Caroline Calloway American Instagram Star From Falls Church

Early life

Caroline Calloway was born on 5 December 1991 in Falls Church, Virginia. She attended Episcopal High School, finishing there in 2006. She began an art history degree in New York and, in 2013, started again at the University of Cambridge as a member of St Edmund's College. She completed her studies there in 2016. During her teens she added Gotschall to her surname, explaining that she thought it would suit the cover of a book.

Career

Calloway opened an Instagram account in 2012 with the help of a university friend, Natalie Beach. After she moved to Cambridge, the account became a running record of student life there, with long, essay-like captions. Some of the parties she described were held in rooms borrowed from colleges other than her own, and the lavish scenes led to her nickname the "Gatsby of Cambridge". She also bought advertising to widen the account's audience.

Her writing ambitions followed. In 2015 she announced that a publisher, Flatiron Books, had offered her a deal for a memoir about her Cambridge years, and in 2016 the book was announced under the title And We Were Like. She withdrew from the agreement in 2017 after not delivering the manuscript, and she then sold the annotated book proposal through an online marketplace. Beach later stated that the advance she had been paid was smaller than the figure Calloway had given in public.

In December 2018 Calloway announced a "Creativity Workshop Tour" that promised sessions on building an online brand, developing ideas and the emotional side of making art. Tickets were priced at 165 dollars. Most of the planned cities never hosted an event; the tour was cancelled, buyers were told they would be refunded, and only two workshops took place, both in New York. A reporter's online thread comparing the tour to the Fyre Festival brought the episode to wide attention. In August 2019 she ran another workshop in New York under the title "The Scam".

In September 2019 Beach published an essay in The Cut, "I Was Caroline Calloway", about their friendship. It described how Beach had written many of the captions that appeared under Calloway's name and had worked on the book proposal. It became the magazine's most-read story of that year. Calloway answered in April 2020 with a serialised reply, "I am Caroline Calloway", which she placed behind a paywall and used to raise money for the charity Direct Relief, supporting health workers during the coronavirus pandemic. By April 2020 she had raised close to 50,000 dollars.

Later in 2020 she opened an OnlyFans account, and in July 2021 she began selling a self-made oil blend on her website under the name Snake Oil. In 2022 she appeared in the credits of the film Not Okay, her only screen credit on record.

In June 2023 she released her first book, the memoir Scammer, through her own website. The title refers to the accusations she has faced from followers and critics. Reviewers in several publications, among them The Washington Post, Vogue and The New Yorker, wrote favourably about it, while a review in i-D found the middle of the book weaker and her attempts to answer her critics unstimulating but praised her descriptions of everyday scenes.

Public roles

Calloway is best known as a social media personality and author. Her Instagram account is her main platform and had about 632,000 followers when last counted in October 2026.