Caroline Calloway | |
---|---|
Born | Caroline Calloway Gotschall [1] December 5, 1991 [2] Falls Church, Virginia, U.S. |
Education | New York University St Edmund's College, Cambridge (BA) |
Relatives |
|
Website | carolinecalloway |
Caroline Gotschall Calloway (born December 5, 1991) is an American social media celebrity who initially developed a following while a student at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the 2023 memoir Scammer, the title of which references accusations of scamming she has received from fans and critics.
Calloway was born in Falls Church, Virginia, and was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy. [2] Her maternal great-grandfather is Owen Burns, an entrepreneur and real estate mogul who developed many of the historic structures in Sarasota, Florida. [3] [4] At the age of 17, she changed her last name to Gotschall Calloway because she considered it would "look better on books". [1]
Calloway began undergraduate studies in art history at New York University. [5] In 2013, after succeeding on her third application, she restarted at St Edmund's College, Cambridge, and was graduated in 2016. [2] [6] She later admitted to having forged her academic credentials to secure admission to Cambridge. [7] Calloway has stated that she has general anxiety disorder and depression. [1] She has been open about her Adderall abuse and addiction while at Cambridge. [8] [1]
Calloway joined Instagram in 2012 with the help of her NYU classmate Natalie Beach. [1] The Instagram account documented her life at Cambridge and contained long captions. [9] Calloway bought followers and purchased ads to grow her account. [8] She became known as the "Gatsby of Cambridge" for the lavish parties that she documented online, which she hosted in rented rooms at other Cambridge colleges[ which? ] that she considered more Instagram-worthy than St. Edmund's. [6]
Calloway publicly announced that Flatiron Books had offered her a book deal to write a memoir for US$500,000 in 2015, of which she had received 30% as an advance. [10] She announced via her Instagram stories in 2017 that she was withdrawing from her book deal after failing to fulfill her contract. [11] Beach reported the deal was for US$375,000, and the advance she received was actually for US$100,000, which she owed back to the publisher after she canceled the deal. [1] [12] After that, Calloway offered the book proposal with personal annotations for sale on Etsy. [11]
In 2016 it was announced that Calloway would publish a memoir titled And We Were Like about her time at Cambridge with Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers, with the help of literary agent Byrd Leavell. [13] [1] During her final year at Cambridge, Calloway had hired Beach to co-write the book and proposal. [14] She then set up an initial meeting with Leavell by pretending to his secretary that she was already his client. [1] Leavell has since said of his experience working with Calloway that she was "deeply unwell, deeply dishonest" and that "It was more important to her to be seen as an author than it was to be an author." [15]
In December 2018, Calloway launched an international "Creativity Workshop Tour". Her original announcement indicated that the workshop would offer tutorials on building an Instagram brand, developing ideas, and addressing "the emotional and spiritual dimensions of making art." [16] Participation in the tour was priced at US$165 per person, and tickets were sold for events in Boston, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Charlotte, and Washington DC. [11] This tour was subsequently canceled due to Calloway failing to book venues for these events, with Calloway announcing that she would refund those who had already bought tickets. [8] [11] Eventually, Calloway held two workshops in New York. [17] The cancellation of the workshops gained public attention when reporter Kayleigh Donaldson created a Twitter thread that gained news coverage comparing Calloway's tour to Fyre Festival, later publishing this as an article for the online publication Pajiba. [16] [11] [18] After the publication of Donaldson's article, Calloway briefly offered t-shirts for sale on Threadless that bore the caption "Stop hate-following me, Kayleigh". [19] Threadless suspended sale of these shirts for violating its targeted harassment policy. [19]
In August 2019, Calloway held a second creativity workshop, "The Scam", in New York. [20] Although press was not invited to the event, a Vice reporter bought a ticket, attended the event under a false name, and published an article about her experience. [20]
In September 2019, Beach wrote an essay for The Cut , "I Was Caroline Calloway", chronicling her friendship with Calloway and disclosing that she had ghostwritten a number of the Instagram captions credited to Calloway and collaborated with her to produce a subsequent book proposal. [2] [8] [12]
Also, Calloway brought Depths of Wikipedia its first wave of followers, publicizing the account's posts favorably after resolving an incident in which Annie Rauwerda had posted about Calloway's Wikipedia page. [21] [22]
