Almost four years to the day since the infamous Fyre Festival began on April 27th, 2017, the many attendees who were defrauded and tricked with promises of a luxury music festival on a private island will receive restitution. A group of 277 plaintiffs has reportedly reached a settlement with organizers in which each person will be awarded $7,220.
According to a report from Billboard, lawyers representing the class action group and the trustee charged with Fyre’s assets have reached the aforementioned settlement and will vote on it on May 13th. While $7,220 is the agreed-upon amount, attendees could receive less based on Fyre’s pending bankruptcy case with other creditors.
“It’s a small but significant step for ticket holders who were defrauded and had their lives up ended as a result of the fraudulent conduct by [Fyre founder Billy] McFarland,” Ben Meiselas, partner at Geragos & Geragos and lead attorney for the class-action representing the ticket holders, told Billboard.
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This latest development comes after attorney Mark Geragos initially filed a $100 million class-action suit against Fyre organizers Ja Rule and Billy McFarland just days after the debacle in Exuma in The Bahamas made international headlines. McFarland is currently serving out a six-year prison sentence at Elkton Federal Correctional Facility in Ohio, where he remains embroiled in another class action filed two days after the first lawsuit.
“Shockingly, Defendants had been aware for months that their festival was dangerously under-equipped and posed a serious danger to anyone in attendance,” the class-action lawsuit stated.
Though currently incarcerated in a federal facility, McFarland has managed to continue his shameless self-promotion completely lacking in any self-awareness. In April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill, the convicted felon launched Project-315, a non-profit which aimed to raise money so that federal inmates could call home as often as possible—given that new pandemic regulations had put an indefinite halt to all in-person visits. As someone convicted of financial crimes, McFarland is not legally able to operate the charity himself.
Six months later in October 2020, McFarland emerged once again from his concrete cocoon to announce Dumpster Fyre, a new podcast—recorded within the walls of prison using his daily 15 minutes of phone call time—that would explain his side of the disaster that was Fyre Festival. Two days later, The New York Times reported that McFarland had been moved to solitary confinement as punishment for launching the podcast as well as his Instagram account that formerly boasted photoshoot quality images from the prison yard but has since been wiped clean.
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