If you’re anything like me, you’ve been following the Fyre Festival drama with a bag of popcorn. (That’s not even mentioning the drama of Hulu surprise dropping its own Fyre-themed documentary a day before Netflix’s “Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened” became available for streaming on the online platform.)

The whole thing reads like the best of legal thrillers- it has it all: corrupt businessmen, broken contracts, the squandering of millions of dollars. Then there are the non sequitur additions like supermodels frolicking on the beach in a slick advertisement apropos of reality, a desperately-clinging-to-relevancy early aughts rapper, and the hilarious social media documentation of a “music festival” that never really came to fruition.

In case you haven’t watched both of the Fyre Festival themed documentaries, available on Hulu and Netflix respectively, here’s a timeline of the events to get you up to speed.

Now, what does all of this have to do with the law? Well, Fyre Festival’s creator Billy McFarland is currently serving a six-year sentence in New York federal prison for fraud-- for a different fraud he ran after the Fyre Festival was a disaster. There are currently many more pending lawsuits naming McFarland, Ja Rule-- and, interestingly, the supermodels who helped advertise for the festival. It seems that many (actually, all except one) of the models failed to use the hashtag #ad when promoting the festival, making them in violation of FTC requirements for advertising. The models have all since deleted their Fyre Festival posts, but I’m sure we should watch this space because on the Internet-- it’s forever. I also suspect that many of the “Doe Defendants 1-50” mentioned in the lawsuit are supermodels.

In this age of social media, where a tweet of a cheese sandwich seemed to be the last straw that brought down Fyre Festival, it just seems right that the lawyers representing one of the plaintiffs tweeted the first few pages of their complaint for all of us to see. They later posted their entire complaint to the cloud, which you can read here.

We can’t always count on web-savvy lawyers to cloud-drop legal documents to the public, though, which is where one of my favorite free legal research tools comes in to play. Courtlistener is a free legal research site that allows anyone to search for state and federal caselaw and dockets. It’s not comprehensive-- but it is free and being added to all the time. It also took me about five seconds to find a second Fyre lawsuit docket using it. See that docket here (and read the complaint for some jollies). 

And don’t worry about this circus ever ending-- Ja Rule announced this week that he’s planning a second Fyre Festival.

Submitted by Emma E Babler on February 15, 2019

This article appears in the categories: Law Library