Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison Thursday for multiple counts of fraud, including the failed festival in the Bahamas where the 26-year-old lured hundreds of millennials with the help of celebrity investors like Ja Rule and Instagram celebrities like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid.
“The remorse I feel is crushing,” McFarland said, wearing a khaki prison jumpsuit and glasses before a packed courtroom of his family and victims. “I lived every day with the weight of knowing that I literally destroyed the lives of my friends and family.”
McFarland said “I’m sorry” multiple times during his sentencing hearing and begged U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Buchwald for leniency as his sister and mother wept and his father held his head in his hands. McFarland said he had faced violence in prison so far and that “the best way to be sorry is through my future actions.”
McFarland’s legal team had also asked the court for leniency, saying in early October that McFarland had been diagnosed with untreated bipolar disorder, preventing him from knowing right from wrong.
But Buchwald was unmoved. “It is my conclusion based on all the submissions that the defendant is a serial fraudster and that to date his fraud like a circle has no ending,” she said, adding that even if he’s bipolar that does not excuse his behavior.
Yet in the end, the sentence was not as harsh as it could have been. Buchwald had the freedom to go as high as 20 years for convictions on three counts of wire fraud, one count of bank fraud, and one count of lying to investigators.
Instead, she allowed sentences for multiple counts of fraud to be served concurrently, meaning he got six years in prison and three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to forfeit $26,182,386, though it’s unclear how much of that, if any, he currently has.
