How I got hooked on Instagram celebrity Caroline Calloway

Genevieve Wheeler outlines her 'parasocial relationship' with the American influencer Caroline Calloway.

In 2013, Genevieve Wheeler was studying in Boston, Massachusetts. The aspiring writer dreamed of going to university abroad and soaking up European culture.

So when she came across a woman called Caroline Calloway on Instagram, it felt like she'd found the perfect representation of the life she wanted.

Caroline was a pretty blonde American who posted pictures of her travels around Europe, before using her account to document her time at the University of Cambridge.

"I related to her, but thought her life was better than mine, her life was what mine could be in a few years time if I got really lucky," says Genevieve. "It was like finding my new favourite young adult novel, diving in and getting really entranced. Then realising, 'wait, this person is real! I can comment on their photos and they'll interact with me!'"

Pictures of Caroline in preppy outfits in front of Cambridge's imposing gothic buildings filled her feed, along with lengthy captions detailing her relationship with her English boyfriend and musings on student life.

"It was this combination of relatability and aspiration that just completely hooked me. You wouldn't find it with your average celebrity because there are so many circumstances that led them to gain fame and status.

"But she had come from relatively similar circumstances to myself and was living this fairytale life and it was like, 'I can do this too.' The way she wrote about it was engaging to me, and I used it as a guidebook to see if I could do something similar."

As it turned out, Genevieve did get lucky – she also went to study in Europe, so when Caroline announced she was throwing a ball in Cambridge in 2015 and inviting a handful of her 500,000 Instagram followers, Genevieve booked a flight to the UK.

By this point – despite not actually conversing directly with Caroline online – Genevieve says she felt like Caroline was "my friend that my friends hadn't met". The Cambridge ball was the first time they interacted in person (pictured at top).

"It was everything I'd hoped for at the time," Genevieve says. "But retroactively, it made less sense. A bunch of people who were her friends from the internet showed up at a ball in Cambridge, and there were other Cambridge attendees [students].

"Everyone there was referring to us as like, 'Oh are you Caroline's fans?' Caroline was calling us her friends from the internet. There was a very stark divide between the people who lived in that world, and us. I was walking up to people who I didn't know from Adam but I'd seen on Caroline's Instagram and asking them about their studies, and they were totally confused. I was freaking strangers out! But it didn’t occur to me in the moment."

A BBC Three documentary, My Insta Scammer Friend, charts Caroline's rise and fall through the eyes of some of her most devoted followers, and asks how well we can really know people through the internet.

Those 500,000 followers hadn't come across Caroline's travel and lifestyle content of their own accord. It was later revealed by a former friend, Natalie Beach, that Caroline bought ads to promote her profile to potential followers on Instagram, with the aim of building enough of a presence to get a book deal.

In 2015, Caroline claimed to have received a $500,000 (£417,000) advance for a memoir. But the book never materialised – she announced in 2017 that she was withdrawing from the deal after failing to fulfil her obligations to the publisher. She also sold in-person "Creativity Workshops" for $165 (£138) per person. Two events took place - but the others were cancelled shortly afterwards, with the money being refunded. And she owed thousands in rent arrears.

In 2019, her former friend Natalie Beach published an essay, external claiming that she'd been behind Caroline's Instagram persona, ghostwriting her beguiling captions and her book proposal while Caroline struggled with a prescription pill addiction.

Feeling like a celebrity or online figure is a genuine friend is called a parasocial relationship.

Dr. Rachel Kowert, a research psychologist, says: "Traditionally, a parasocial relationship is understood as a one-sided relationship between an individual and (typically) a media personality. The rise of social media and live streaming has changed the nature of parasocial relationships fundamentally as they now hold the potential to be reciprocal."

"I absolutely over-invested," Genevieve admits. 

"My main takeaway is that if it doesn't look and feel like a real relationship, it's because it's not," she adds, when asked how she views online personalities now, compared to when she first followed Caroline.

"It's fair to have expectations but if you build this parasocial relationship with someone they don't owe you anything.

"You don't know who they really are as a person, you're just seeing the veneer they want you to see. I think five years ago I was under the impression that she was sharing her whole self online."

Providing a response to the documentary, Caroline said: "I've paid back my entire book advance. I refunded everyone from my Creativity Workshops. I owe 40k in back-rent. I've paid off debts before and I'll do it again. Natalie co-wrote my Instagram captions in the spring of 2013, before I was famous… But all the Cambridge captions… are stories about my life at uni that I wrote without her… I hired Natalie again in 2016 to co-write a book proposal.

"I made my life look better than it was on Instagram from ages 21 to 23, 2014 through 2016. Throughout 2017 and well into 2018, I took a social media hiatus to get clean from my amphetamine addiction. I've spent twice as long posting about how messy… my life is than I ever did making it into a fairytale."

You can watch My Insta Scammer Friend on BBC iPlayer.