Controversial influencer Caroline Calloway has doubled down on her decision not to evacuate during Hurricane Milton.
Calloway, 32, posted a shocking video on Instagram on Tuesday, saying she was “going to die” because she refused to evacuate her home in Sarasota.
Since then, she has taken to X to recount her experiences, seemingly showing her nearly 58,000 followers that she is unfazed by the raging hurricane.
He has even taken the opportunity to announce several times “how nice” his book is.
‘I’m not going to evacuate because of the hurricane. “I live in Sarasota, on the beach, in evacuation zone A,” Calloway previously wrote on X.
Caroline Calloway, 32, posted an update video sharing her experiences after refusing to evacuate from the storm.
‘For more great tips, buy my second book! It’s called A Guide to Life by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway. It’s about to come out if I survive! It is a book of advice.
He also wrote: ‘I have champagne and four generations of Floridians in my veins. Everything will be alright,” as well as the witty catchphrase: “Where there’s a Callowill, there’s a Calloway.”
In an attempt to put a poetic spin on her circumstances, the notorious scammer posted a video of her “reporting live from the eye of the storm.”
She captioned the video: “I have always lived in the eye of the storm (emotionally, but now also physically at this very moment).”
He said he didn’t lose power and the water outside his house was “completely still.”
Calloway added that it had been “very loud” outside moments before he began recording.
Calloway posted video of the storm dissipating in just ‘seconds’
In another post, he showed heavy rain and aggressive winds next to the same area completely still just “seconds later.”
Many X users were quick to share their disapproval and skepticism of Calloway’s hurricane-fueled content.
“It’s amazing that you found a way to create a hurricane that will devastate thousands of people. ALL ABOUT YOU,” one user wrote.
Another chimed in: ‘Caroline, I can’t believe this. I really can’t. There’s a Category 5 hurricane approaching, you’re sitting in Zone A, literally the first area they tell you to evacuate, and your response is to double the danger for some pretty internet post?
Others were much less kind, insulting her and wishing her bad things.
Some, however, showed their support for the influencer, urging her to “get in” and be safe.
One fan wrote: ‘Caroline stay safe!!!!! We need you!!!!’
In his original post about the hurricane on Tuesday, he said: ‘So if you’ve been following Hurricane Milton, I’m going to die!’ It is assumed to make landfall in the Sarasota-Bradenton area. I’m in Sarasota, I live by the water, it’s zone A, mandatory evacuation.
Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday night as a Category 3 storm
Calloway then tried to explain why he didn’t leave his house in time for the storm.
—First of all, I can’t drive. Secondly, the airport is nearby. Third, the last time I evacuated for a hurricane, I went to my mom’s house in Northport for Hurricane Ian,” he said.
“Their entire street was flooded and the US military evacuated us after three days without electricity or running water,” Calloway revealed.
‘It was very traumatic and that’s why I don’t want to evacuate to my mom’s house because the last time I did that, it was the worst moment of my life!’
Calloway became one of the first Instagram influencers when she documented her time at the prestigious Cambridge University in England, but it was discovered that she had falsified her grades.
Most notably, he paid for Instagram followers and defrauded hundreds of fans with “creative workshops” that never materialized before fleeing to Florida, where he says he “hasn’t fucked someone who can read in over two years.”
In 2015, her large Instagram following helped her land a six-figure book deal, but she failed, calling its premise “sexist” but offering the first seven chapters for sale on Etsy.
Then his ghostwriter Natalie Beach wrote an explosive essay in The Cut.
The trial coincided with the suicide of Calloway’s father, and Calloway told her followers on Instagram Stories that she was battling depression, anxiety and Adderall addiction, while consumed by existential questions about why she was alive.
Still needing to pay the advance for the book she had not written, she opened an Onlyfans account in 2020 claiming that Playboy had commissioned a photo shoot for her.
He told Harvard’s Crimson Magazine that he imagined his subscribers would be “kids 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 were not enough to prevent a landlord from evicting her from her West Village apartment and suing her for $40,000 and damages 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 show’s makers.
‘She liked your posts and it felt like Christmas morning. “It was the greatest thing in the world.”
“I would definitely say I’m addicted,” Caitlin Vickers said. “I really wanted to live that life.”
She told her followers that she wanted them to ‘grow old with me’ and watch her fall in love and get married.
But many lost money on his ‘creativity workshops’ and were devastated when Calloway revealed his mercenary side shortly before quitting social media in 2021.
Calloway posted a video Tuesday claiming he was “going to die” in Hurricane Milton.
—Do you know how difficult it is to get fame and money from nothing? she demanded. 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 New York University to Cambridge with Beach, who admitted she was dazzled by “the most confident girl she had ever met.”
“She looked like an adult, someone who had just moved on and built a life of independence. “I, meanwhile, was a virgin with a docile ponytail and lived in a railroad apartment that was sinking into the Gowanus Canal,” she wrote.
‘She constantly called me her best friend and work wife, telling me she loved me. I thought we were in this together.’
Plagued by debt, Calloway created an Onlyfans page that she claimed brought her $25,000 a month.
But Calloway later admitted that she had been aroused by Beach’s account of being sexually assaulted, and cruelly compared her figure to that of a potbellied man with whom she had had sex.
Three years later, she was compared to notorious Fyre Festival scammer Billy McFarland after selling $165 worth of tickets to a nationwide ‘Creativity Workshop Tour’, which promised tutorials on how to build an Instagram brand, develop ideas and address ‘the emotional and spiritual dimensions of making art’. .
But most events were canceled, and Calloway urged some ticket buyers in Philadelphia to take a train to New York for one of the few that took place.
“It was a disgusting feeling,” said fan Abigail Scott. “A light bulb went off…She was just looking at her fans as a way to make money.”
Caroline Calloway, 32, had 800,000 followers on Instagram as one of the site’s first influencers, but her landlord sued her for $40,000 after leaving her New York apartment in 2022.
Moving to Sarasota, Florida, he capitalized on his reputation with a 2023 memoir called Scammer in which he described the plaque he hoped would one day be outside his old apartment in New York.
Sold through his revived Instagram account and self-released through his Dead Dad imprint, it was well received by critics and the New Yorker described it as “funny, engaging and full of genuine insight.”
She told the Crimson that she hopes it will be the first in a trilogy of ‘juvenilia’ answering her critics before attempting to leave her past behind.
“It’s been terrible for my reputation,” he said. ‘I mean, people finally know that I’m not a scammer now. How am I supposed to maintain my reputation when there are people here slandering my name?
Earlier this month, she told the No Jumper podcast that she was only dating men who know nothing about her past, but that she “hates” them.
“We have food, but it’s a little scary and… yeah, I’ll keep you posted,” he concluded, before posting a video of Tampa Bay Mayor Jane Castor saying that if they don’t evacuate, “they’re going to die.”
She remained in the path of Hurricane Milton as it moved toward a potentially catastrophic collision along Florida’s west coast, but appears to have emerged unscathed.
The storm, which is currently a Category 1, produced wind gusts that exceeded 100 mph and flooded parts of the state. Early Wednesday’s tornadoes killed “several people” in St. Lucie County.
A flash flood emergency was declared in the Tampa area late last night due to high water, which initially made landfall as a Category 3 storm.