Trending 22nd January 2019 by Cara Croke

Over 100k Has Been Raised Through GoFundMe For An Unpaid Fyre Festival Worker

Maryann Rolle lost $50,000 of her life savings when the festival collapsed.

Netflix’s Fyre Festival documentary has been the talk of the town recently, and mainly because viewers can’t get over how badly the people involved were scammed.

One person who people felt especially bad for was Bahamian restaurant worker Maryann Rolle. In the documentary, she revealed that she lost $50,000 of her life savings when the festival collapsed in April 2017.

Maryann and her team worked to prepare 1,000 meals per day for the staff of the Fyre Festival, but after the festival collapsed, she was left without pay and was forced to pay her staff with her personal savings.

She now doesn’t “even like to talk about the Fyre Festival” because of the pain it’s caused her.

Maryann and her husband Elvis then set up a GoFundMe page with a target of raising $123,000 – and have since surpassed that amount with an incredible $140,000 just seven days after its creation.

On the page, Maryann explained: “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.

“My only resource today is to appeal for help.

“There is an old saying that goes ‘bad publicity is better than no publicity’ and I pray that whoever reads this plea is able to assist.”

The campaign was also shared to Instagram this week by Ja Rule, who co-founded the festival with entrepreneur Billy McFarland.

“My heart goes out to this lovely lady,” he captioned the post. “We’ve never met but I’m devastated that something that was meant to be amazing, turn out to be such a disaster and hurt so many ppl… SORRY to anyone who has been negatively effected by the festival.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs5Y1S4Antz/

A spokesperson for GoFundMe told BuzzFeed News: “This has been an incredible outpouring of support for the workers affected by the Fyre festival. As ever, we’ll be working with the organisers and beneficiaries to make sure the money gets to the right place.”

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