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Fyre Fest's Billy McFarland Is Writing a Memoir From Prison
And you'll probably never guess what it's called.
Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
Fyre Festival became the stuff of legend in 2017, when well-to-do millennials who paid thousands of dollars to attend a made-for-Instagram tropical bacchanalia arrived instead to no musical acts, a sea of FEMA disaster-relief tents, and styrofoam containers of untoasted bread. Earlier this year, a pair of dueling documentaries from Netflix and Hulu answered many of the burning questions about how, exactly, Fyre Festival came to be, plumbing the depths of organizer Billy McFarland's unique blend of incompetence, criminality, and delusions of grandeur.
McFarland, who is in federal prison for fraud until sometime in 2024, is already plotting a grand comeback. And New York magazine has the story of his possibly forthcoming autobiography. Earlier this year, Anastasia Eremenko, his Russian model girlfriend who made a cameo in Hulu's Fyre Fraud documentary, reached out to freelance book editor Josh Raab with a proposition. McFarland, she explained, has been penning a memoir by hand while incarcerated, sending the manuscript to Eremenko page by page for transcription.
The subject matter of Promythus: The God of Fyre—that is the memoir's real working title, with McFarland's preferred spellings and everything—sounds like a pop-culture mad lib in which all the subjects are tiresome, uninteresting people.
The book, McFarland said, chronicles his career from the first investment in a now-shuttered start-up back in 2011 to the FBI paying him a visit days after the festival imploded. Rubinshtein provided Raab with a bullet-pointed, name-dropping list of selected stories, the sorts of "great and terrible moments" McFarland planned to highlight. Actors, models, musicians, people who are only famous because their parents are, cameos from members of the Trump administration, the list goes on and on.
The most fascinating aspect of New York's story is how McFarland still seems to believe that he is a misunderstood creative genius, not a serial liar who owes some $26 million in restitution to those he defrauded. In e-mails to Raab, McFarland asserts that he's struggling to "fully come to terms with" how the festival affected residents of Great Exuma, an island of fewer than 10,000 people. The devastating economic consequences of his failure to pay a quarter-million dollars he owes to hundreds of day laborers, for example, is evidently not yet something he fully appreciates.
He also said the organizers spent about $40 million on the festival and that many of the vendors had been paid more than enough. McFarland said he is still trying to figure out where things went bad with those vendors, including MaryAnn Rolle, the restaurant owner in Great Exuma whose appearance in the Netflix documentary prompted a GoFundMe campaign that raised $200,000 to help make up her lost savings.
McFarland appears to exhibit a strong desire to tell the proverbial Real Story of What Happened, and firmly believes that the Netflix and Hulu accounts of this manmade disaster did not do justice to his artistic vision. Yet, as New York points out, given that he began serving his sentence before the documentaries were released, McFarland has not actually seen either one.
Aside from his literary aspirations, the man who quarterbacked a new harebrained scam after being arrested for his first harebrained scam apparently harbors grand ambitions for the scope of his post-incarceration scamming future. "The Festival will not be a one and done event," he wrote to Raab. "It's happening again, so the original story will lose the potential to be told and set the stage if it's not done before the next events take place." As they always say in the entertainment industry, when your name has become synonymous with the shameful excesses of a social-media-obsessed culture blind to the impact it has on the world around it, write a book, try again, and hope for the best.