Fyre Festival victim reaps online donations

A Bahamian caterer who accepted a “good faith contract” with the fraudulent Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland to prep thousands of meals and provide lodging for VIP partygoers — and found herself cooking without pay for stranded festival patrons — has raised more than $100,000 through a GoFundMe campaign.

Maryann Rolle, proprietor of the Exuma Point Bar and Grille, near the site of the disastrous Fyre Festival, said she dipped into her life’s savings to pay workers who labored around the clock — even though she herself never saw a dime.

“I had ten persons working directly with me, just preparing food all day and all night, 24 hours,” she said in the Netflix documentary, “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.” “I had to literally pay all those people. I am here as a Bahamian and they stand in my face every day.”

The music event billed as a VIP experience featuring Blink-182 and other musical acts quickly devolved into a barbaric retreat whose “luxury accommodations” included unfinished tents and drenched mattresses. Organizer Billy McFarland, 27, is currently serving six years in prison for a fraud estimated to have stolen $27.4 million from investors. His partner, rapper Ja Rule, insists he, too, was “hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hoodwinked, led astray.”

Rolle says on her fundraising page that she catered approximately 1,000 meals a day in April 2017 and also hosted festival organizers at Exuma Point Resort, which she co-owns with her husband.

“As I make this plea it’s hard to believe and embarrassing to admit that I was not paid…I was left in a big hole! My life was changed forever, and my credit was ruined by Fyre Fest,” Rolle and her husband, Elvis, wrote. “My only resource today is to appeal for help,” they said. As of Monday more than 4,000 people had contributed a total surpassing $131,000 to the couple’s campaign.

Rolle told Bahamian newspaper Tribune 242 she honored her contract in hopes that the company behind the failed festival would bring business to the island later down the line.

“I wasn’t working for this one, I was working on our future goals with Fyre,” she said. “That was my purpose.”

“I understand how good business should work, so I was in agreement. You’re thinking it’s real, we liaison in good faith. In the Bahamas, sometimes we tend to get careless about business and we lean more to good faith, that’s our culture,” she said.