Simone Cromer, the woman behind boundary-crossing Timothee Chalamet stan account, Club Chalamet, is becoming internet famous in her own right

Dear Gossips,   

This week, the Wall Street Journal published a profile of Simone Cromer, the 59-year-old woman behind the Club Chalamet social media stan account. If you are a healthy person with boundaries, you may not be aware of Club Chalamet, but if you are medium-to-terminally online, you’ve probably encountered the popular stan account before. She’s obsessively supportive of Timothee Chalamet, misogynistically opposed to his relationship with Kylie Jenner—whom she refers to as “Slurpee”, a normal and cool thing to do—and known for unhinged rants about everything from Chalamet’s personal life to his Oscar odds. 

And now she’s becoming internet famous in her own right for her stan life.

I dove into analysis about the WSJ profile, particularly the ineffable Kayleigh Donaldson’s piece on Substack, yearning for a return of public shame to keep people like Cromer in check. I, too, remember a time when you were embarrassed to admit you read, or worse wrote, fanfiction, went to conventions, or followed a particular actor’s trajectory closely through media. Fandom was private, the fourth wall was strong. It has eroded, though, and not always for the worse. For instance, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fanfic. I DO think it’s wrong of late-night hosts to read excerpts from explicit fics on TV for the sole purpose of embarrassing celebrities, but that shame is on them, not the fic writers and readers. 

Club Chalamet, or “Miss Club” as she’s known online, is part of a long tradition of unhinged middle-aged women stanning younger male celebrities (who are almost uniformly white, a psychologist should look into this). Twenty years ago, it was Twimoms posting unhinged content about Robert Pattinson, before him, Leonardo DiCaprio had an early online fandom of nutters, and before that…well, hard to know, for sure, because the internet has enabled all of this. But certainly, young male celebrities have long been the target of an older female demographic. The phenomenon is not new, only the method of delivery is. 

For me, the concern is less that Simone Cromer, specifically, is going to do something truly dangerous toward Chalamet. There are certainly ghosts in the margins of super-standom—Rebecca Schaeffer, murdered by her stalker on her doorstep, and Selena Quintanilla, murdered by a fan who worked for one of Selena’s businesses, to name just two—and they should not be ignored. Super-stanning rides close to a dangerous line. 

My more immediate concern is just the continued degradation of celebrity culture. It’s funny that the youths were shocked to learn Club Chalamet is not a cohort of young fans—a proper club—but one “old” lady, but it’s not funny to platform super-stanning and make it seem like a legitimate approach to celebrity. In the profile, Cromer speaks as if she knows Chalamet, as if they have some sort of relationship, but she has only encountered him a number of times at events, that’s it. And they’ve never had an honest interaction because they can’t. The very nature of her super-stanning ensures he will never be anything but polite to her. It’s bad PR if he is rude.

Propping up boundary-crossing stan accounts like Club Chalamet just spreads more poisonous irony through the celebrity gossip space, it further mainstreams parasocial behavior, and contributes to the sportification of the arts—Club Chalamet approaches Chalamet’s career as if he was a sports team chalking wins and losses, and not an artist engaged in acts of creation, some of which will, by the very nature of art, work while others don’t. I know I sound old and crotchety saying it, but things were better back in my day, when stanning was kept firmly within the constraints of anonymous online fan communities, and if you were too weird, the community would just ban you and move on, and there was a firm fourth wall between celebrity and audience.

Anyway, someone should prepare Club Chalamet for the possibility that Timothee will lose an Oscar to Leonardo DiCaprio. The Academy is weird about pretty young men anyway, and painting Timothee Chalamet as the subject of obsessive online fandom isn’t going to help him. 

Let us know what your thoughts are at The Squawk. (App link here)

Live long and gossip,

Sarah