In 2020, Calloway created an OnlyFans account, promising videographic and photographic content containing nudity. [23] She alleged in interviews that her intention to enter the adult entertainment industry had been planned by Playboy , and that the magazine had commissioned a photo shoot of her dressed as a student in a library. [24] When asked, the magazine stated: "Playboy does not have and did not have any photo shoot planned with Caroline Calloway." [24] Calloway has described her sex work as "emotionally poignant, softcore cerebral porn." [25] Her content includes cosplay of characters from children's movies such as Harry Potter , Matilda and Beauty and the Beast , [26] and partially undressed photographs of herself captioned with details of her father's autopsy. [27] [24]
Calloway posted her projected income from sex work on her Twitter account in May 2020, leading to criticism about her failure to recognize difficulties faced by sex workers, as well as her attempts to distance herself from sex work. [28] [26]
In July 2021, Calloway began selling a homemade blend of grapeseed oil and essential oils branded as Snake Oil through her website. [29] [30] [31]
In April 2020, Calloway announced that she would publish a response to Beach's 2019 The Cut essay. [32] [33] Scammer was released in June 2023 through Calloway's website. [34]
Scammer has received generally positive reviews, with Becca Rothfeld of the Washington Post calling Scammer "gloriously opulent" [34] and Kitty Grady of Vogue writing that Scammer "welcomes Caroline onto the scene as a new character: that of a deft and funny writer". [35] A more critical review by Charlie Squire for i-D describes Calloway's attempts to clear her name and address her scandals "unstimulating" and says that the book is "fatally mediocre in the middle". [36] However, Squire's review ends positively, praising Calloway's "hazy, modernist writing", concluding:
"Caroline is unafraid to want things that we are not supposed to say we want: fame, thinness, adoration – and yet she never veers off into cheap shock value. Where Scammer really shines is in its descriptions of the quotidian. Caroline's story is interesting, sure, it's a life she's lived to write this specific book. But where she proves herself to be an artist is in descriptions of her back-alley psychiatrist, an old friend living just outside of Boston, the electrical cords at the Harvard Lampoon house, or the fundamentally English aversion to sitting on the floor." [37]
Until March 2022, Calloway lived in the West Village in Manhattan; [38] she announced then that she was moving to Florida. [31]
Natalie Portman is an Israeli-born American actress. She has had a prolific film career since her teenage years and has starred in various blockbusters and independent films, receiving multiple accolades, including an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards.
Natalie Jane Imbruglia is an Australian-British singer-songwriter and actress. In the early 1990s, she played Beth Brennan in Neighbours. Having left the soap opera, she moved to the UK and began a singing career. Her debut single, a cover of Ednaswap's song "Torn" (1997), quickly became a worldwide hit, topped the US Billboard Radio Songs Chart for eleven weeks in 1998, and was listed on 50 Best Songs of 1990s by Rolling Stone. Her debut album, Left of the Middle (1997) was a commercial success, certified multi-platinum in the US, the UK and Australia and eventually sold seven million copies worldwide. Subsequent albums, including White Lilies Island (2001) and Counting Down the Days (2005) did not match commercial success of her debut, but both albums still gained Gold certification in the UK. As of 2021, Imbruglia has released six studio albums and has sold more than ten million copies worldwide. Imbruglia has received various accolades, including eight ARIA Awards, two Brit Awards, one Billboard Music Award, one Silver Clef Award and three Grammy nominations.
Caroline Quentin is an English actress, broadcaster and television presenter. Quentin became known for her television appearances: portraying Dorothy in Men Behaving Badly (1992–1998), Maddie Magellan in Jonathan Creek (1997–2000), Kate Salinger in Kiss Me Kate and DCI Janine Lewis in Blue Murder (2003–2009).
Catherine, Princess of Wales,, is a member of the British royal family. She is married to William, Prince of Wales, heir apparent to the British throne.
Natalie Louise Haynes is an English writer, broadcaster, classicist, and comedian.
Torrey Joël DeVitto is an American actress and former fashion model. Her first starring role was as Karen Kerr on the ABC Family drama series Beautiful People (2005–2006). She followed this up with recurring roles as Carrie in The CW drama series One Tree Hill (2008–2009), as Melissa Hastings in the ABC Family/Freeform mystery drama series Pretty Little Liars (2010–2017), and as Dr. Meredith Fell in The CW fantasy drama series The Vampire Diaries (2012–2013). DeVitto went on to star as Maggie Hall in the final season of Lifetime's drama series Army Wives (2013) and as Dr. Natalie Manning in the NBC medical drama series Chicago Med (2015–2021).
