‘Gatsby of Cambridge’ Caroline Calloway lied on university application

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”.