Advertisement

‘Gatsby of Cambridge’ Caroline Calloway lied on university application

Caroline Calloway - Andrew Crowley
Caroline Calloway - Andrew Crowley

A social media influencer who was dubbed the “Gatsby of Cambridge” for the glamorous parties she attended has revealed she lied to secure a place at the university.

Caroline Calloway, an American student, rose to notoriety in 2015 when she attracted hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers for documenting her social life at the University of Cambridge, including “Harry Potter-like castles, Jane Austen-like balls”, and young men playing polo. Publicity around her social media account resulted in a $500,000 (£400,000) book deal.

However, it now appears that Ms Calloway should never have got into St Edmund’s College in the first place. She told Vanity Fair: “I lied on my application. I forged my transcript when I got in.”

Ms Calloway, now 31, says she is preparing to release her first memoir, titled Scammer. She told Vanity Fair that she won a place to study History of Art at Cambridge on her third attempt, after receiving rejections from Harvard, Yale and Oxford.

She applied for an undergraduate course after first studying at New York University.

“I couldn’t live the rest of my life with an NYU email address,” she told the magazine.

Captions on her social media posts while at Cambridge included “The time Oscar flew us to Venice for Valentine’s Day”, and “The time my friend Max and I went to a ball at Blenheim Palace”.

She told Varsity in 2020 that the parties she threw in her rented rooms at Downing and King’s in her second and third years earned her the reputation of the “Gatsby of Cambridge”.

Caroline Calloway - Barcroft Media
Caroline Calloway - Barcroft Media

“I feel like I’m in Harry Potter, turning up for dinner in the grand hall in my robes and having beautiful three-course meals,” she told MailOnline when she was a student. “I’m still getting used to which way to lean when they serve you.

“I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve had to Google ‘etiquette’. Not because I necessarily want to change to be British but more because I don’t want to horribly embarrass myself or be rude to the host. It’s been a steep learning curve but so much fun. The British just have so many forks but I love all the history.”

She said she secured a $500,000 book deal with the publisher Flatiron to write a memoir called And We Were Like about her life and relationships.

However, her commercial endeavours then began to unravel. She never wrote the book and said she was forced to pay back $100,000, blaming her party lifestyle and an addiction to Adderall.

She returned to New York, where she sold tickets for $165 a pop to attend “creativity workshops” in 2019 to help repay her publisher.

However, she was soon dubbed “the next Fyre Festival scammer” amid claims that she sold tickets before booking any venues.

A Netflix documentary exposed how hundreds of wealthy young people, who parted ways with thousands of dollars to attend the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, faced makeshift tents and wild dogs roaming the island in an environment that was compared to a war zone.

Ms Calloway later pledged to refund all tickets for her workshops after a New York event that saw her talk haphazardly about her life story and hand out clip-on orchids instead of the promised flower crowns.

Later that year, Ms Calloway’s former best friend Natalie Beach wrote an article for The Cut which exposed how Ms Calloway had launched her social media profile by buying tens of thousands of followers. Ms Beach revealed that she had been paid to edit Instagram posts for Ms Calloway and had co-written her book proposal.

Ms Calloway subsequently decided to wipe clean her Instagram account and reinvent herself as a writer. Speaking to Vice earlier this year, she said: “Remember when people used to be able to smoke on planes because they didn’t know it was bad for you? That was like the early days of social media. I just had no idea that it was causing lung cancer down the road.”

Her long-planned book, she says, she hopes will find readers “exactly when” they need it.

Responding to claims that the former student lied to get into Cambridge, a spokesperson for St Edmund’s College told Varsity, the student newspaper: “We cannot comment on individual students, however, we take statements like this very seriously.”