Influencer Caroline Calloway sparks fury while revealing how she survived Hurricane Milton after refusing to evacuate

Controversial influencer Caroline Calloway has doubled down on her decision not to evacuate during Hurricane Milton. 

Calloway, 32, posted a shocking Instagram video on Tuesday, saying she was 'going to die' because she refused to evacuate her Sarasota home. 

Since then, she has taken to X to chronicle her experiences, seemingly proving to her nearly 58,000 followers that she is unfazed by the raging hurricane.  

She has even taken the opportunity to advertise 'how cute' her book is a number of times.  

'I’m not evacuating for the hurricane. I live in Sarasota, on the beach, in evacuation zone A,' Calloway previously wrote on X.

'For more great advice, buy my second book! It’s called Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life. It’s about to come out if I survive! It’s an advice book'

She also wrote, 'I have champagne and four generations of Floridians in my veins. It’ll be fine' as well as the clever 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 hurricane.'

She captioned the video: 'I’ve always lived in the eye of the storm (emotionally, but now also physically at this precise moment).' 

She said that she did not lose power and the water outside her home was 'totally still.'

Calloway added it had been 'so loud' outside just moments before she started recording.

In another post, she showed heavy rain pour and aggressive winds next to the same area completely still just 'seconds later.'

Many X users rushed to share their disapproval and skepticism of Calloway's hurricane-driven content. 

'Amazing that you found a way to make a hurricane that will devastate thousands of people ALL ABOUT YOU,' one user wrote. 

Another chimed in: 'Caroline, I cannot believe this. Like, really, I cannot. A Category 5 hurricane is rolling in, you’re sitting in Zone A, literally the first area they tell to evacuate, and your response is to double down on the danger for some cute internet post?'

Others were far less kind, calling her names and wishing bad things upon her. 

Some however showed their support for the influencer, urging her to 'get inside' and be safe. 

A fan wrote, 'Caroline stay safe!!!!! We need you!!!!'

In her original hurricane post from Tuesday, she said: 'So if you've been following Hurricane Milton, um, I'm going to die! It's supposed to make landfall in the Sarasota-Bradenton area. I'm in Sarasota, I live on the water, it's zone A, mandatory evacuation.'

Calloway then attempted to explain why she didn't get out of her home in time for the storm.

'I can't drive, first of all. Second of all, the airport is close. Third of all, the last time I evacuated for a hurricane, I went to my mom's house in Northport for Hurricane Ian,' she said.

'Her whole street flooded and we were evacuated after three days without power or running water by the U.S. military,' Calloway revealed.

'It was very traumatic and so I don't want to evacuate to my mom's house because the last time I did that, it was the worst time ever!'

Calloway became one of the first Instagram influencers when she documented her time at England's prestigious Cambridge University but was found to have faked her qualifications.

She notably paid for followers on Instagram, and defrauded hundreds of fans with 'creative workshops' that never materialized before bolting to Florida where she says she's 'not f***ed someone who can read in over two years'.

In 2015, her large Instagram following helped her secure a six-figure book deal but she failed to deliver, branding its premise 'sexist', but offering the first seven chapters for sale on Etsy.

Then her ghostwriter Natalie Beach wrote a bombshell essay in The Cut.

The essay coincided with the suicide of Calloway's father, and Calloway told followers on Instagram Stories she was struggling with depression, anxiety, and Adderall addiction, while consumed with existential questions about why she was alive.

Still needing to pay off the advance on the book she had not written, she opened an OnlyFans account in 2020 claiming that Playboy had commissioned a photoshoot with her.

She told Harvard's Crimson Magazine she imagined her subscribers to be 'boys who went to Princeton and now work on Wall Street and who think I would have been mean to them in middle school'.

But her subscribers were not enough to stop her being evicted from her West Village apartment by a landlord who sued her for $40,000 and damage to the building.

That summer a BBC documentary 'My Insta Scammer Friend' dealt her reputation another blow as former followers detailed their abusive relationship with her.

'I was 10 out of 10 obsessed with Caroline Calloway,' Genevieve Wheeler told the program-makers.

'She would like your posts and it felt like Christmas morning. It was the greatest thing in the world.'

'I would definitely say I was addicted,' said Caitlin Vickers. 'I wanted to be living that life so much.'

She told followers she wanted them to 'grow old with me' and watch her fall in love and get married.

But many lost money on her 'creativity workshops' and were devastated when Calloway revealed her mercenary side shortly before quitting social media in 2021.

'Do you know hard it is to conjure fame and money out of thin air?' she demanded. 'And I'm f***ing killing it.

'Big picture: I want fame, power and money and people talking about me is part of that.'

She transferred from NYU to Cambridge with Beach, who admitted she was dazzled by 'the most confident girl I'd ever known'.

'She seemed like an adult, someone who had just gone ahead and constructed a life of independence. I, meanwhile, was a virgin with a meek ponytail, living in a railroad apartment that was sinking into the Gowanus Canal,' she wrote.

'She was constantly calling me her best friend and work wife, telling me she loved me. I thought we were in this together.'

But Calloway later admitted she had been turned on by Beach's account of being sexually assaulted, and cruelly compared her figure to that of a pot-bellied man she had had sex with.

Three years later she was likened to notorious Fyre Festival conman Billy McFarland after selling $165 tickets to a nationwide 'Creativity Workshop Tour', which promised tutorials on building an Instagram brand, developing ideas, and addressing 'the emotional and spiritual dimensions of making art'.

But most of the events were cancelled with Calloway urging some ticket buyers in Philadelphia to get on a train to New York for one of the few that went ahead.

'It was this sickening feeling,' fan Abigail Scott said. 'A lightbulb went off … She was just looking at her fans as a way to make money.'

Relocating to Sarasota in Florida she cashed in on her reputation with a 2023 memoir called Scammer in which she described the plaque she hoped would one day sit outside her former New York apartment.

Sold through her revived Instagram account and self-published through her imprint Dead Dad publishing it was well received by reviewers with the New Yorker describing it as 'funny, engaging, and full of genuine insight'.

She told the Crimson she expects it to be the first of a trilogy of 'juvenilia' answering her critics before she tries to put her past behind her.

'It's been terrible for my reputation,' she said. 'I mean, people finally know that I'm not a scammer now. How am I supposed to keep up my reputation when people are out here slandering my name?'

Earlier this month she told the No Jumper podcast she was only dating men who know nothing about her past, but she 'hates' them.

She remained in the path of Hurricane Milton as it churned toward a potentially catastrophic collision along the west coast of Florida but appears to have emerged unscathed. 

The storm, which is currently a Category 1, brought wind gusts exceeding 100 mph and flooding parts of the state. Tornadoes earlier Wednesday have killed 'multiple people' in St. Lucie County. 

A Flash Flood Emergency was declared in the Tampa area through the late night hours from the high waters from, which initially made landfall as a Category 3 storm.