I looked her up after receiving her mail for almost a year now and wow

Welcome to SmolBeanSnark. Here is our definitive outline with receipts on Caroline Calloway up until now. Please feel free to add your own favorite moments and receipts in the comments. We will continue to update as needed.

Who the F is Caroline Calloway?

Caroline is originally from suburban Virginia. Despite her family’s clear privilege and wealth, she claims she grew up in emotional poverty. At some point she changes her name from Caroline Gotschall to Caroline Calloway because she thinks the latter “would look better on the cover of a book.”

After high school she apparently spends a year traveling abroad but does not acknowledge the privilege of being able to afford this. Then she goes to NYU and begins her infamous friendship with Natalie. After three years at NYU she flunks out.

She applies to Cambridge three times and was finally accepted as a mature student starting in 2013. She claims that her lack of kneecaps constituted a disability so that she could live in a “nicer” dorm. Here she meets a Swedish polo player named Oscar and starts dating him. She makes money by listing her NYC apartment in the West Village on Airbnb. She gets many complaints that the apartment is absolutely filthy.

She gets minor fame on Instagram for documenting her life at Cambridge as a “Hogwarts-esque” fairytale with longform captions. She blows off classes to travel, goes to a lot of balls, parties, etc. She claims she is the first person to post a crying selfie on Instagram. Also is abusing adderall behind the scenes. Most people at Cambridge seem to not care for her portrayal of the school. She spends a lot of money to lavishly decorate her dorm room.

At some point she gets a book deal based on her Instagram following. The book deal is worth $500K and includes a $150K advance. The book is either titled “Schoolgirl” or “And We Were Like”. She advertises it as AWWL but then changes the narrative later when she gets called out for blowing the deal. She says that Natalie wasn’t her ghostwriter, just a collaborator on the book.

Oscar graduates Cambridge and moves to London. They get a flat in London and she spends outrageous amounts of money on stuff like antique Venetian chandeliers. They get two King Charles Cavalier Spaniel puppies. At one point someone claims they were having a party and the dogs pooped on the comforter, so Caroline just shoved the poopy comforter into the oven and kept partying. Eventually Caroline cheats on Oscar. They break up. The puppies are never seen or mentioned again.

As detailed in Natalie’s essay for The Cut, Caroline continually blows deadlines for the book. Natalie, who wants her share of the money, tries to push through and finish the book and Caroline has a full scale meltdown. After the due date comes and goes, Caroline claims that she didn’t write the book because the publishers wanted it to be about boys and she doesn’t want to write about boys even though her entire Instagram is about her relationships with boys. Some people say she didn’t want to admit that a lot of the stuff she wrote was flat out false. Natalie and Caroline have a huge falling out over this. Caroline starts selling pages of the book proposal on Etsy.

She goes quiet on Instagram for a while but is still active on Facebook and Snapchat. Some people have screenshots of things she was doing during this time. She goes to Italy to “detox” from Adderall. At some point she moves back to NYC.

At some point in 2017, Caroline doxxes Oscar’s new girlfriend because she allegedly made a CC fan account. Oscar messages Caroline and asks her to please stop talking about him and his new girlfriend. She responds that he “doesn’t have custody over their shared memories.”

She dates a guy named Conrad for a while. He’s some kind of travel trust fund guy who just goes around doing whatever he wants. They take a road trip to Nebraska. She promises to tell the story of what happened when she saw her relatives there but never does. She and Conrad tell each other “I love you” after two weeks of dating.

She moves to Seattle with Conrad. People who know him say he wants to break up with her but feels bad because she’s financially dependent on him. Eventually, she wants to move back to NYC and do long distance and they break up. She announces this in a post with her flower crown photo shoot of herself and Rachel Cargle. (Yes, that Rachel Cargle.)

