Ja Rule mostly dismissed from Fyre Festival case, with the possibility of one pesky tweet coming back to haunt him

If you're not familiar with the debacle of Fyre Festival, you can watch two documentaries about it, or catch up on the Wikipedia page. The tl;dr version is: It was billed as a luxury music festival that would blow Coachella out of the water, and was canceled on the day it was to start, leaving attendees, who had paid thousands of dollars to attend, stranded with FEMA tents for accommodation. The festival had some big names associated with it, co-founded by Ja Rule and promoted on social media by people like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid. Ja Rule was sued, along with Billy McFarland, CEO of Fyre Media, who has already pleaded guilty to fraud in connection with the festival and has been sentenced to prison. 

Now, there's a recent ruling out of the Southern District of New York in In re Fyre Festival Litigation, 17-cv-3296 (PKC) (see links at end of blog post), that might succeed in dismissing Ja Rule from the case. The plaintiffs have been granted a very limited leave to amend with respect to one specific tweet, so Ja Rule might stay in the case on the basis of that tweet. 

The case has contract claims against Fyre Media, but this opinion focuses on individuals, Ja Rule and Grant Margolin, former Chief Marketing Officer for Fyre Festival. Neither Margolin nor Ja Rule was a party to the contract at issue in the case, so this decision doesn't take up the contract issues, but it is interesting on the fraud issue, so I'm blogging it anyway (also, how can you not blog a court opinion that has a footnote explaining what "FOMO" means?). Fraud requires pleading with particularity, and the plaintiffs fail to meet this burden. Although they allege many allegedly fraudulent statements, they fail to allege when many of those statements were made or whether the defendants knew at the time that the statements were untrue. After all, the defendants could have made the statements about Fyre Festival with every intention of delivering on their promises of an incredible festival. 

The one exception to this is a particular tweet at issue by Ja Rule. The plaintiffs properly allege the date of that tweet, which was the day before the festival was scheduled to start (and instead was canceled). The tweet reads, "The stage is set!!! In less than 24 hours, the first annual Fyre Festival begins. #festivallife" The plaintiffs also allege that Ja Rule must at least have been reckless in continuing to encourage people to attend a festival whose stage was not at all set. The plaintiffs trip up when it comes to alleging reliance on their part on the tweet, but the court gives them leave to amend to try to fix this failure. The court does not give the plaintiffs leave to amend any of the other failings of the complaint because of delay on the part of the plaintiffs. 

The court also discusses some negligence issues as well as tortious interference and unjust enrichment claims. When it comes to tortious interference, there were no allegations that Ja Rule or Margolin interfered with or caused Fyre Festival's inability to perform the contract, merely that they knew Fyre Festival would not be able to perform. As for the unjust enrichment claim, the court warns that this is not a catch-all cause of action and cannot be used to cure the defects in the other causes of action. 

Some other reporting on this ruling here, here, and here.  

(edit: h/t to Ryan Smith of Smith Law for sending the motion: Download 1-17-CV-03296-PKC Brief and opinion: Download Fyre Dismissal to me)