Influencer Deletes Instagram Account After Her Bid for Another User’s Handle Backfires

Katherine Asplundh, the TikTok influencer who unintentionally went viral with her attempts to get an Instagram user to give her their handle, has now deleted her own account amid an intense online backlash.

Asplundh, née Driscoll, had asked the current owner of the @katherineasplundh handle if she would be prepared to hand it over after Asplundh tied the knot late last month with Cabot Asplundh, the scion of a wealthy tree service family reportedly worth billions. The negotiations with the current owner, it’s fair to say, did not go well.

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The current owner of the handle shared on Reddit screengrabs of the private messages she received from Katherine Asplundh. “I thought this was a scam at first,” the handle owner, who goes by “Kate” on Instagram, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote in her Reddit post. “I would have given her my username for free but her attitude threw me off.”

“Hi I was wondering if I could purchase your username from you,” Asplundh wrote to Kate, images of the conversation show. “Just got married and this is my new name!” In response, Kate wrote: “Hi congrats! That’s my name too. I just googled and it said selling my username would get me banned from Instagram.”

“I purchased my username in the past actually that’s not true,” Asplundh responded, adding that celebrities purchase their usernames “all the time,” which is how “they have all their handles as their full names.”

Later in the exchange, Kate again expressed concerns about being banned from the platform. (Instagram’s terms of use do say that users can’t make “attempts to buy, sell or transfer any aspect” of their accounts, including usernames.)

“Sorry!” Kate wrote.

The hitherto cordial conversation then went off the rails. First, Asplundh told Kate she did not believe “that your name is Katherine Asplundh” and said she had therefore “reported you to Instagram and they’re actually able to tell me your real name.” “I really hope I don’t know you because that’s gonna be really embarrassing for you,” she wrote.

She also accused Kate of “pretending to be someone you’re not,” adding “which is illegal.” “Nope you asked to purchase my username,” Kate responded. “Which goes against Instagram rules. I just reported you.”

Asplundh also claimed the “family I just married into is the only asplundh family” in the U.S. and said she would “love to see” proof that Kate was using her real name on the coveted account. Kate explained she is “not American” and said: “This is my account, I’ve had it since 2018. I’m sorry we share the same name but just because you got married doesn’t mean you can have my username.”

“If you were nice I would have considered giving it to you for free,” Kate added. “But you weren’t. I reported you for asking me to sell my account and another report for harassing me. Have a good day.”

Speaking to the Inquirer, Kate declined to elaborate on her nationality. She also reiterated that she would have been “open” to giving up her username but Asplundh’s “messages came off snarky, so I told myself, ‘OK, this isn’t worth it.’”

After Kate’s Reddit thread got picked up on other platforms—including on X where one post about the saga has been viewed almost eight million times—people siding against Asplundh started creating new Instagram accounts with usernames that the influencer might plausibly register instead in an effort to stop her from getting those too, according to the New York Post.

Amid the furor, commenting appears to have been disabled on several of Asplundh’s recent TikTok videos, and the Instagram page for her original username “isn’t available” as of Thursday morning.

“Hey guys I didn’t post the screenshots for her to get bullied,” Kate wrote in one follow-up post to her Reddit post as the story blew up. “She was rude but let’s not get on her level. I think she’s got the message.”

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