Natalie Morales is an American actress and director. She starred in the 2008 ABC Family series The Middleman and had a main role in 2009 on the first season of the USA Network series White Collar. In 2010, she appeared in the feature films Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Going the Distance. Morales also had a starring role in the Fox comedy series The Grinder, the NBC sitcom Abby's, and recurring roles in the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, HBO's The Newsroom, as well as the Netflix series Dead to Me.
Charlotte Letitia Crosby is an English television personality, known for appearing in the MTV reality series Geordie Shore and winning the twelfth series of Celebrity Big Brother. In 2017, she began presenting Just Tattoo of Us, and in 2018, Crosby began starring in her own reality series, The Charlotte Show.
Caroline Elizabeth Polachek is an American singer, producer, and songwriter. Raised in Connecticut, Polachek cofounded the indie pop band Chairlift while studying at the University of Colorado. The duo emerged from the late-2000s Brooklyn music scene with the sleeper hit "Bruises". In 2014, she released her first solo project, Arcadia, as Ramona Lisa. Under CEP, she dropped Drawing the Target Around the Arrow in 2017.
William Zervakos McFarland is an American businessman whose enterprises have been characterized by fraud. He has served time in prison for financial crimes related to Fyre Festival, having defrauded investors of $27.4 million. Vanity Fair describes him as "the poster boy for millennial scamming".
Kayleigh McEnany is an American conservative political commentator, television personality, and writer who served the administration of Donald Trump as the 33rd White House press secretary from April 2020 to January 2021.
Fyre Festival was a fraudulent luxury music festival organized by con artist Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule. It was created with the intent of promoting the company's Fyre app for booking music talent. The festival was scheduled to take place on April 28–30 and May 5–7, 2017, on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma.
Mary-Belle Kirschner, better known as Belle Delphine, is a South African-born British media personality, pornographic actress, model, and YouTuber. Her social media accounts feature erotic and cosplay modelling, sometimes blending the two together. Her online persona began in 2018 through her cosplay modeling on Instagram. Her posts on the platform were often influenced by popular memes and trends.
Ariel Rebecca Martin, known professionally as Baby Ariel, is an American social media personality who rose to fame after posting lip-syncing videos on the defunct video sharing app Musical.ly. She was recognized as one of the most influential people on the Internet by Time magazine in 2017, and she was featured on Forbes 2017 list of top entertainment influencers.
Kayleigh Rae is a Scottish professional wrestler. She is currently signed to WWE, where she performs on the SmackDown brand under the ring name Alba Fyre, and is one-half of The Unholy Union with Isla Dawn. She previously wrestled under the ring name Kay Lee Ray.
Jerry Media is a content and advertising company that operates various Instagram accounts, most prominently @fuckjerry. The account, founded by Elliot Tebele in 2011, is known for its aggregation of online content and internet memes. The account's popularity led Tebele to found Jerry Media which later became known for its promotion of the Fyre Festival. Later, Jerry Media co-produced Fyre, a documentary about the failed music festival. Jerry Media is involved with Jerry News, JaJa Tequila, and the card game What Do You Meme.
Emma Frances Chamberlain is an American social media personality, YouTuber, podcaster, businesswoman and model. She won the 2018 Streamy Award for Breakout Creator. In 2019, Time magazine included her on its Time 100 Next list, and its list of The 25 Most Influential People On The Internet, writing that "Chamberlain pioneered an approach to vlogging that shook up YouTube's unofficial style guide."
Dolls of Our Lives is a podcast hosted by Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney in which the hosts revisit the American Girl book series they loved as children.
A thirst trap is a type of social media post intended to entice viewers sexually. It refers to a viewer's "thirst", a colloquialism likening sexual frustration to dehydration, implying desperation, with the afflicted individual being described as "thirsty". The phrase entered into the lexicon in the late 1990s, but is most related to Internet slang that developed in the early 2010s. Its meaning has changed over time, previously referring to a graceless need for approval, affection or attention. A thirsty comment is usually a comment that wants the sexual attention of someone.
Depths of Wikipedia is a group of social media accounts dedicated to highlighting facts from Wikipedia. Created on Instagram by Annie Rauwerda in 2020, the account shares excerpts from various Wikipedia articles on a number of topics.