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Fyre Festival ticketholders fail to get Ja Rule added back onto lawsuit
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 19 November 2019
Ja Rule has seemingly succeeded once again in having himself dismissed from one of the ongoing lawsuits relating to that pesky Fyre Festival.
The rapper, real name Jeffrey Atkins, was very much presented as a co-founder of the luxury music event until it fell apart just as ticketholders started to arrive. When the Fyre company collapsed and its boss Billy McFarland was jailed for fraud, those who went legal in relation to the festival needed to find other people to sue who might actually have some money with which to pay damages. Atkins was an obvious candidate.
However, back in July, the judge overseeing a $100 million class action lawsuit involving people who had bought tickets to the Fyre Festival agreed to remove Atkins as a defendant.
The judge said that there was no evidence that, when hyping up the festival, the rapper knew that the promises he was making could not be kept by the chaotic Fyre company. And while, by the time he posted one last tweet just before the festival was due to start, he must have known all was not well, there was no evidence that anyone had departed for the island in the Bahamas hosting the event specifically based on that message.
After that judgement lawyers leading on the lawsuit filed new papers trying to get Atkins relisted as a defendant. They argued that they had found ticketholders who did, in fact, depart for the Fyre Festival because of the rapper’s late in the day tweet confirming the event was going ahead. Attorneys also argued that the two documentaries made about the whole Fyre debacle suggested that Atkins was more aware of the chaos behind the scenes than previously thought. And yet he continued to promote the show.
According to AllHipHop.com, the judge hearing the case has now rejected those latter arguments, reckoning there was still insufficient grounds to conclude that Atkins’ role in promoting the failed event constituted fraud.
A legal rep for Atkins welcomed the ruling, telling AllHipHop.com: “This ruling is nothing short of a total vindication of Mr Atkins”.
