Everything You Need to Know About Caroline Calloway

If you’ve recently spent a lot of time on social media, especially Twitter, you’ve probably seen the name Caroline Calloway mentioned numerous times. The Internet’s obsession with Caroline Calloway has been steadily growing over the past few years, only continuing to rise after she provides scandal after scandal. But who exactly is Caroline Calloway, and why is she so controversial?

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Caroline Calloway was the predecessor to the influencers of today. In the early 2010s, back in the early days of Instagram, she purchased 40,000 followers. These followers helped kickstart her social media career, and she eventually became popular for writing long captions musing about her life. Calloway especially focusing on presenting an idealized depiction of life as a Cambridge student and on describing in detail her relationships and break-ups with her college boyfriends. These captions, a staple of her brand, eventually allowed her to receive a book deal. Calloway couldn’t get enough writing done for the book, so the deal fell through in 2017.

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Caroline Calloway’s first major scandal was in 2018, when she announced a US tour of creativity workshops. The workshops were advertised as 5-hour-long sessions in which she would provide handmade salads and homemade care packages that included personalized letters. Tickets to the event cost $165 apiece. As the first stop of the tour grew clear, it became clear that Calloway was not prepared.

She gradually began backing out of the promises she had made. The first to go were the personalized letters, which she said were taking more time than she had hoped. The flower crown making session she had promised turned out to be a mere photoshoot with reusable flower clips. She did complete her salads, but attendees reported the salads being incredibly lackluster and not what had been promised. Press surrounding the tour grew so bad that Calloway canceled the remaining events and refunded the tickets, only to uncancel the tour a few days later. The failure of the tour drew comparisons to events such as the notorious Fyre Festival and contributed to Calloway’s reputation as a scammer.

A picture from Calloway’s infamous workshop tour. Image via.

The other major scandal of Caroline Calloway’s career came last September when Natalie Beach, her ex-best-friend from her days at NYU, released a scathing article in The Cut detailing their tumultuous friendship. Beach revealed herself as the ghostwriter behind many of Calloway’s Instagram captions. She felt that Calloway had been an unstable and unreliable friend who had often taken advantage of her.

The article is filled with anecdotes from the pairs’ friendship, including trips to Europe gone wrong, Calloway hiring Beach to run an Airbnb for her, and their attempts to work on Calloway’s memoir before the book deal fell through. Calloway took to social media many times to write about how the publishing of this article had affected her, reminiscing on her friendship with Beach and on the public’s shifting opinion of her. Recently, she’s begun directly responding to the article, sharing her side of the story on her personal website.

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It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why the Internet is so obsessed with Caroline Calloway. But her story creates an undeniable fascination and intrigue. Perhaps it’s because of the elite, seemingly unattainable lifestyle she espouses. Perhaps it’s because of the neverending controversy. Perhaps it’s because of her role in shaping the use of social media for personal gain into what it is today. Maybe someday, the world will crack the mystery that is Caroline Calloway. But until then, we’ll just have to sit and wait, scrolling through her numerous posts on Instagram and Twitter.

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