Suing Fyre Festival Prepared Me for Trump

Written by Ben Meiselas

When I was sitting around the Thanksgiving table, my dad brought up the topic of my lawsuit against Fyre Festival from many years before I started MeidasTouch.

My dad said that the incoming Trump administration looked like the Washington, D.C., version of Fyre Festival. “Remember when you brought down the original Fyre Festival in 2017?” my dad asked.

My nieces and nephews, who are too young to remember Fyre Festival, asked, “Uncle Ben, what’s a Fyre Festival?”

This led to me telling the story about how I uncovered the $100 million fraud at a bizarre, fake 2017 music festival in the Bahamas and how that led to the arrest and federal conviction of the organizer.

After a big Thanksgiving meal, we all sat around and watched the Hulu and Netflix movies about the Fyre Festival—both of which I happen to appear in, strangely enough.

Here’s the story I shared at the Thanksgiving table:

Back in 2017, I was handling civil rights cases and had also taken on some high-profile cases against large corporations engaged in fraud. For example, I was one of the lead plaintiff attorneys for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Receivership in one of the largest Ponzi scheme/medical fraud cases in California’s history. So it wasn’t unusual to get phone calls pitching me potential new cases.

In late April 2017, my office was flooded with calls from people saying they were stuck on an island in the Bahamas after showing up expecting to attend a music festival called Fyre Festival. They had purchased tickets for thousands of dollars, expecting a luxury experience. But when they arrived, there was no festival, no music, barely any food, no amenities, and no way to leave the island.

It was such a strange story to hear. But call after call, I kept hearing the same thing. People started sending me photos and videos from the island. We investigated the claims, helped people get off the island, and very quickly filed a lawsuit against the Fyre Festival and its organizer. We determined that the festival was part of an elaborate fraud—not just against attendees but also against the people who invested in the company behind the event.

Shortly after we filed the lawsuit, the Feds initiated an investigation based on our work and brought criminal charges against the organizer of the event, leading to a conviction and prison sentence.

Both Hulu and Netflix made documentaries about the Fyre Festival fraud. In the Hulu documentary, I compared Fyre Festival to the Trump White House at that time. This was many years before I would go on to start MeidasTouch with my brothers.

One of the lessons I took from my lawsuit against Fyre Festival was how bad actors could exploit social media to convince people to do outrageous things against their own interests, even in the face of obvious red flags and warnings. In the case of Fyre Festival, people traveled all the way to an island in the Bahamas searching for a music festival that never existed—with no way to return home.

I realize now that my experience exposing the Fyre fraud was instrumental in building a digital media infrastructure to combat bad actors and disinformation on social media. Fyre Festival was peanuts compared to our work now against Trump. Part of my frustration as a litigator was that my work was limited to specific cases—it’s hard to fight for structural change when you’re litigating discrete lawsuits.

Now, at MeidasTouch, we have the opportunity to stop the Trump Fyre fraud Part 2.