‘Disaster Girl’ reveals why she smiled in front of the burning building and turned into an internet legend

Remember the “Disaster Girl” meme featuring a little girl with a smirk on her face, standing in front of a burning building? It has been one of the most popular templates for memes around the world ever since it was posted online in 2005. The girl in the picture - Zoe Roth - was just four when the story unfolded. At the age of 21, she made $500,000 off the viral meme. Zoe Roth opens up on how she became an internet legend and why she smiled in front of that burning building. 

It was a normal day in 2005. Zoe’s family was living in Mebane in North Carolina, United States near a fire station. One day, the family suddenly heard fire sirens outside their house. They rushed outdoors and saw that two blocks away, billows of smoke were rising towards the sky. They walked down the road and saw that a house was on fire. Upon inquiry, it turned out that it was simply a test fire, controlled by the firefighters.

Zoe’s dad Dave Roth, who is a photographer, had just got a new camera. He asked her to smile against the backdrop of the burning house so he could take a picture. And she did. The moment sent the internet into a tizzy since it appears as though she is giving a sinister, almost smug smirk, which most people translate as “evil.”

Her father put the picture into a photo contest in 2007 and it won. In 2008, it bagged the “Emotion Capture Contest” title from JPG magazine, quickly becoming viral. The photograph was used, re-used, edited, and manipulated hundreds of times. 

In an interview with The New York Times, Zoe said, “You just make it fit however you want to fit it. I love seeing them because I’d never make any of them myself, but I love seeing how creative people are.” She added, “Once it’s out there, it’s out there and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Mr. Roth said, “It always finds a way to stay relevant with whatever new kind of awful, terrible bad thing is happening, so I’ve laughed at a lot of them.”

After more than a decade of having her image endlessly manipulated and churned out of the memes' corners, Zoe decided to sell the original copy of her meme as a nonfungible token, or NFT, for nearly half a million dollars. She sold the image with the help of Ben Lashes, an NFT entrepreneur who has dealt with sales of masterpieces like “Nyan Cat,” “Grumpy Cat,” “Keyboard Cat,” “Doge,” “Success Kid,” and “David After Dentist.”

The meme sold for 180 Ether, a form of cryptocurrency, at a Foundation auction to a user identified as @3FMusic. The currency's value at that time was estimated to be more than $495,000. The Roth family retained the copyright and will receive 10 percent of the future sales.

Zoe used the funds from the auction to pay off her student loans after earning a B.A. in Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. As of today, she works as a Research Associate for S&P Global in Salt Lake City, Utah.