The luxury festival in the Bahamas promoted by Bella Hadid and Ja Rule was supposed to be heavenly. One blogger explains how it descended into hellish chaos that has prompted lawsuits – and his own podcast on the fiasco

Fyre Fest: the ultimate 2017 parable – a failed music festival in the Bahamas that became the talk of the internet in April. It was the perfect storm: “influencers” such as Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski promoted the event on their Instagram accounts, rapper Ja Rule was one of the organisers, and acts such as Blink-182 and rap trio Migos were due to headline. Approximately 5,000 punters bought tickets, many to discover the festival site a dump – and there was a curious lack of information; a viral photo of a cheese sandwich, a few tweets from festival guests. At the time, the internet wondered: is it a conspiracy? A strange PR stunt?

Seth Crossno was one of the festivalgoers tweeting from the front lines. He had decided to attend Fyre Fest in December 2016 after a friend had convinced him it was “the next Coachella”. Seth thought it could make a pleasant holiday: “It was an exciting thing to look forward to, a five-day trip to the Bahamas, but I wasn’t signed on for the same reasons everyone else was.”

He had never listened to Migos, for example, and he saw it as a work opportunity. Seth runs a satirical blog under the pen name William Needham Finley IV, which is his take on a rich kid from Raleigh, North Carolina (where Seth is from). “I personally had no desire to go to an EDM festival on an island with a bunch of vloggers,” he says now, “but it seemed like something William would do.”

Besides, $1,000 (£748) for five days in the Bahamas at a new music festival, including accommodation and flights, wasn’t bad. “My friend said it was always like that the first year,” explains Crossno over the phone from Raleigh. “I thought maybe it will just be this awesome thing that we were lucky to find out about first. But it quickly got more expensive because the planners kept adding things to the website: a helicopter ride, backstage passes, free drinks.” By the time he left for the festival, he had splashed $4,000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A widely circulated image of the food on offer at Fyre Fest. Photograph: Public Domain

Alarm bells started to ring when the private jet promised from Miami airport down to the Bahamian island of Great Exuma was “just a plane from Swift Air with everyone else that was going”. At the site, things quickly worsened: “There were a bunch of trucks, people unloading things, tents everywhere – some were soaking wet because it had rained. It didn’t look like anything we’d signed up for.” Stage equipment was being moved around with forklifts and some guests were drunk, says Crossno. “I’m shocked no one was injured. Eventually, they took us to this little house on the island where people were gathering, trying to check in, find the camps, find their bags. Billy McFarland, the co-founder of the festival, was standing on a table answering questions one by one. He seemed really overwhelmed.”

Crossno and his friends managed to catch a flight off the island later that night, the entire trip lasting a miserable 24 hours in all, during which his phone was inundated with calls from the press about his tweets. He gave most journalists the name William, which led them to his blog, fuelling reports that the festival was Lord of the Flies: the rich kid edition. “That’s to be expected,” says Crossno now, sounding amused. “I didn’t pay $25,000 to go to this [as some outlets reported the ticket price] – but I know paying $4,000 to go on vacation to the Bahamas makes me fair game to make fun of.”

When Crossno got home, he was told to fill out a form online to apply for a refund. Spectacularly, the form offered the option of forgoing your refund for double the tickets to next year’s festival (the idea of a repeat event has since been shut down by the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism). “Obviously, we said: ‘No thank you,’” he says. After hearing nothing on the refund, Crossno decided to take legal action. In May 2017, he filed a claim against Swift Air, Ja Rule and Billy McFarland for fraud and negligence. “We’re not trying to make a million dollars,” he explains. “I just want to get to a place where it’s settled. It would be great to get our money back.”

On 30 April 2017, a $100m class-action lawsuit was filed against the festival’s organisers, with another following the same week. Both claimed that McFarland and Ja Rule put guests at risks by proceeding with the festival when the site was not ready. Crossno did not want to get involved with these: “It’s dumb, what would we get, $9? And it would probably take five years.”

In late June, McFarland was charged with defrauding investors by presenting them with fake documents while seeking investment in his company, Fyre Media. Ja Rule was not charged, despite being a partner in the company. Finally, in August, Fyre Fest LLC was declared bankrupt, with McFarland and Ja Rule to face futher investigation.

Meanwhile, Crossno is still searching for answers: “Even now, with all this hot water, all these fraud charges, it’s like: what did Billy know? What did the investors know? Did he dupe everybody? Why show up? To make it look like he wasn’t taking the money and running? Because you think you can pull it off? Are you that delusional?”

In a bid to get to the bottom of the mystery, Crossno has been working on a podcast, Dumpster Fyre, which he describes as a kind of Serial for Fyre Fest.: “The press has been entertaining to do, but it’s not like I launched a career out of it all,” he assures me. “I don’t really promote the interviews publicly – I’ve done so many it would seem like: ‘Wow, this guy won’t quit’ – but I wanted to document the process of how the media works, how the whole influencer thing works.” The last question seems prescient, given that the use of influencers posting about the festival on social media in exchange for tickets has been found to violate trade law. “There need to be better rules in place,” Crossno says.

Overall, he says he is not angry about what happened on Great Exuma. However, he adds: “We have all these lawsuits going on, so I don’t think publicly I’m supposed to say it’s hilarious, but it is. It’s funny that all these people went down there thinking they were going to hang out with Emily Ratajkowski and Hailey Baldwin, and all they got was a gravel parking lot and what sounded like somebody’s iPod Shuffle plugged into the main stage. I could not have made that up.”

The lesson from the parable then? Seth ponders for a moment: “I would say: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”