Kendall Jenner Pays a Literal Price for Her Fyre Festival Promo
nce, a long time ago, an unnamed marketing executive working on Fyre Festival said, “Let’s just do it and be legends.” They did it, and organizer Billy McFarland was promptly arrested, charged with wire fraud, and sentenced to six years in jail. Legends, as you know from watching The Sandlot every day for a whole month of summer in 1995, “never die.” But in the case of the Fyre Festival, it would be more accurate to say, “Legends inspire legal imbroglios that never die.” The fallout from that whole mess way back in 2017 is not over. And the latest participant to pay for it is 24-year-old reality star and model Kendall Jenner.
This lawsuit seems to have gotten her on a sponcon technicality. Brooklyn bankruptcy trustee Gregory Messer sued Jenner in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of New York in 2019 to recover his clients’ investments in the festival. He is trying to recoup payments made to talent agencies, performers, and some vendors. The lawsuit states that even though Jenner was paid $275,000 all told to post on Instagram with her model friends, she “did not indicate to the public that she was paid to promote the Festival.”
The post, the lawsuit states, also promised Jenner’s followers that the event “would be filled with famous models on an exotic private island with ‘first-class culinary experiences and a luxury atmosphere.’” And that “Jenner’s reference to her ‘G.O.O.D. Music Family’ as ‘headliners’ at the Festival, intentionally led certain members of the public and ticket purchasers to believe that Jenner’s brother in law, famous musician and GOOD Music record label founder Kanye West, may be or would be performing at the Festival.
“In fact, Mr. West was never going to perform at the Festival. This conduct demonstrates a clear lack of good faith on Jenner’s part,” it claimed.
Whether an Instagram influencer/model can be held responsible for something she did not know was going to blow up so spectacularly is for the court of public opinion to decide. But, though she denied liability, Jenner agreed to settle and pay $90,000, a slap on the wrist in supermodel terms.
