And Finally Artist News Business News Live Business Media

Ja Rule hits out at his portrayal in Fyre Festival documentaries

By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 21 January 2019

Ja Rule has hit out at anyone who, after watching either of the two new documentaries about the Fyre Festival debacle, subsequently concluded that he might be at least partly to blame. He said that the team behind the event had failed to deliver his “amazing vision” and that he too has been “watching the docs in awe”.

Unlike most people watching those docs in awe, of course, Ja Rule actually features in them, he being a co-founder of the doomed luxury festival venture.

Which means you can see him taking a lead in the chaotic creation of the original Fyre promo video. And in a post-event meeting, where he says that he doesn’t believe the Fyre company engaged in any actual fraud by not delivering on what festival-goers and others had been promised. It was just – he reckoned – a case of “false advertising”. Otherwise known as fraud.

Although, what none of the people sitting in that meeting knew at the time, of course, was that the other Fyre co-founder – Billy McFarland – had most definitely been committing fraud. And lots of it. Something the rapper insists he had no idea about.

“I love how people watch a doc and think they have all the answers”, Ja Rule wrote on Twitter yesterday. Adding: “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 added that he did not give an interview to either documentary because, he claims, McFarland was involved in both.

McFarland is interviewed in the Hulu documentary, but not in the Netflix film. The director of the latter, Chris Smith, told The Ringer that he and his team did not feel it would be right to pay McFarland for his time. He’s adds that the fraudulent Fyre man had claimed to have been offered $250,000 by Hulu to participate in its doc, although the director of that film – Jenner Furst – denies this.

Ja Rule also questions the involvement of social media agency Fuck Jerry in the Netflix film. The company was behind the online promotion of the festival and comes out of the Netflix version of events relatively unscathed.

Of the various people and companies who lost out due to their involvement in the Fyre Festival, many who have watched the new documentaries have expressed particular sympathy for the residents of the island of Great Exuma, where the event was to take place. Over 200 local labourers who worked around the clock for weeks to try to complete the site are said, in the Netflix film, to have lost $250,000 between them.

Meanwhile, Maryann Rolle, who runs the Exuma Point Bar And Grille and was hired to cater the event, says in the same doc that she used $50,000 of her own savings to pay the people she had hired to work for her at the event.

In the wake of the film, a GoFundMe page has been launched to raise money for her, on which Rolle says, “my life was changed forever, and my credit was ruined by Fyre Fest”. Almost $130,000 has now been donated to the campaign.