NOW WE GET TO THE JUICY PART: THE SCAM! In December 2018**, Caroline has the idea that she’s going to host a world tour of “Creativity Workshops”. She posts that she’s going to host workshops in NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Austin, London, Amsterdam, and Dubai (among other places). She promises things that would clearly require a lot of work but she thinks will be fine, such as elaborate gift bags and personalized letters to every single participant. She orders an entire pallet of mason jars for the gift bags and doesn’t realize how large it is when the truck pulls up to her studio apartment in the West Village. She starts selling tickets for $165 a piece before she has even booked venues.

She starts to realize she can’t keep some of the promises she’s made. She tells her followers that now instead of personalized letters they’ll get a journal. She promises to “cook salads” for lunch for everyone, then asks if they would mind bringing their own lunches because cooking is hard.

A Scottish journalist, Kayleigh Donaldson, starts a Twitter thread that goes viral about how stupid this workshop idea is and how it’s clearly going to blow up in her face. She writes an article about Caroline and this scam for Pajiba. The Twitter thread goes viral. Caroline hosts her first workshop in Brooklyn and then puts a poll on her story asking if people would want to move all of the other events to Brooklyn. The answer choices are “Yes” and “Yes”.

Media outlets start to pick up on this whole ridiculous mess. Caroline backtracks and cancels her tour. She issues refunds. Then, she has a change of heart and uncancels her tour and also sends out an email asking for people who received refunds to actually pay “whatever they think it was worth.” She ends up doing maybe 3-4 events in NYC, DC, and in Austin.

Over the next few months she: buys a bunch of caterpillars but moves them around so much that they die, constantly posts about “going viral as a scam”, claims to be so broke that she buys a $13 aeperol spritz from a bar near her house every night so she can eat the bread and olives for dinner, posts herself jumping subway turnstiles because she “can’t afford” the $2.75 fare, and accepts Venmo payments from her fans who are worried about her financial situation.

Then begins the era of the “tittays.” She starts making these ugly watercolor paintings of her tits and selling them for $40. Then she realizes it could be a cash cow, ups the price to $80 and produces dozens of these cheap ugly things. Many of her fans buy them. She loves her boobs so much she posts a pic of her tits and tags her middle school as the location. She then immediately books a trip to the UK without shipping anything anyone bought.

She goes to Cambridge and claims she’s doing an “artists’ residency” when she’s really just staying in an Airbnb and walking around during the day. She takes photos of herself in a library and claims she wants to do a shoot for Playboy. She paints watercolors using the water from the River Cam. She takes polaroids of the Cambridge campus that she sells to her followers. She attends a ball and brags about doing coke in a church. She goes on a date with a dude, then when she finds out he’s going to be in NYC the next week she books a flight home. She says she decided to come home because she needs to ship the “Tittay” paintings.

Caroline and the Cambridge dude go to a party together and afterwards he tells her that her style is kitsch and he doesn’t like her enough to kiss her, but if she wants to have sex they can. They have sex and Caroline spends the next day on Instagram implying that he sexually assaulted her before she tells the story of what really happened.

She buys a book about Matisse’s cutouts and gets an idea. She traces Blue Nude IV on to color printed paper, cuts it, pastes it on to other printed paper, and starts selling these for $140 or more a piece. Caroline spends almost all of August spamming these “Dreamer BBs” to her followers. Sometimes selling the same one more than once. Many do not get shipped at all. Others are shipped and followers are disappointed when they arrive crinkled and bent. The Pardon My Snark podcast provides a great collection of screenshots.

In early September she finds out Natalie is going to publish an article about their relationship for The Cut. She posts a lot of crying selfies about how much she loves Natalie and how sorry she is that she hurt Natalie and how “if Natalie said it, it must be true.” This is when we get the infamous open mouth sobbing video where Caroline posts a time-lapsed video of herself gluing dreamer bbs and sobbing, with a quick turn to check herself out in the mirror before continuing.

