Whether or not you watched Netflix’s Fyre Festival documentary, you are probably aware of the blow job incident. To recap, the now-jailed Fyre Festival organiser Billy McFarland asked veteran event producer and ‘friend’ Andy King to suck dick to get the water supply released from customs and save the festival.
“You’re our wonderful gay leader and we need you to go down. Will you… suck… dick to fix this water problem?” McFarland apparently asked of King.
And while he didn’t have to follow through, King admitted that,
“I got to his office, fully prepared to suck his dick.”
Of course this guy is now fielding several offers for his own TV show. That is the kind of publicity that becoming a viral sensation can give.
This scene from the documentary understandably turned King into an internet sensation. He was a meme, he was ‘the ultimate friend’, and he’s still referred to as “the unsung hero” of the Fyre Festival.
But the problem is that the outlandishness of this single anecdote has eclipsed King’s culpability in the Fyre Festival scam and relieved him of the need to show any meaningful remorse.
Although King definitely experienced exploitation, and his consistent faith in Billy signals a serious case of delusion, his hands aren’t totally clean in this whole mess.
Elsewhere in the documentary he compares the impending doom of the Fyre Festival to Woodstock – where plenty of festival-goers suffered from lack of food, plumbing, and transport after cars were stranded in a 62-mile long traffic jam that lasted for 12 days.
King knew the festival was going to be a disaster, but it seems he thought it would be worth it if they could make a big splash. It doesn’t exactly scream of compassion for the actual people attending the festival, only for his own team and their legacy.
And although, understandably, King says he doesn’t want to be known as ‘the blowjob king’, he is now embracing the fame that the documentary moment has given him.
Andy King has seen all of your FYRE Fest memes — and he loves them! pic.twitter.com/mCNgDoHpjW
— Netflix US (@netflix) January 29, 2019
“I’m blown away with the response of the documentary. Completely blown away. I’m now a noun, a verb, an adjective. It’s mind-boggling,” King told Netflix in an interview.
“One of our biggest goals, obviously, is paying back all the people in the Bahamas,” he says, seeming to ambiguously take credit for the successful GoFundMe campaign that the festival’s caterer Maryann Rolle started to restore the savings she used to pay her own staff after everyone was left unpaid. Maryann Rolle was the unsung hero of the Fyre Festival, not Andy King.
But of course, it is Andy King who is in talks to start his own TV show.
“I had three TV show offers this week, from notable networks,” King told Vanity Fair.
“In the old world of TV it was The Carol Burnett Show and these fun, light-hearted shows that weren’t all crime-related,” he explained. “You see the attractiveness of HGTV today. People love Flip or Flop or Fixer Upper. Let’s just say it’s going to be a show about hosting crazy events—what it takes to make them happen. There will be cliff-hangers, and you’ll get to follow me around and see how I pull them off.”
He’s also been offered ad campaigns with three different water companies, naturally.
The best Andy King, Evian related memes from Fyre Fest. #fyrefraud pic.twitter.com/jJVXNWF6UT
— Anthony Borthwick (@dirtypawsNJ) January 24, 2019
King openly admits he’s going to “embrace” his newfound celebrity, in the hopes to garner attention for his own business Inward Point. The company’s ethos is to produce sustainable, zero-waste, and inclusive events, so at least it appears to be contributing to something positive.
However at the end of the day, Andy King was decidedly involved in the mass deception executed by the Fyre Festival. He’s managed to sidestep any blame and now is enjoying financial gain from being a part of something that left hundreds of Bahamian workers unpaid and facilitated an unsafe experience for hundreds of people (the documentary skims over the potential incidents that occurred overnight with no light and too much alcohol fuelling a Lord of the Flies atmosphere at the festival.)
Andy King just does not deserve his own TV show.