Over the past week, followers of Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway have waited with bated breath for the reveal of an exposé written by her former ghostwriter, writer Natalie Beach.
Calloway, who rose to notoriety after she failed to deliver on a $500k book deal and her ill-fated $165 creativity workshops (she promised salads, oat milk and writing exercises but in many cases didn't even book a location) posted a series of attention-grabbing posts in the lead up to the piece written for The Cut. As Calloway questioned “What THE F**K is taking so long?” Beach’s piece was finally published.
The article, which is titled “I Was Caroline Calloway”, delves into the personal and working relationship between Beach and Calloway, who met while they were both studying at New York University.
In the piece, Beach claimed that she at one point ghostwrote and edited many of Calloway’s signature social media captions as well as a portion of her book ‘And We Were Like’ which was never published, in exchange for an airplane ticket Calloway bought her.
One of the biggest claims that Beach made was that Calloway - who she called the “ultimate unreliable narrator” - had bought “tens of thousands of followers” and bought ads to promote her account.
Given that her account was the basis on which the proposal for her and Beach’s book ‘And We Were Like’ had been sold on, Beach wrote, “We had sold the proposal based off a false number; wouldn’t there be consequences? If the bedrock of Caroline’s Instagram account wasn’t true, then was any of it?”
At the time of writing, Calloway has 785k followers on Instagram and her bio describes herself as “The other scam”.
According to Instagram auditing software IG Audit, an estimated 25% of her current following is fake and engagement analytics tool Hypr's stats claim that just 0.2% of her Instagram following engages with her posts.
Since the publication of Beach’s article, Calloway has seen a spike of nearly 2.5k followers according to social media analytics tool Socialblade.
Calloway revealed to Man Repeller that she had been offered half a million dollars for the memoir in 2015 by publishers Flatiron Books and had been offered "30% of the money from the deal upfront" - a sum which comes to over $166,000. Her editor, Byrd Leavell, previously worked with the website Total Frat Move, beauty writer Cat Marnell, Tucker Max and Tiffany Haddish, among many others.
Beach explained that Calloway had agreed to pay her a portion of the book fee, however, found out later through a third party that Calloway claimed she was “not sure” if she would be able to finish her book in early 2016.
Beach then flew to Cambridge University to help Calloway write ahead of their deadline in six months.
Despite Calloway’s Instagram painting a romantic story of an American undergrad studying in Cambridge and falling in love with a Swedish boy (who later asked her to stop writing about him after they split), Beach said she witnessed a “gap widening between the story we told and the situation on the ground”.
Beach claimed that she found evidence that Calloway frequently used prescription pills including Adderall and sleeping pills.
She added that had to at one point, she had to force Calloway to take a shower after two and a half days spent in a lace dress as well as read emails from angry university professors for her. Calloway has in the past said that she has struggled with an “Adderall addiction”.
The two young women eventually went to Amsterdam together and Calloway left Beach alone at a bar to go back to their rented Airbnb. After Beach returned to the property, she said that she called and left messages for Calloway which she never responded to.
Beach said the night turned into “one of the worst nights of my life” - which saw Beach seek shelter in train stations, face street harassment from a number of men (including a DJ who wrote poetry about “murdering Natalie Portman” and another who tried to “take me home with him”) and eventually sleep in a bathroom stall at the Fotografiemuseum.
Calloway “finally answered the door” at noon the following day, though the article does not make it clear if the influencer had been in the property the whole time.
Beach explained that their relationship became more of a working relationship, saying that she had “built my whole career around my commitment to her persona”.
As the pair were running behind schedule with the book, Beach said she had “bought us time with the publishers by writing a quarter of the manuscript by myself” - but then claimed Calloway hated what she had written and threatened to commit suicide if she wrote anymore.
Calloway eventually missed her deadline for the book and told Man Repeller that she had decided not to finish it at all, saying, “I promised a memoir where the only thing that happened to me were boyfriends and where the climax of my entire life experience to date was boy-related.
It wasn't long before I realized the boy-obsessed version of myself I planned to depict as my memoir's protagonist was not one I could stand behind."
Eventually, her publishers cancelled the contract and told Calloway to repay her book advance - at that point, Calloway revealed that she had already spent much of it.
To recoup her losses, Calloway began to sell annotated and sticker-covered pages of the little that had been written for $5 per chapter on Etsy. Her official website www.carolinecalloway.com is still covered in promotional materials for the doomed book and describes it as a "new kind of memoir".
Beach called her friendship with Calloway “an intoxicating, formative, challenging, infuriating and deeply important relationship of mine” on Twitter, announcing the article.
Calloway has since seen the article and shared it in an Instagram post, as well as changing the link in her bio to The Cut piece.
Calloway said she would be reading the article today for the first time with her therapist and noted that she had seen the response online saying, "I mean WHAT? this is an odd day. When I pulled up the news results for me I saw that this story had already been picked up by Jezebel, Business Insider, Cosmo... Even the New Haven Register. Last night my name was trending at third on Twitter in the United States."
She added that she would be "writing my response to her essay", saying, "I have some things to say."
In another post, Calloway criticised Beach for detailing her battle with suicidal thoughts - revealing in a string of text messages that it wasn’t “fair”.
She also added that she had lodged a complaint with a member of The Cut's team.
Although Calloway did say to her followers that she “didn’t want you to find out like this” and also that she “[didn’t] resent Natalie for revealing I was suicidal”, Calloway’s text messages reveal that she took issue with Beach’s characterisation of why she was suicidal.
“On the phone the only thing I said that was important to me that you get right is regarding the time when I was suicidal,” Calloway wrote in her texts, “She’s a wonderful writer. Life no longer seemed worth living because I had sold a memoir I couldn’t and didn’t want to write and I was living with an addiction I didn’t know how to solve.”
Calloway posted a number of Instagram posts and stories in the lead up to Beach’s article. They flip-flopped between her being “pissed” and calling whatever Beach would eventually write a “dramedic [sic] masterpiece."
She said in one caption, “I wrote about Natalie’s upcoming article because I guessed that by using my access to the largest audience of people interested in Caroline Calloway—an audience only I have access to—I could ramp up anticipation...I write about my life—and if I can make my art and express myself AND help my friends, I do.”
Calloway also wrote that she was “in a much better place than I was three years ago” and shared an image of a commemorative Yale plate - a reference to Beach’s revelation that Calloway hoarded Yale memorabilia in a “Yale box” after being rejected from the university.
Beach said that in her article that she had gifted Calloway a set of Yale plates and Calloway burst into tears at the sight of them, before claiming that they had been stolen from her apartment along with a ring - though Beach noted that she eventually saw Calloway wearing the ring again.
Calloway wrote, “I’m ready to make jokes about the Yale plates.”
Calloway also hinted at a potential follow up to Beach’s article with The Cut’s competitor New York Times, as she tagged the outlet’s internet culture reporter Taylor Lorenz in her post.