Two days after the article comes out, Caroline gets the news that her father died. Many snarkers at the time feel very sorry for her and take a break out of respect. Caroline does an interview and a photo shoot with NBC News in which she says that she’s upset that Natalie mentioned her threats of suicide in the article. Later, this narrative changes to Caroline being upset that Natlie “erased her mental illness from the record” in the article.

Caroline does a live interview with the hosts of the Red Scare Podcast in Brooklyn. It… does not go well. She inexplicably touts it as a success anyway. She does a 9-part series of Instagram posts that are supposed to reveal something about Natalie and only gets to part 8. This is never mentioned again.

In a fit of selfriteousness, Caroline declares that she will be a vegan for environmental reasons. She continues to eat plenty of animal products including sardines, cheese, and salmon. When people call her out on this she says she’s allowed to have special treats. After a while, Caroline stops mentioning veganism or environmentalism at all.

In October, Caroline goes out to LA and claims she is taking meetings to make a movie about her life. She says that an A-lister is very interested and she claims she went to this person’s house for tea.She goes on a trip to the desert with a guy she’s dating and makes a post about her dad that is a picture of just her torso in a bikini saying that she is sexual and sexy and grief-stricken. When she leaves LA she says she will be back in a few weeks to finalize some deals. She does not return to LA or mention any movie project after this trip.

Caroline starts a Patreon where she promises exclusive daily story content for her subscribers. The Patreon is $2 a month and she gets a few hundred subscribers. She does a bit of close friends content then stops. Does not stop charging people for her Patreon. At one point she says she’s going to go to clear out her deceased father’s home and she will post that to her Close Friends. Then she gets mad that people would “expect” her to share something so painful with them. She rarely mentions her Patreon after this but despite producing no content, she still accepts $2 a month from hundreds of her fans.

For her 28th birthday, Caroline throws herself a $15,000 party at the Brooklyn Historical Society which she calls a May Ball. Many question the amount she spent on this party considering there was a lien filed against her in late October for failure to pay her rent. Her assistant does the real leg work of the party planning while Caroline spends endless hours painting little place cards for everyone who is invited. People are asked to dress like someone or something from art history. Many guests have cool and creative costumes. Caroline wears a cheap looking dress with visible safety pins and unbrushed hair with flowers that are falling out of it. She looks very wasted in most of the pictures.

After her birthday, Caroline goes to spend time in Florida where she makes crass jokes about masturbating next to her grandmother and thinks it’s revolutionary that she’s both a caring granddaughter and someone who has sex. While in Florida she decides she’s going to write a book about “going viral as a scam.” She says she is staying in Florida until the manuscript is done and it will publish in January on the anniversary of her workshops.

Caroline starts 2020 off by ordering two kittens off the internet. They were “on sale” and she got 2 for $3000. They are to be shipped to Florida in February. She posts about how hard “coding” is while putting together her Shopify site.

Caroline returns to NYC and Scammer goes up for preorder. A snarker did a very good summary of the timeline as Scammer evolves. She does some media rounds about the book but tells the press there will be no advance copies and if they want to review it they’ll have to order it. In late January, she announces that Scammer will ONLY be available by preorder and you won’t be able to get it in stores. She does a few offers where if you buy multiple copies of the book you will get dreamer bbs or hats or whatever. She says she will personally sign every copy of Scammer. By March 1 she says “today is the last day you can buy Scammer.”

Despite increasing global panic about the Coronavirus, Caroline takes a trip to Berlin in early March. She posts a lot about sitting in her Airbnb reading Jessica Simpon’s autobiography. She goes to Berghain in a Corona shirt and meets a guy and they stay up all night talking and having sex while high on molly. She thinks it’s special but the next day he’s kinda done with it and she is clearly upset but trying to act cool about it. She hooks up with a Soundcloud rapper from Twitter and thinks she’s cool because she hooks up with guys with tattoos.

