Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarland gives first interview since prison release | Channel

Fyre Festival promoter, Billy McFarland.

• Billy McFarland has given his first interview since his release from prison in May.
• The investor was behind the notorious Fyre Festival and was sentenced to six years in prison for two counts of wire fraud after the event went terribly wrong.
• “I need to apologise,” he tells Good Morning America in an interview. “I let people down. I let down employees. I let down their families. I let down investors. So, I need to apologise.”

Billy McFarland, who co-organised the notorious Fyre Festival with rapper Ja Rule, has given his first interview since his release from prison earlier this year.

The Fyre Festival was dubbed “the greatest party that never happened” – as was the title of the Netflix documentary about it – when McFarland promised a luxury music event in the Bahamas, but did not deliver.

Concertgoers shared the conditions of the festival online, which was promoted by celebrities, including Kendall Jenner, showing nightmarish conditions.

McFarland was later arrested and charged over his alleged “connection with a scheme to defraud investors” with his company Fyre Media LLC, and “a related entity responsible for organising a music festival”. In March 2018, he pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud and was sentenced to six years in prison. Additionally, he was ordered to pay investors, vendors and concertgoers millions in restitution.

After serving four out of six years, McFarland was released into a half-way house in May of this year.

Now, in an interview with Good Morning America, he says: “I need to apologise. And that is the first and the last thing that needs to be done.”

He adds in a clip shared by GMA:

He continues, responding to people calling him a ‘conman’: “I messed up. And I was so driven by this desperate desire to prove people right… I think I was just so insecure that I thought the only way to prove myself to them was to succeed. That led me down just this terrible path of bad decisions.”