It’s Getting Hard to Keep Track of the Incoming Fyre Festival Lawsuits

By Aimée Lutkin  |  May 9, 2017 | 9:55pm
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Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits! Fyre Festival can’t get enough! The disastrous island nightmare has attracted yet another lawsuit, while the very first class action filed has gotten an exciting update. In a refreshing twist, complainants are finding someone to blame besides organizers Ja Rule and Billy McFarland.

The sixth lawsuit from ticket holders Kenneth and Emily Reel, who paid $4,600 for a VIP villa in the heart of the Fyre Fetsival experience, did name Ja Rule and Billy McFarland. But, according to Rolling Stone, they’re also dragging the festival’s PR agency 42West and advertising company Matte Projects into the mess, claiming they “did not take any steps, let alone reasonable steps, to ensure that their promotional materials and marketing campaigns were accurate.”

The Reels are from North Carolina and claim they never made it to Exuma, getting stranded in a Miami airport on their way to the event. Their lawyer, Jeffrey Backman, said in an email to Rolling Stone that Fyre Festival’s organizers cannot be allowed to “get away with it in the hopes of becoming legends.” It may be too late prevent “legendary” status, though this situation is probably not what Ja Rule and McFarland wanted to be famous for.

The other news is that first class action suit filed by attorney Mark Geragos, which is claiming $100 million in damages, is now including Doe Investors 1 though 15 as defendants. Those numbers refer to the parties who invested money in Fyre Festival, though it is unclear if they too were victims of fraud or not, Bloomberg reports:

“In the weeks leading up to the festival, when the company already knew the event was doomed for failure, Fyre Media Inc., which was minimally under-capitalized with [initial] investors, was floating a completely inflated and shocking valuation of Fyre Media Inc. between $90 million and $105 million to additional” investors, the lawyers said in court papers.

Those investors who don’t take the position that they were defrauded may also claim that they were seed investors in the Fyre app, which is used to hire entertainers for clubs and parties, and had no knowledge or input towards the failed festival alone. Geragos law firm, however, maintains that without the money from investors, Fyre Festival would never have gotten as far as it did:

“Clearly, the $90-$105 million valuation placed on Fyre Media by its founders was completely untethered to any financial reality,” Geragos firm lawyers wrote in the filing in Los Angeles federal court. “Yet, the ability of Fyre Media to float any substantial valuation at all was based on the continued cash flow it was receiving, in the weeks and days leading to the festival, from attendees who were the unwitting pawns and ultimately victims.”

And those are all the Fyre Festival lawsuits. For this hour.

 
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