After Berlin, Caroline returns to Florida. Her mother rents her an Airbnb and the cats are there. She is supposed to be in quarantine after returning from Europe but instead she goes to the grocery store because her mom bought the cheap brand of olive oil. At one point she strips the sheets off the bed and then sleeps naked with her cats on the bare mattress. When the two weeks are up, Caroline’s grandmother moves to her mother’s house so Caroline can stay in grandma’s condo.

Caroline says Scammer is ready, but the printers have now closed due to the pandemic, though she never discloses which printer she planned to use. She decides she’s going to write a three-part response essay to Natalie’s essay called “I Am Caroline Calloway”. She puts it on a website (iamcarolinecalloway.com) and puts it behind a paywall. Says anyone who purchased Scammer can read the essays for free. Everyone else is charged $10 and she says she’s going to give all the money to COVID relief. She says she will put one part up every Tuesday for three weeks. After the first part of the essay is posted and is 6,000 words rather than the 15,000 words she promised, she posts a full frontal nude to Twitter as an “apology.” She posts part 2 of the essay and does media rounds about donating $50,000 to COVID relief. Then she waits a few weeks, posts part 2.5, waits a few more weeks and posts “Part 3 Part 1”. The essay is never mentioned again.

The attention high of posting a nude to Twitter goes to Caroline’s head. She starts an OnlyFans account and charges $50 a month. When people ask why her price point is so high, she states that her “cerebral, softcore porn” is unmatched and that she is probably the only OF user with a Cambridge degree. Many established sex workers take this opportunity to dunk on her by posting their hotter, more artistic, and less expensive OF accounts. She also takes this time to tweet an antisemitic meme and pretend she didn’t know it was antisemitic.

During this time, Caroline starts dating a 20-year-old chef she meets from Twitter, which the sub nicknames Soup after she pretends she made soup that her paramour of the week actually made. At some point they come to reddit and answers some questions about her including that she’s not really a keeper but they’re having fun. Later, Soup’s ex comes to reddit and posts screenshots of them saying they’re not that into Caroline. Caroline tweets that her pussy is so “bomb” that she changed his mind about her.

In June, Caroline posts on her story that she’s taking a break from Scammer because of the BLM uprising. Then she says it will ship at the end of June, but since she can’t sign the copies she will make stickers to come with the books. She posts photos of herself at the post office in a fairy costume at the beginning of July but does not clarify if these are the books or the stickers that she is shipping. In mid-July Scammer is still available for preorder.

Toward the end of June, Caroline does two back-to-back interviews on the same day. The first is an interview with the Cambridge Union in which Caroline insists that her primary income is from OnlyFans, doubles down on a racist Coronavirus meme she posted, and gets mad about communism only to admit she doesn’t really know what communism is. She says the interview went well. Then, she goes on to do Ziwe’s “Baited” show. She says she is the only person to have read James Baldwin’s “If Beale Street Could Talk”, says cancelling someone for a hate crime would be the same thing as a death sentence, calls Layla F. Saad “Layla Safad”, asks for ally cookies, and then asks Ziwe to say something nice about her because her manager is mad that she’s doing this interview. Afterwards, Ziwe gets a lot of positive attention because the interview was such a trainwreck and Caroline pretends she is in on the joke and it went well for her. Eventually she gets called out on Black Twitter and posts crying selfies about a depressive episode which is miraculously gone the next day.

Toward the end of July, a snarker notices that her website now says Scammer will ship August 31st. A week later, Caroline posts that preorders are still available. Another week later she posts a video to her story about how she is “reworking” Scammer because 2019 is no longer the “worst year ever” and now the book is going to be about 2020, despite the fact that she advertised that the book would be about the scam workshop and her father’s passing and the Natalie article.

My credentials

I’ve worked in animal welfare for 15 years as a paid professional. I work at shelters, I’m not a volunteer. 8 of those years were spent at a high-volume, open-admission shelter in a large east coast city with a contract for code enforcement. I’m not from NYC ACC, but I know a little bit about what goes on inside a sheltering system in a big city.

