The organizers of Fyre Festival – think: The Hunger Games, but for influencers – have reached an agreement with 277 attendees for $ 7,220 each. The New York Times reports.
Tickets to the 2017 ‘luxury’ music festival on a remote island in the Bahamas that actually turned out to be a beach full of FEMA tents and some pathetic cheese sandwiches, which cost anywhere from $ 1,000 to $ 12,000 – more if you bought a package deal. Yes, really, because the organizers of the Fyre Festival, while apparently not skilled enough to coordinate hotel bookings and a caterer, brought in big Instagram stars to praise the inaugural event, including Kendall Jenner, who donated $ 250,000 for a post she has since received. deleted.
Organizers also (falsely) claimed that the island was once owned by notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Weird flex, right?
Jenner did not attend the event, but she, too, paid for it last year in the form of a $ 90,000 settlement. Organizer Billy McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison in 2018 after being found guilty of allegations of telegraphic fraud. He was also ordered to pay $ 5 million to two people who paid $ 13,000 each for VIP packages (did the sandwiches come with extra slices of cheese?). McFarland’s business partner, rapper Ja Rule, was cleared of wrongdoing.
The festival that became a go-to example of gloating and (yet another) cautionary tale of believing Sponcon on social media ended up being the source of two documentaries, for Hulu and Netflix. And because time is a flat circle, Fyre Fest’s “dinner” tweet is being put up for auction as NFT, but the money there should at least go to a good cause: original tweeter Trevor DeHaas undergoes a kidney transplant and says he To raise $ 80,000 for medical expenses.
The $ 2 million class-action settlement, reached Tuesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York’s Southern District, is currently awaiting final approval, with a hearing scheduled for May 13.
The final amount attendees receive may eventually be reduced depending on what happens to other creditors in Fyre Festival’s bankruptcy case. But at least the cardholders have already had some practice in getting less than they were promised.