Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/Reuters/Handout
MaryAnn Rolle, a resort and restaurant operator in Exuma Point, Bahamas, preaches a motto of love and forgiveness. But even she can’t get behind Fyre Festival II—now being organized by Billy McFarland, the convicted fraudster behind the first one.
“I don’t think he should go forward with any Fyre Festival until he pays the people here in the Bahamas that he owes,” Rolle said. “You don’t do wrong and then just continue to go on as if you don’t care about people.”
Rolle, 59, was one of the caterers contracted for McFarland’s infamous music festival that wasn’t—a 2017 fiasco that sparked multiple lawsuits and competing documentaries and sent him to prison for four years. Rolle says she worked nonstop to deliver 1,000 meals a day to guests at the doomed festival but was never paid for her work—or the work of employees she compensated out of her own savings. Rolle previously told The New York Times that festival organizers owed her $134,000, and that she spent $50,000 of her own money on expenses.