Fyre employees and “A-list names” were warned to stay away from this weekend’s disastrous festival in the Bahamas, according to reports in Motherboard and Page Six. Fyre staff members were reportedly flown from New York to Miami on Thursday, but that’s as far as they got.
“On Thursday, I got a call from a girl that was just hired recently,” one employee told Motherboard. “We’re all getting ready to go to the Bahamas, and one of these new girls calls me on my cell phone and says, ‘Hey, don’t even bother, there’s no accommodations for you guys and you’ll be in a bad situation.’ So, we didn’t even go to the Bahamas, we just stayed in Miami.”
The employee also said some staff flew back to NYC on their own dime, and that even before the festival it like seemed Fyre was “having financial issues.” There is also reportedly concern within the company that the disastrous festival will negatively impact the Fyre app, which is supposed to help streamline the process of booking celebrities for appearances and which the festival was ostensibly promoting.
“We all feel, on the product side, that everything to do with the festival just destroyed the product we’ve been working on very hard and is almost finished,” the source said. “Morale is very low. We’re in this limbo state, like, hey, is this company even going to survive this?”
Another source reportedly close to the company spoke to New York Post’s Page Six, saying that Fyre Festival co-founders Billy McFarland and Ja Rule, among others, personally warned celebrities not to attend the event at the last minute.
“They called all the A-list names and the modeling agencies and told them not to come,” the source said. “They were just like, ‘Oh, come next weekend when all the kinks have been worked out.’ This was before the chaos even started.”
Ja Rule issued a brief statement Friday afternoon, writing on Twitter that the debacle was “NOT HIS FAULT” but that he was “deeply sorry to everyone inconvenienced by this.” McFarland has yet to comment publicly.
