Caroline Calloway sparks fury while revealing how she survived Hurricane Milton after refusing to evacuate

Controversial influencer Caroline Calloway has doubled down on her decision not to evacuate during Hurricane Milton.

Calloway, 32, posted a shocking Instagram video on Tuesday in which she said she was “going to die” because she refused to evacuate her Sarasota home.

She has since taken to

She’s even taken the opportunity a few times to advertise “how cute” her book is.

‘I’m not going to evacuate because of the hurricane. I live in Sarasota, on the beach, in evacuation zone A,” Calloway previously wrote on X.

‘For more great advice, buy my second book! It’s called Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life. It’s about to come true if I survive! It is an advice book

She also wrote, “I have champagne and four generations of Floridians in my veins. We’ll be fine,” as well as the clever tagline, “Where there’s a Callowill, there’s a Calloway.”

In an attempt to put a poetic spin on her circumstances, the infamous con artist posted a video of her “reporting live from the eye of the hurricane.”

She captioned the video: “I’ve always lived in the eye of the storm (emotionally, but now also physically at this particular moment).”

She said she had not lost power and that the water outside her home was “completely still.”

Calloway added that it was “so loud” outside right before she started recording.

In another post, she showed heavy rain and aggressive winds next to the same area, still only “seconds later.”

Many X users rushed to share their disapproval and skepticism of Calloway’s Hurricane-driven content.

“Amazing that you found a way to cause a hurricane that will devastate thousands of people, ALL ABOUT YOU,” one user wrote.

Another said: ‘Caroline, I can’t believe this. Really, I can’t. There’s a Category 5 hurricane coming, you’re in Zone A, literally the first area they have to evacuate, and your response is to double the danger for a nice internet post?’

Others were much less kind, calling her name and wishing bad things on her.

However, some showed their support for the influencer and urged her to “go inside” and be safe.

One fan wrote: ‘Caroline stay safe!!!!! We need you!!!!’

In her original hurricane post on Tuesday, she said, “So if you’ve been following Hurricane Milton, ugh, I’m dying! It would make landfall in the Sarasota-Bradenton area. I’m in Sarasota, I live on the water, it’s zone A, mandatory evacuation.”

Calloway then tried to explain why she didn’t get out of her house in time for the storm.

“First of all, I can’t drive. Secondly, the airport is close by. Third, the last time I was evacuated because of a hurricane, I went to my mother’s house in Northport because of Hurricane Ian,” she said.

“Her entire street was flooded and we were evacuated by the U.S. military after three days without power or running water,” Calloway revealed.

“It was very traumatic and that’s why I don’t want to evacuate to my mother’s house because the last time I did it was the worst time ever!”

Calloway became one of the first Instagram influencers when she documented her time at England’s prestigious Cambridge University, but was found to have falsified her qualifications.

Most notably, she paid for followers on Instagram and duped hundreds of fans with “creative workshops” that never got off the ground before she left for Florida, where she says she “hasn’t found a fuck from anyone who can read in two years.”

In 2015, her large Instagram following helped her land a six-figure book deal, but that didn’t work out. She called the premise “sexist” but offered the first seven chapters for sale on Etsy.

Then her ghostwriter Natalie Beach wrote a bombshell essay in The Cut.

The essay coincided with the suicide of Calloway’s father, and Calloway told followers on Instagram Stories that she struggled with depression, anxiety and Adderall addiction while being consumed by existential questions about why she was still alive.

Still having to pay the advance for the book she didn’t write, she opened an OnlyFans account in 2020 and claimed Playboy had ordered a photo shoot with her.

She told Harvard’s Crimson Magazine that she imagined her subscribers were “guys who went to Princeton and now work on Wall Street and who think I would have been mean to them in high school.”

But her subscribers weren’t enough to prevent her from being evicted from her West Village apartment by a landlord who sued her for $40,000 and damage to the building.

That summer, a BBC documentary ‘My Insta Scammer Friend’ dealt another blow to her reputation when former followers detailed their abusive relationship with her.

“I was 10 out of 10 obsessed with Caroline Calloway,” Genevieve Wheeler told the program makers.

“She would like your messages and it felt like Christmas morning. It was the most beautiful thing in the world.’

“I would definitely say I was hooked,” Caitlin Vickers said. “I wanted to live that life so badly.”

She told her followers that she wanted them to “grow old with me” and watch her fall in love and get married.

But many lost money during her ‘creativity workshops’ and were devastated when Calloway revealed her mercenary side shortly before quitting social media in 2021.

“You know it’s hard to conjure fame and money out of thin air?” she asked. “And I’m killing it.

‘Big picture: I want fame, power and money and people talking about me is part of that.’

She transferred from NYU to Cambridge with Beach, who admitted she was dazzled by “the most confident girl I had ever known.”

‘She seemed like an adult, someone who had just gone the extra mile and built an independent life. Meanwhile, I was a virgin with a meek ponytail living in a railroad apartment that sank into the Gowanus Canal,” she wrote.

‘She constantly called me her best friend and work wife and told me she loved me. I thought we were in this together.”

But Calloway later admitted that she had been turned on by Beach’s story of sexual abuse, and cruelly compared her figure to that of a pot-bellied man she had had sex with.

Three years later, she was compared to infamous Fyre Festival scammer Billy McFarland after selling $165 tickets for a nationwide “Creativity Workshop Tour,” which promised tutorials on building an Instagram brand, developing ideas and discussing ‘the emotional and spiritual dimensions of art making’. .

But most events were canceled, with Calloway urging some ticket buyers in Philadelphia to hop on a train to New York for one of the few that went ahead.

“It was a sickening feeling,” said fan Abigail Scott. “A light bulb went off… She was just looking at her fans as a way to make money.”

When she moved to Sarasota, Florida, she cashed in on her reputation with a 2023 memoir called Scammer, in which she described the plaque she hoped would one day appear outside her former New York apartment.

Sold through her revived Instagram account and self-published through her imprint Dead Dad. Its publication was well received by reviewers, with the New Yorker describing it as “funny, engaging and full of heartfelt insight.”

She told the Crimson that she expects this to be the first of a trilogy of “juvenilia” that will answer her critics before she tries to put her past behind her.

“It’s been terrible for my reputation,” she said. “I mean, people finally know I’m not a fraud. How am I supposed to uphold my reputation if people here are slandering my name?’

Earlier this month, she told the No Jumper podcast that she was only dating men who don’t know about her past, but that she “hates” them.

She stayed in the path of Hurricane Milton as it barreled toward a potentially catastrophic collision along the west coast of Florida, but appears to have emerged unscathed.

The storm, currently a Category 1, brought winds of more than 100 miles per hour and flooded parts of the state. Tornadoes earlier Wednesday killed “several people” in St. Lucie County.

A state of emergency was declared in the Tampa area in the late overnight hours due to high water, which initially made landfall as a Category 3 storm.