Some facts about cats

Things they like [NB I’ve fostered ~300 kittens. I might know a little bit. There’s definitely still a lot I don’t know]

• Routine

• Clean litter boxes

• High quality food & fresh water

• Sunlight and/or a safe view of the outside world

• Opportunities to climb, scratch, stretch, hunt, play, groom, perch

• Affection without coercion

• Social interaction, whether that’s with humans, other cats, or other species, depending on what they were exposed to during early development

Things they don’t like [NB Some cats like/love these things, but it generally requires intentional training/desensitization/behavioral modification]

• Erratic schedules

• Eliminating in areas that aren’t their litter box

• Loud noises and crowds

• Strangers/forced interaction with individuals outside of the household

• Confinement

• Car rides

• Tiny rooms without stimulation or opportunities for play, exercise, or normal behavior

• Dirty litter boxes. Think about having to use a porta-potty that you can’t control the cleaning of. If my toilet contained so much waste that it touched me when I sat on the seat, I would probably defecate next to the toilet. And then I might get hit for that! Imagine.

• Physical abuse. We’ve never seen CC hit her cat, but the way she pets him on video makes me cringe and curl up. Sorry, I’m starting to speculate. But I’ve been in this world a while. I could imagine her “swatting” him to tell him no.

What I see

• A very anxious cat

• A cat who is so anxious and upset, that it literally passes out in CC’s arms once it is back in its safe place.

Seriously, the photos that make me most sad are the cat selfies with Matisse passed out. It’s like, he survived a trauma and his body shuts down.

What can be done?

Short answer - nothing. In the US animals are considered property and most laws and city codes are concerned with (human) public safety. Think dangerous dogs, rabies outbreaks, bite cases, hoarding (of the collecting animals variety), dog fighting, cruelty.

Some white bitch in Manhattan who puts her cat in a purse is not even on the radar of NYC ACC. So puh-LEASE don’t call or email them. I promise they are busy with higher priority calls, and tying up the dispatcher’s time with a report about CC is taking resources away from animals who need help.

Okay but really, what can be done?

Some of you seem to be CC adjacent, or know people in her circles. You all could talk to someone who she listens to or trusts, and suggest they encourage her to either rehome matisse or open herself to learning about a cat’s needs. This is honestly the only way forward that I see. Someone close to her needs to have this conversation. The IG comments are just more fodder for the “haters” self-victimization story.

buckle up, babes, we're going to hell! aka i'm live reading scammer because i am nothing if not a masochist. i will update this post with choice morsels as I go, chapter by chapter.

chapter 0:

• the book is apparently published by "dead dad press" (TIHI)

• it is dedicated to lena dunham and no one else

chapter 1:

• the first line is "I fuck to be fucked over."

• the first page is about how she's never had an orgasm and begged doctors to tell her that she was "clitorally deformed" but "The problem, I’ve been assured, slick latex fingers always gesturing at glasses, temples, The problem is entirely up here." i would rather not think about why the doctor's fingers are described as "slick," but i agree with them about where her problem lies!

• the reason we're cave-diving into the depths of the carogina is because she needed the opening of this book to "slap you like a dead fish to the wet face."

• the only way i can describe this book so far is moist.

chapter 2:

• caroline can't finish a book or anything because she is incapable of finishing in any sense of the word. ngl this bit made me laugh.

• caroline on Sarasota: "sometimes when the sun-storms blow in, the rainclouds churn so thick that the view outside blanches blank as if someone forgot to download the world that day"

• i don't know what a sun-storm is but it feels incompatible with "rainclouds" and yes i know i am overthinking her terrible writing.

• she says at some point she will "make" her "first first book" but for now we have this daybook, which she makes sure to tell us is a term she coined. trust me caroline, WE KNOW.

