For those of us who didn’t book tickets to Fyre Festival - a luxury music festival with headliners including Major Lazer and Disclosure and resident influencer attendees from Bella Hadid to Hailey Baldwin – April 2017 was a pretty funny time to be online.
We saw the disaster that Fyre Festival became unfold tweet by tweet, and laughed from the luxury of our warm cosy bedrooms as we realised people had paid as much as £9,000 for tickets to stay in rain-soaked disaster relief tents on an unfinished building site in the Bahamas, and eat American cheese singles on bread, without a musician or model in sight.
But watching Netflix’s Fyre Festival documentary FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened wasn’t so funny.
It becomes clear within minutes that the actions of Fyre founder Billy McFarland had a severe impact on the livelihoods and mental health of those who worked for him, and - according to the interviews - he left a trail of destruction behind him, before being convicted of fraud and sentenced to six years in federal prison.
Here are five shocking moments from Netflix’s Fyre Festival documentary.
Watergate
Easily the most shocking moment was when Fyre’s event producer Andy King tells the interviewer that Billy McFarland asked him to go and meet with the Head of Customs, and perform a sexual act in order to get the trucks of Evian water needed for the festival through to the site.
We’ll leave the full clip here, with subtitles.
King later had to switch clothes with someone and lie down in the back of a truck to get out of the Bahamas without being seen, as unpaid local workers had put hits out on the Fyre team.
People are the worst
The next moment is right up there with the first. One of the attendees interviewed said in order to have a tent without any neighbours, he and his friends went around urinating in other tents and slashing them with knives so they were unusable.
No negativity please!
You realise while watching the documentary how many people warned Billy about how badly wrong this festival could go. Everyone from the talent bookers to logistics specialists said they made him aware of the lack of resources available to cater to the number of people they were expecting.
Billy’s reaction? To say they could leave if they wanted to (of course, no one would be paid in full for their work until the end of the festival), repeat that he wanted solutions not negativity, and fire anyone who wouldn’t get on board with his ambitious plans.
‘It’s not fraud… it’s false advertising’
You’ve probably seen tweets this weekend about Ja Rule being the worst. That’s because throughout the documentary he seems completely unfazed by everything that’s going on, and towards the end, when the festival has been shut down and the Fyre team are having a debrief, someone describes what they did as fraud, to which he replies; ‘It’s not fraud… it’s false advertising’.
Scammers never stop
An incredulous moment in the last part of the documentary happens when Billy, who is out on bail after being arrested for fraud, sets up a new scam.
He managed to successfully trick people on the Fyre mailing list into paying for fake tickets to the Met Gala, a Taylor Swift meet and greet and Coachella, and how do we have footage of this scam? Oh because he hired a videographer to follow him around and tape the whole thing.
An additional shocking moment that has captured the hearts of the internet, was when festival caterer Maryann Rolle revealed that she had used her personal savings to pay all the staff who worked for her, because Billy and the Fyre team left the island without paying them.
Rolle set up a Go Fund Me page which has now raised over £100,000.