Ticketholders for the “Fyre Festival” will receive a measly four cents on the dollar in refunds.
In 2017, entrepreneur Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule drew 5,000 people to a remote island in the Bahamas by promising a luxury music festival experience. In return for their tickets — some of which sold for up to $100,000 — fans received cold cheese sandwiches and rain-soaked mattresses in dilapidated FEMA tents.
Many artists — including Pusha T, Tyga, Migos, and Blink-182 — dropped out of the festival days before it began. McFarland also paid Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski, and other influencers to promote the event on social media.
McFarland pleaded guilty in 2018 to three counts of wire fraud, one count of bank fraud, and one charge of making false statements. He was sentenced to six years in prison and told to pay more than $26 million to defrauded customers and investors.
Gregory Messer — who has been overseeing the Fyre Festival’s bankruptcy for the past four years — recently asked for permission to distribute the paltry $1.4 million he was able to collect. As the New York Post reports:
After subtracting costs of roughly $1.1 million, including payment to Messer and his legal team, there will be just $300,000 left for creditors, court papers show. That will leave less than 4 cents on the dollar for the unsecured creditors, including ticketholders, who claim they are owed more than $7 million, Messer said.
As tickets ranged from $1,200 to $100,000 each, would-be attendees could receive as low as $48 in refunds.
The New York Post continues:
Jenner, younger sister to Kim Kardashian West, coughed up $90,000 of the $275,000 she received, court papers show. Ratajkowski returned $37,500 of her $300,000 payment. Rock band Blink 182, which famously tweeted that it was backing out even as attendees arrived on the island, returned $157,100 of the $265,000 it had been paid.
Messer says he had trouble clawing back money from many of the entities he went after, including musical acts, influencers and jet and yacht companies. Even though the musical acts “never performed… most of these artists had strong contracts,” he said. McFarland, meanwhile, “provided no cooperation” when it came to recovering funds and kept “essentially no books and records” that might help track down people who benefited from the scheme, the trustee said.
Messer is investigating whether footage included in Hulu and Netflix documentaries about the Fyre Festival is estate property, but otherwise intends to shutter the case.