Netflix
Some people would say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist. However, I’m of the firm opinion his greatest accomplishment was actually the time when he lured hundreds of unsuspecting youths to an isolated island to attend a gathering spawned from the depths of hell.
A couple of weeks ago, the world got a chance to once again delight in the misfortune of people whose lives revolve around doing it for the ‘Gram when Hulu and Netflix each dropped their own interpretation of the series of unfortunate events surrounding the ill-fated Fyre Festival.
I moved to New York City around the same time Fyre Festival co-founder (and recently-convicted felon) Billy McFarland started to peddle his fake credit card to impressionable millennials. Thankfully, I knew a scam when I saw one but the same can’t be said for more than a few people I worked with at the time— or the ones who ended up in the Bahamas a couple of years ago.
McFarland is the most visible scapegoat as far as Fyre Festival is concerned, but as the documentaries show, he had plenty of help constructing the throne of lies he’d eventually come to sit on.
While Ja Rule also deserves his share of the credit, Fyre Festival never could have become the disaster it was if it wasn’t for the massive social media campaign that thrust it into the spotlight after every person worth following threw up a post linking to a video promising a non-existent utopia.
Despite playing a key role in the scam, virtually all of the Instagram Famous influencers who were paid to promote Fyre Festival pleaded ignorance and emerged relatively unscathed.
However, the day of reckoning may finally be upon them.
According to Billboard, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Emily Ratajkowski are just a few of the high-profile names who are currently facing subpoenas after the trustee overseeing the Fyre Media bankruptcy case asked a judge to take a closer look at how payments were handled.
Gregory Messer— the man responsible for attempting to put all of the pieces back together and recouping as much money as possible— has turned his attention to the modeling agencies that provided talent for the promo video in addition to Jerry Media, the meme factory-turned-marketing agency responsible for flooding timelines with orange squares.
However, there might not be a bigger fish than Jenner, who was reportedly paid $250,000 for a single Instagram post using the G.O.O.D. Music name to drum up publicity (it was quietly deleted when things began to unravel).
I smell a sequel.