'Chaotic disaster': Wake County lawsuit reveals how Fyre Festival failed to deliver promises

RALEIGH (WTVD) -- You've probably heard about the Fyre Festival -- especially with documentaries about the failed event recently debuting on Netflix and Hulu. But did you know one of the lawsuits against the creators of the festival was filed right here in Wake County?

The documentaries about the ill-fated festival were released in January. They detail how the 2017 Fyre Festival and its organizers failed to deliver on the numerous promises made to ticket buyers.

Many of those same details can be found in the Wake County lawsuit.

Seth Crossno, a Wake County resident who was interviewed for both documentaries, and his friend Mark Thompson, sued 2017 Fyre Festival and its organizers in May of 2017. The judge ultimately ruled in their favor and granted them $5 million in damages. They have yet to see any of that money.

The complaints in the lawsuit reads much like the documentaries.

"Fyre Festival adopted the tagline 'on the boundaries of impossible' -- an all too fortuitous motto for an event that would ultimately end up exactly as the motto suggests: an impossible feat to pull off," read one line in the lawsuit.

Another line described the festival as "a complete and total chaotic disaster, the inevitable result of the festivals' unraveling from its very inception."

Fyre Festival organizers sold thousands of ticket packages priced from $1,200 to over $100,000 per person. The tickets touted first-class airfare, luxury housing, and five-star dining. However, ticket buyers flew without any special perks, were forced to live in what was described as a refugee camp and ate cheese sandwiches.

According to the lawsuit, Crossno and Thompson flew from Raleigh to Miami on April 26 and then continued to the Bahamas. When they arrived, "they were shocked to find that, instead of the luxury experience that was advertised, they were greeted with a disastrous and barren area where workers were scrambling to set up the most basic on infrastructure, no security was in place and minimal amounts of Frye Festival workers were available to provide direction or information."

Read the full lawsuit below.