music festivals

Famous Guests Were Reportedly Warned Not to Go to Fyre Festival in Advance

Ja Rule. Photo: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images for City Harvest

The Fyre Festival – a “luxury” musical festival organized by Ja Rule and Billy McFarland, an entrepreneur born in 1991 – was supposed to take place on the island of Exumas in the Bahamas this weekend. Instead, the earliest attendees arrived to a complete mess: disaster relief tents instead of the accommodations they were promised, low water supplies, and nothing but untoasted bread and cheese for meals. While it’s provided those of us at home a healthy bit of schadenfreude at the expense of people who can afford to shell out up to $250,000 for a weekend music festival, new reports indicate that the most famous guests were warned in advance not to attend.

“They called all the A-list names and the modeling agencies and told them not to come,” a source told Page Six. (The festival was famously promoted by models like Emily Ratajkowski and Bella Hadid.) “They were just like, ‘oh come next weekend when all the kinks have been worked out.’ This was before the chaos even started.”

The people who were on yachts were also spared from the worst of it, which is an evergreen sentence and also the jist of this simply incredible paragraph:

Those on yachts fared better, including Nigerian billionaire Kola Aluko, who was there on Galactica Star, his 65m $50 million yacht. We hear one of Jay Z‘s managers was there and that Alex von Furstenberg has rented Jerry Seinfeld‘s 42m yacht Moka and is cruising around with pals. “The people in yachts were fine,” a source told us. “The only thing that they had to deal with was instead of nice boats taking them between their boat and the island, they used lift rafts.”

The festival has since been postponed and Ja Rule posted an apology on Twitter that reads, “I truly apologize as this is NOT MY FAULT.”

Famous Guests Reportedly Warned Not to Go to Fyre Festival