Exclusive | Caroline Calloway survived the hurricane and is back to the business of influencing
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 pictures of her supposedly idyllic life studying art history at Cambridge University in England.But her fame turned to notoriety when it was revealed that she had purchased followers and that a friend had ghostwritten her evocative captions.
Calloway developed an Adderall addiction, 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 controversially weathering Hurricane Milton — she’s been living in Sarasota, Fla., since 2022 — with cheeky social media posts.
“So if you’ve been following Hurricane Milton, um, I’m going to die,” the 32-year-old Calloway said in a video Tuesday on Instagram, where she has 676,000 followers, one 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 grandma, stayed put.On Wednesday, she posted a photo of herself in a tube top sitting crossed-legged in front of a sliding glass door with her cat, Matisse, on her lap inside her home.
“If I actually die in this storm, my books are going to go WAY UP in price.Order now,” she shamelessly wrote on Instagram.
The next day, in a viral text exchange riffing on a meme, she declared, “I lived, b—h.” Her hurricane antics outraged some.“Caroline Calloway refusing to leave a mandatory evacuation zone (right on the water, right where landfall is expected) and dying in a hurricane would be the perfect ending to her narrative tbh,” wrote a 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 Florida resident,” she explained.
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