“Tinkerbell runs on faith, trust, and pixie dust; Caroline runs on likes, follows, and poorly advised pre-orders for her memoir that likely doesn’t exist.”— Clare Fuller, gymtanlanguish.substack.com
“Sex work tourism (as well as shock value patronage) used to really personally offend me when I was younger, but I’ve seen it enough now to accept this majestic cycle.”— Kat, titsandsass.com
“What Calloway and other celebrity drop-ins to OnlyFans fail to realize is that sex work is actual, serious labor, not a bandwagon to hop on.”— Claire Downs, elle.com
“It was more important to her to be seen as an author than it was to be an author. She didn’t know how to be an author.”— Byrd Leavell, backmattermag.com
“Caroline Calloway hasn’t done or written anything worthy of all the media attention she’s receiving. She’s not a criminal, or a scammer, or even a particularly good writer. She’s just a privileged twenty-something-year-old woman with an artsy, aesthetically pleasing Instagram.”— Kirby Davis, miamistudent.net
“The idea that she thought nice penmanship might sexually sway a boy fills me with tenderness.”— Megan Angelo, nbcnews.com
“At this moment I’m practicing the skill set of not trying to get you to like me. Like, whether or not you like me, I like me.”— Caroline Calloway, nbcnews.com
“When a white woman commits fraud, it excites us before we even know the story. We lick our lips and sharpen the digital guillotine. We cannot wait for these public beheadings.”— Nayomi Reghay, vox.com
“Responsible journalism outlets ought to stop running pieces that amount to personal grievances.”— Tiana Lowe, washingtonexaminer.com
“I mean, I can think of at least a dozen other socially manipulative, intellectually bankrupt writers who’ve perpetuated far worse personal and professional scams, but who my peers will never air out loud because they don’t want to shake the tree and bring down a world of bird shit.”— Jeremy Gordon, theoutline.com
“I should have been having the time of my life in paradise, but Caroline had a way of making me feel small, as if I had folded myself up like a travel toothbrush so she could take me along for the trip.”— Natalie Beach, thecut.com
“To constantly preach about introspection but then lean into being a “self-obsessed mess” so much so that you put it on a hat not only says that you might not have enough respect for yourself to put distance between you and the descriptor, but also that you know that you’re allowed to be that way. Mo…”— Opheli Garcia Lawler, mic.com
“The Scam is a scam, and its winking self-referentiality serves in the end to do nothing much more than to gloss over that it is, in fact, a scam, perpetuated by someone who, probably like a lot of the people who attended the event, has a hard time meeting their rent.”— Anna Iovine, vice.com
“It’s flourishing now as one of the web’s most compelling storytelling platforms, a repository for uplifting confessions, compressed screeds, some with candidly political overtones, self-help digests, mini essays and speculative musings and, perhaps most compellingly, serialized memoirs in sound-bite…”— Ruth La Ferla, nytimes.com
“When we are talking, she lets the women around us know I am a reporter, something I’d already told them, and jokes that they should all be very mean to me. She then says she’s kidding and wants everyone to feel welcome and like they are getting the full value out of the day, even the reporters. It’s…”— Madison Malone Kircher, nymag.com
“And just like that, the Creativity Workshop by Caroline Calloway ascended into failed influencer-event heaven. I imagine the ghost of Fyre Festival met it at the gates.”— Madison Malone Kircher, thecut.com
“That Instagram influencer I occasionally check in on because she's The Worst is now charging $165 for a 4 hour "seminar" on how to be yourself.”— Kayleigh Donaldson, twitter.com