Rapper Ja Rule has criticised two new documentaries about Fyre festival, the failed luxury music event in the Bahamas of which he was a co-founder alongside Billy McFarland.
Fyre was due to take place on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma over two weekends in April and May 2017. The festival was promoted on the image of luxury nonpareil including lavish beach houses and proximity to leading models and influencers.
Both Hulu’s Fyre Fraud and Netflix’s Fyre detail the festival’s inability to fulfil basic infrastructure, let alone extravagant extras, leaving thousands of festivalgoers stranded without accommodation, food and water. McFarland was convicted of defrauding investors out of $27.4m (£21.3m) and jailed for six years in federal prison.
Ja Rule tweeted: “I love how ppl watch a doc and think they have all the answers.” He called out the streaming platforms for allegedly paying people involved in the fiasco for their participation in the documentaries. He claimed that Hulu paid McFarland and Netflix paid the media organisation FuckJerry, which did marketing for Fyre, for their participation.
McFarland was interviewed in the Hulu documentary and Elliot Tebele, creator of Jerry Media/FuckJerry, is an executive producer of the Netflix documentary. The films’ respective directors have criticised one another for the involvement of these parties.
“That money should have went to the ppl in the Bahamas,” the rapper continued in reference to Maryann Rolle, who runs the Exuma Point Bar and Grille, which catered for stranded festivalgoers. Rolle said she used $50,000 (£38,000) of her own money to pay staff who helped at the event after being left in the lurch by the founders. More than $77,000 (£60,000) has been raised for Rolle in a crowd-funding effort.
The rapper continued: “the docs clearly have Billy at fault but let’s blame the rapper lmao [laughing my ass off] ok,” Ja Rule continued. In another tweet, he said: “I had an amazing vision to create a festival like NO OTHER!!! I would NEVER SCAM or FRAUD anyone what sense does that make???” He claimed: “I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hood winked, led astray!!!”
The documentary contains footage from after the festival in which the rapper tells Fyre employees: “That’s not fraud, that’s not fraud. False advertising, maybe.”
