‘Disaster Girl’ of meme fame walks among us in North Carolina. Nope, she’s not evil.
As a 4-year-old, Zoe Roth posed for a picture in front of a burning building, flashing a fiendish grin as the flames rose high.
The picture captures an innocent moment. The local fire department set fire to an old house down her street in Mebane as a training exercise, and Roth was just a bystander when her father said, “Smile,” pointing the lens her way.
But in that moment, the child from Alamance County found accidental online fame that has followed her as she becomes an adult.
The photo was published a few years later, when she was in second grade, and has wound its way across all corners of social media social media, one click at a time, ensuring Roth’s diabolical smile becomes one of the Internet’s most recognizable memes, granting her a parallel identity.
In the years since, Roth’s mischievous glare has been superimposed on countless other images: the sinking Titanic, the burning Hindenburg, a pair of dinosaurs cowering beneath a falling meteor. The joke remains the same: perhaps this cute kid caused this catastrophe. “Clean what room?” reads one caption below Roth’s face.
Now 21 and a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, Roth tries to keep her parallel identity at bay. But it resurfaced on Twitter during the collective mourning over Roy Williams’ retirement as UNC basketball coach, when people on campus realized, as Roth knows they all eventually will, that Disaster Girl walks among them.
“Nobody’s ever seen my face and realized, which is kind of nice for me. I don’t usually bring it up,” she said in a Zoom interview with The News & Observer. “Because I know that it will always get brought up eventually. I don’t think it’s a huge part of my personality because it doesn’t, like, reflect me. I didn’t choose any of this.”
As Disaster Girl, Roth belongs to an exclusive club of meme archetypes, whose stories of accidental notoriety are being retold in a series of BuzzFeed videos. Maggie Goldenberger’s tale of becoming the “Ermahgerd Girl” is told in Vanity Fair. Gavin, Roth’s personal favorite meme, is chronicled in New York magazine. Sometimes, Roth and other meme heroes swap stories and compare notes.
She owes her online fame to her father, Dave Roth, an amateur photographer who snapped so many photos of his young daughter that she doesn’t clearly remember posing for the fire picture. He submitted the shot to the now-defunct website Zooomr and then to a contest in JPG magazine. The photo won the prize for emotion-capture pictures.
In those days, she explained, she naturally possessed an evil leer that came out in all her pictures.
Once published, Roth became an elementary school celebrity.
“’Oh my gosh, are you famous now?’” Roth remembers being asked. “’Yes, I am famous now. This is the new me.’”
But the photo’s popularity is still a mystery. Roth never posted it anywhere, so she can’t explain how it galloped into social media notoriety, or how she ended up smiling in front of a burning Notre Dame cathedral, or how her photo got captioned, Old McDonald had a farm. Had.”
“As long as I’ve been on social media, it’s also been there doing its own thing,” she said. “So I’ve never been able to separate myself from it.”
She doesn’t bring it up, but sometimes, co-workers will whisper, “Look up Zoe Roth” to the uninitiated newcomers. She doesn’t tell people she meets about her online alter ego, but eventually they notice that she has 22,000 Instagram followers, and that her profile picture is followed by “Public Figure. It’s a long story.” Her followers, for unknown reasons, are mostly in Poland, Brazil and Indonesia.
“I think it’s fun,” she told BuzzFeed. “I think it’s cool, and I know that there’s a portrait of me in Portugal somewhere, so if I’m ever in Portugal or if anyone knows where it is, I would love to go there.”
Meanwhile, she majors in Peace, War and Defense and Chinese at UNC, where she and Disaster Girl maintain a playful but separate peace.
“If I see a fire,” she joked, “I obviously have to get in front of it.”
