Actually attending the disastrous Fyre Festival sounds like it was a miserable experience, but making fun of the Fyre Festival on Twitter has been the sort of harmless fun that everyone can enjoy. Apparently, though, the organizers running—or “running”—the fest didn’t think it was so harmless. As reported by Pitchfork, the latest lawsuit filed against founders Ja Rule and Bill McFarland claims that they tried to send cease-and-desist letters to people who were complaining about or criticizing the event on social media, arguing that the jokes and complaints could “incite violence, rioting, or civil unrest.”
The lawsuit itself comes from a pair of disgruntled ticket buyers, and they’re not only suing Ja Rule and McFarland, but also a PR company and marketing agency that the plaintiffs say “did nothing” to make sure that the fabulous festival they were promoting was legitimate. The detail about the cease-and-desist letter is presumably being used to illustrate just how brazenly cruel the Fyre Festival organizers have been, with the lawsuit adding that they even suggested that if “someone innocent does get hurt as a result” of the social media jokers/complainers, then the festival would hold the jokers/complainers “accountable and responsible.”
This new lawsuit is but one of many, and the Pitchfork story also says that there’s been a new development in the very first one. Celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos had filed a $100 million class action suit against the Fyre organizers, and in a new set of documents, he claims that the entire Fyre Festival was “merely a front for a massive financial fraud akin to a Ponzi scheme.” Basically, Geragos is suggesting that the festival was set up to fail, with the organizers allegedly planning to just run off with the money. Interestingly, the documents also say that a number of “notable” investors gave money to the Fyre Festival, and though none of them are named, they supposedly include “a financial firm that was recently bought by a publicly traded bank, a venture capital firm whose managing director was named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World,’ ‘a socialite’ married to a prominent banking executive, and ‘a social media personality.’” That means angry people who survived the Fyre Festival can now try and figure out which of their favorite famous people/banking institutions fit those descriptions.