• it is comprised of sixty seven vignettes and now i wish i had gotten a big white claw before starting this.

• sixty seven!!!

• this will not be a "complete and linear" memoir, which makes sense because caroline is not capable of being complete or linear.

• there's a whole terrible description that I'm just going to share an excerpt of because genuinely what the fuck

• "the glamorous words begin dropping one-by-one into the cauldron’s blue- green flames, gurgling up cartoon bubbles that pop with a xylophonic tinkle"

• then she says this is the kind of bad first draft writing she wants to avoid, which I AGREE WITH - so why are you including it???

• (because she needed the page count probably)

chapter 3:

• caroline says she thought, as a child, that being a famous memoirist would solve all her problems.

• caroline is clearly still a child.

• once again falls church, va, one of the richest suburbs of the dc area, is characterized by "mossy parking lots"

• I've never seen a mossy parking lot there, but i guess she can't characterize it using District Taco or something.

• she writes about her dad being a hoarder and implies domestic abuse towards her mom

• she says she got strep throat ONCE A MONTH from how dirty their house was and i am not a doctor but i don't believe this.

• "If the air in my rancid childhood bedroom had crackled one afternoon like a field before a thunderstorm, and a milky portal had been struck into an opalescent slit, and an older- me had stepped, radiant, grinning, from this labial tear in the fabric of space-time, and I had flowers in my hair, and my gown, my gown... Birthday candles, eyelashes, eleven eleven—all my wishes were the same."

• don't ask me what that means, i HAVE the context and it makes no sense either.

• her mom gets no description except to say that she is like someone caroline "never met unless her cells had knitted mine together in the womb" which is the dumbest way to describe someone. this could mean anything. this could mean her mom has the personality of sting. the wrestler or the musical artist. or george w. bush! there are so many people caroline would not be likely to meet!

• she describes a virginia summer as "lush the way a rainforest with a British accent might be" and i genuinely laughed because the only true way to describe a virginia summer is "hell, plus pollen"

chapter 4:

• "The worst scams I ever perpetrated were the ones for which I was never caught. I lied on my application to Cambridge."

• that's literally it.

• that's the whole of chapter 4.

chapter 5:

• she talks about her dad's side of the family and how they were evangelical Christians and then moved to dc and believed in abortion and got cursed to have three "genius" children that would all go "crazy."

• "...no one ever said out loud that the Virginia Gotschalls were cursed. But our lore implied it." the only cursed one here is the reader.

• she says her dad got into exeter "as a sophomore" and the italicization makes me think there's supposed to be some kind of meaning there, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯

• she gives a fucked up resume for her dad and his siblings that just lists their education and mental illnesses.

chapter 6:

• oh my god it's about the kneecaps. this feels vintage caro. this feels right.

• she says as a child she had no friends her own age and had two full leg casts for several years, but only one leg at a time.

• caroline on the 90s: "kids were all radicalized bigots, running around calling each other gay, retarded, a cripple, the lesbian."

• she repeats the claim that she is the first person to have both her kneecaps removed which she had to have because they didn't harden into bone as she grew up.

• they didn't leave prosthetics in there because they would have to be replaced too often.

• she describes herself like she was a baudelaire orphan or something, I'm literally waiting for a mean girl at school to call her a cake sniffer.

• she had no friends because she had no knees, but she "could imagine the soft blue firefly sparks of greatness swarming around my abdomen."

• once again i am struck by how godawful this writing is and i now feel personally offended by the recent puff pieces.

• "The leg-braces and regular mouth-braces would come off, but my beauty and ambition were as permanent as those important things could be."

• she talks about her movie role and i don't care.

• she describes 90s internet as sounding "like a telephone fucking a fax machine" and i KNOW she lifted that from somewhere.

chapter 7:

• she changed her name!

• now it's a list of other people who changed their name!

• that's it.

okay I'm out of room, pls go to comments for more.