Scamming socialite Caroline Calloway thinks she is ‘dying’ because she hasn’t been evacuated from the area where Hurricane Milton will hit.
Calloway, 32, 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.
Calloway posted the full extent of her predicament on her Instagram Story on Tuesday evening from her new home in Florida.
“So if you’ve been following Hurricane Milton, uh, 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,” she said.
Calloway then tried to explain why she didn’t get out of her house in time for the storm.
Scamming socialite Caroline Calloway thinks she’s ‘dying’ because she hasn’t evacuated from the area where Hurricane Milton will hit
Calloway, 32, 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
“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!”
She then said she was sitting in a bathtub full of “spare water” with her cat.
“We have food, but it’s kind of scary and… yeah, I’ll keep you posted,” she finished, before posting a video of Tampa Bay Mayor Jane Castor saying that if you don’t evacuate, “you’re going to die . “‘
Calloway was infamous for paying 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 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.
Calloway posted the full extent of her predicament on her Instagram Story on Tuesday night from her new home in Florida
It is now in the path of Hurricane Milton, which headed toward a potentially catastrophic collision Wednesday along Florida’s west coast, where some residents insisted they would stay put after millions were ordered to evacuate and officials warned that those left behind face high chances would have to survive.
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 Crimson Magazine she imagined that 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.
“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.
“We have food, but it’s a little scary and… yeah, I’ll keep you posted,” she finished, before posting a video of Tampa Bay Mayor Jane Castor saying that if you don’t evacuate, “you’ll die’.
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’. .
Caroline Calloway, 32, had 800,000 followers on Instagram as one of the site’s first influencers, but was sued by her landlord for $40,000 after moving out of her New York apartment in 2022.
Wracked by debt, Calloway set up an OnlyFans page that she says made her $25,000 a month
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 she only dated men who didn’t know about her past, but she “hated” them.
It is now in the path of Hurricane Milton, which headed toward a potentially catastrophic collision Wednesday along Florida’s west coast, where some residents insisted they would remain after millions of people were ordered to evacuate and officials warned that any stragglers could leave behind large would have a chance to survive.
The Tampa Bay areahome to more than 3.3 million peoplefaced the possibility of widespread destruction after avoiding direct hits from major hurricanes for more than a century.
The National Hurricane Center forecast that Milton, a monstrous Category 5 hurricane, would likely weaken during much of its approach but would remain a major hurricane when it makes landfall late Wednesday.