Two Fyre Festival attendees will be making major money moves soon.
Vice News reports the two North Carolinian men who attended the botched music festival last year were awarded $5 million in their lawsuit against Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland. They are first two people to win a lawsuit against McFarland. (Ja Rule, who was McFarland’s partner, was named in the lawsuit at first but they eventually left him out of it when they reached a separate agreement. “We worked with [him] and his attorney and amicably decided to move on to other business matters,” said one of the co-plaintiffs, Seth Crossno, according to Vice.)
Although Crossno and his co-plaintiff, Mark Thompson, asked for $25,000 in their 47-page lawsuit filed last year, a judge awarded them the $5 million for compensatory damages in addition to an extra $1 million in punitive damages. Crossno and Thompson both spent $13,000 to gain a luxurious package experience at the Fyre Festival. But when they made it to the Bahamas where the festival was supposed to be held, they were met with little to no food, camping tents, and several other disgruntled attendees on the stranded part of the island.
In the meantime, things aren't looking too good for McFarland. He has a sentencing hearing next month for two counts of wire fraud and was recently charged with scamming people through a company, NYC VIP Access. There's also a docuseries in the works about the disaster music festival coming to Hulu.
