The organizers of Fyre Festival – think: The Hunger Games, but for influencers – agreed to a settlement with 277 participants for $ 7,220 each, The New York Times reports.
Tickets for the 2017 ‘luxury’ music festival on a remote island in the Bahamas, which was actually a beach full of FEMA tent and some pathetic sandwiches with cheese, costing between $ 1,000 and as much as $ 12,000 – more if you bought a package deal. Yes, really, because the organizers of Fyre Festival, while apparently not skilled enough to coordinate hotel reservations and a caterer, did appoint Instagram stars to sing the praises of the inaugural speech, including Kendall Jenner, who raised $ 250,000 received for a post she has been doing ever since. deleted.
Organizers also (falsely) claimed that the island was once owned by the infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Weird flex, right?
Jenner did not attend the event, but she too eventually paid for it, in the form of a $ 90,000 settlement last year. Organizer Billy McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison in 2018 after pleading guilty to charges of wire fraud. He was also ordered to pay $ 5 million to two people who each paid $ 13,000 for GDP packages (did the sandwiches add extra cheese slices?). McFarland’s business partner, rapper Ja Rule, has been struck off for violations.
The festival, which became an example of Schadenfreude and (another warning) about the believing sponcon on social media, was eventually the source of two documentaries for Hulu and Netflix. And because time is a flat circle, the tweet of the ‘meal’ of Fyre Fest is presented as an NFT, but the money there should at least go to a good cause: the original tweeter Trevor DeHaas gets a kidney transplant and says he needs to raise $ 80,000 for medical expenses.
The $ 2 million settlement reached in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the southern district of New York on Tuesday is currently awaiting final approval, with a trial scheduled for May 13.
The final amount participants receive may eventually be reduced depending on what happens to other creditors in the bankruptcy case of Fyre Festival. But at least the ticket holders had all the practice to get less than they were promised.