After waiting four long years, hundreds of attendees of the infamous Fyre Festival are poised to receive more than $7,000 each after settling a class-action lawsuit with event organizers.
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The settlement was reached in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, with an early May deadline to object. The plaintiff is named as Gregory Messer, the Chapter 7 trustee of the estate of Fyre Festival LLC.
The total will end up around $2 million, and was announced as part of the festival’s ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. As it stands, 277 ticket holders will each receive a payout of $7,220, with an approval hearing scheduled for May 13.
Ticket holders were stunned in 2017, when they arrived in the Bahamas for a luxury music festival only to find themselves stranded without basic provisions.
“Billy [McFarland] went to jail, ticket holders can get some money back, and some very entertaining documentaries were made,” Ben Meiselas, a partner at California-based Geragos & Geragos who represented the ticket holders, told The New York Times. “Now that’s justice.”
McFarland, who organized and promoted the event, pled guilty in 2018 to two counts of wire fraud related to the festival. For his multiple fraudulent schemes and false statements to law enforcement, he received a sentence of six years in prison and three on probation.
Organizers offered an apology immediately following the event, admitting it “fell dramatically short of even the most modest expectations” and providing a form attendees could fill out to apply for a refund.
But for many, a refund was not enough to rectify their horrific experience.
The original class-action suit was filed in April 2017 against Fyre Media, McFarland, and rapper Ja Rule, who was advertised as the festival’s co-founder. The plaintiff, named as Daniel Jung, acting individually and as a representative of “a class of similarly-situated persons”, sought $100 million in damages.
The complaint said refunds were inadequate, stating, “Class Members’ damages in being lured to a deserted island and left to fend for themselves — a situation tantamount to false imprisonment — exceed the face value of their ticket packages by many orders of magnitude.”
It accuses organizers of knowingly lying about the festival’s accommodations and safety while continuing to sell ticket packages, which started at $1,200.
The festival was promoted as a luxurious musical festival on a private island, complete with posh accommodations and first-class culinary experiences. However, attendees arrived to find food rations, unsecured FEMA tents and no staff to offer assistance.
“The festival’s lack of adequate food, water, shelter and medical care created a dangerous and panicked situation among attendees — suddenly finding themselves stranded on a remote island without basic provisions — that was closer to ‘The Hunger Games’ or ‘Lord of the Flies’ than Coachella,” they wrote, adding that efforts to escape were hampered by attendees’ reliance on organizers for transportation and the fact that the event had been billed as “cashless.”
The debacle left a trail of lawsuits, criminal charges and popular documentaries in its wake, but many attendees are hoping for closure on May 13.
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