Even after two Fyre Festival documentaries (Netflix and Hulu), new insight into the infamous disaster festival still manages to shock and amaze. Now we’ve got a written account from a 26-year-old fitness instructor from LA of her experience attending the luxury event that never was.
Under the alias ‘Christina’ and published on Human Parts by Medium, the festival-goer gives a play-by-play of the before, during, and after of Fyre Festival for her and her friends.
The recount adds yet another bizarre piece to the messy-as-hell puzzle that is Fyre Festival, and also reveals some interesting new details.
First of all, can we just appreciate for a moment that after the festival-goers discovered first-hand the extent of the scam they’d fallen into, they were asked if they wanted to secure tickets for next year. According to Christina, before leaving the island they had to fill out a questionnaire to tell Fyre how much money was on their RFID bands, so that they could be refunded.
“It asked, ‘Would you forgo a refund for free Fyre Festival 2018 tickets?’ We were like, ‘What the f**k?’”
The hero of Christina’s story is, of course, a local Bahamian. We all agreed that the hero of Netflix’s Fyre Festival documentary, and the whole disaster, is Maryann Rolle, the Bahamian caterer who went 50k out of pocket to pay her staff after the Fyre crew bailed. Luckily Maryann’s GoFundMe campaign has raised that money back and then some.
Similarly, in Christina’s recount, the only active problem-solving and help comes from a local woman who gets them shelter. After arriving on the island, they quickly discovered that their villa didn’t exist.
“Billy MacFarland gets on top of this little white table in the middle of the street,” she described, “and he’s just like, ‘Everybody, shut up. If you don’t have a tent or if you’re waiting for a tent, go get one.’ He literally told people to ‘go get one’ — and people just started running. Then he said, ‘We have no villas.’”
Christina’s group were then taken to a nearby hotel by a Fyre staff, who said they would “take care of the accomodations”. But when the hotel was sold out, the employee ended up admitting that Fyre had no where for them.
Thankfully, a local helped out.
“At probably two, three o’clock in the morning, one of the local workers found us.” Christina said. “She gave us keys to a vacation rental home. Apparently a lot of the locals working on the festival were also managers for these vacation homes, so I’m assuming they’re the only reason we found a place to sleep.”
Not only were the local Bahamian people victims of exploitation by the Fyre Festival team – who left without paying the local workers, but they were villainised by that team once the project fell to pieces.
“We were told by Fyre staff that some of the Bahamians working on the festival were acting like bounty hunters, trying to harm anybody wearing a Fyre wristband because they hadn’t been paid.” Christina described.
“Fyre staff told us to take off our wristbands so we wouldn’t be targeted. I’m not sure what their agenda was in telling us that, and I didn’t hear it anywhere else.”
Everything about how the Fyre Festival team dealt with the disaster of their own making was terrible, and the more we hear, the worse it gets. We’ll see if it can get any worse when Seth Rogen and Andy Samberg bring us their Fyre Festival spoof documentary to complete the doco trifecta.
You can read the entire recount from Christina on Medium.