Grown woman pretends to be high school student to get more Instagram follows
Audrey Francisquini, 28, has been arrested for the crime of trying to relive her youth—and get a bunch of new Instagram followers in the process. In a scheme so perfectly harebrained that it feels like it drifted out of some parallel, cartoon logic dimension, this adult woman decided that the best way to grow her online following was to dress up like a teenager and walk around a high school handing out pamphlets with her Instagram handle on them.
In The Washington Post’s article on Francisquini, we learn she was caught on Monday pretty soon after students at Miami’s American Senior High School realized that their cool new transfer was actually a dirty millennial with a job at Carnival Cruises and not a hip young Gen Z-er. Before her arrest, Francisquini walked around giving students pamphlets about her Instagram account, which apparently “featured videos and several images of her wearing a ‘devil’s mask’” that one kid described as “crazy” and “very creepy.”
Francisquini didn’t immediately flee the school when she learned the fuzz was onto her plan. Despite being questioned twice by campus security guards, she kept handing out her Instagram promos and bugging students. Eventually, when she “noticed school administrators coming toward her,” Francisquini took off. She was later caught—”thanks to the flier with her Instagram handle”—but made a valiant, last-ditch effort to get more followers out of her big day, by posting “I legit have I don’t know how many cops outside right now of my house” on Instagram right before she was arrested. She was “charged with felony trespassing, misdemeanor interfering with a school, and resisting arrest without violence.”
Some of the details from Francisquini’s story are almost unbelievably on-the-nose examples of life imitating art. Just like Steve Buscemi’s 30 Rock PI, the woman walked around the high school with an actual skateboard under one arm (the article describes her as carrying a painting under another). She was also, like Buscemi’s character, a former cop—only Francisquini was fired from that position four years ago “when she was arrested and accused of hacking into another officer’s social media accounts and then posting nude images of the officer.”
No word has surfaced yet as to whether she was a member of a “special task force of very young-looking cops” back in her police days, but, considering the rest of the story, we’re just going to assume that’s the case.
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