For Caroline Calloway, everything is content.
In the 2010s, she rose to fame as an early Instagram influencer, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers with photos of her supposedly idyllic life studying art history at Cambridge University in England.
But her fame turned to infamy when it was discovered that she had bought followers and that a friend had written her suggestive captions.
Calloway developed an addiction to Adderall, lost a lucrative book deal and went broke.
Now, she’s back in the spotlight for self-publishing a new book, “Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life,” and battling Hurricane Milton — she lives in Sarasota, Fla., as of 2022 — with posts cheeky on social media.
“So if you followed Hurricane Milton, um, I’m going to die,” Calloway, 32, said in a video Tuesday on Instagram, where she has 676,000 followers, a day before the deadly storm made landfall. .
Despite living in an evacuation zone, Calloway, who previously called the West Village home and moved south to care for her grandmother, stuck around.
On Wednesday, she posted a photo of herself on a tube, sitting cross-legged in front of a sliding glass door with her cat, Matisse, on her lap inside her home.
“If I really die in this storm, the prices of my books will go up a lot. Order now”, she shamelessly wrote on Instagram.
The next day, in a viral meme-sharing text exchange, she declared: “I lived, bh.”
Her hurricane posts angered some.
“Caroline Calloway’s refusal to leave a mandatory evacuation zone (in water, right where landfall is expected) and dying in a hurricane would be the perfect ending to her story tbh,” wrote one follower on X.
The influencer defended her actions to The Post.
“I decided to stay to help my elderly neighbors and because evacuating for a hurricane is always a difficult and nuanced decision for any Floridian,” she explained. “I’ve been enjoying my time off because we’ve been locked in, but that’s not why I stayed.”
But she also noted that it has been a boon for sales for her new book and said the money would help her mother fix her car.
The new memoir mixes essays by Calloway with excerpts from the late Wurtzel’s 2001 advice, “The Secret of Life.”
“[It’s a] A never-before-seen kind of conversation between two depressed inner-city lovers across time and space,” she said of the book, which also features lines from Julia Fox and Cat Marnell.
Her path from shamed internet girl to self-help author has been a circuitous one.
In 2013, the Falls Church, Va., native started an Instagram account (@CarolineCalloway) to showcase her picturesque life in the British academy — castles, River Cam, wreaths.
She spent $4.99 to get 40,000 followers early – a common practice in those days, now seen as a tactless fake.
By 2015, she had amassed nearly 300,000 followers, a massive fan base for the time.
“I had no idea of the gilded cage I would be locked in feeding the algorithm. What the algorithm likes is wealth, happiness, aesthetics, beauty,” she said.
In 2016, she used her following to broker a book deal with Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, for half a million dollars.
But after the posts, she was struggling, battling an addiction to Adderall. She soon realized she couldn’t give up.
“I was dumb as a stone. . . I sold a book I didn’t want to write,” she said. “The book I sold presented a fairy tale version of my life. It was a cross between what I wanted it to be and how I wanted it to be perceived.”
But, Calloway admitted, “I signed the paper — nobody held a gun to my head.”
She quickly blew through her $100,000 advance — in part to pay her $30,000 tuition for her final year at Cambridge — leaving her on the hook for the publisher.
“I had to find a way to make money,” said Calloway, who described herself as a “maniac pixie nightmare” at the time.
In 2019, desperate to make money, she sold $165 tickets to a “Creativity Workshop” that never materialized and made a $210 homemade “fountain of youth” invention she called insolence Snake Oil.
(It was actually grapeseed oil and various other oils. A dermatologist told VICE UK it could cause a sensitizing reaction.)
Her problems increased during that year.
First, her former landlord in the West Village sued her for $40,000 in back rent.
Then, she reached a new level of fame when New York magazine The Cut published an article by former friend Natalie Beach claiming that she had written her Instagram captions.
It went viral, and Calloway was branded a grifter and a “one-woman Fyre Fest.”
“My reputation was ruined,” she said.
Just days after Beach’s piece was published, Calloway’s father, William Gotschall, took his own life by overdosing on pills. He had struggled with depression and bipolar disorder for years and was on the verge of bankruptcy.
“I was dealing with so much pain. My depression, his depression, his credit card debt and on top of that my addiction to Adderall,” she said. “I like to think without the drug addiction I would never have [pulled out of a book deal] . . . I really wanted to be taken seriously as a writer.”
At the height of her addiction, she was taking 90 milligrams of extended-release Adderall a day, “the legal maximum you’re allowed to take in New York,” she told British podcaster Grace Beverly last year.
In 2017, she began a rehabilitation program. While she still drinks, she has been off Adderall since then.
“The truth is, I just had a lot of grief to process,” she said.
In 2020 she created an Only Fans account selling topless photos of herself dressed as famous female literary characters such as Daisy Buchanan to raise enough money to pay off her debt with her publishers.
“I paid them off that summer — then I left Only Fans,” said Calloway, who claimed she made about $100,000.
While she’s joined the likes of Fyre mastermind Billy McFarland, 32, and Anna Delvey, 33, Calloway says the comparisons aren’t fair.
“I have never been in prison, I have paid back all my debts,” she said.
(McFarland and Delvey each served almost four years in prison for wire fraud and theft, respectively.)
But Calloway has also played a con artist.
In 2023, she self-published her first memoir, The Deceiver.
It was well received around the world, with the New Yorker calling it “funny, engaging and full of real insight”.
According to Calloway, it sold 20,000 copies.
“People already think I’m a fraud,” she said. “I might as well get some benefits out of it.”
#Exclusive #Caroline #Calloway #survived #hurricane #influencer #business
Image Source : nypost.com