Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarland is writing a terribly titled memoir from prison

Last month, news broke that Billy McFarland and Jersey Shore star Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino had struck up a friendship in prison. However, his time behind bars is not all fun and Scrabble games for the Fyre Festival founder, who is currently serving a six-year sentence at the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York. Now, reports indicate that McFarland is writing a book, because what is prison besides a government-funded opportunity to finally sit down and write your memoir?

Per a report in New York Magazine, McFarland’s Russian model girlfriend Anastasia Eremenko reached out to writer and editor Josh Raab at the start of February. She hoped to bring Raab aboard to help edit McFarland’s book, which — we shit you not — is tentatively titled Promythus: The God of Fyre. It turns out that the con man has been writing out the pages to his forthcoming memoir longhand, then sending the letters to Eremenko to type, with the anticipated length coming in at 800 handwritten pages.

As New York Magazine explains,

“The book, McFarland said, chronicles his career from the first investment in a now-shuttered start-up back in 2011 to the FBI paying him a visit days after the festival imploded. [Publicist Brandon] Rubinshtein provided Raab with a bullet-pointed, name-dropping list of selected stories, the sorts of ‘great and terrible moments’ McFarland planned to highlight. Actors, models, musicians, people who are only famous because their parents are, cameos from members of the Trump administration, the list goes on and on. Much of McFarland’s plan centers around telling what he calls the ‘raw’ story, the story he feels that the Hulu and Netflix documentaries — both released in January 2019 — failed to fully depict.”

During Raab and McFarland’s frequent phone conversations, McFarland drew parallels to his story and other con men and cheats who he admired, such as Jordan Belfort of The Wolf of Wall Street fame and Molly Bloom, who inspired Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game in 2017. He also noted that he planned to self-publish the work to help cover the $26 million dollars he owes in restitution.

McFarland also put Raab in touch with publicist Brandon Rubinshtein, who he hired to work on the project. In their own discussions, Rubinshtein allegedly made ridiculous (and now-refuted) claims, like that Ryan Seacrest visited McFarland in jail to rebrand Fyre Fest himself. Andy King, the best meme to come out of the debacle due to his willingness to “suck dick” for water, also was apparently enlisted to do publicity for the book.

The memoir was apparently scheduled for release at the end of April, though has yet to reemerge on Amazon’s self-publishing service. Despite this stall, the failed promoter explained that he needed to release the work quickly because “the festival will not be a one and done event — it’s happening again, so the original story will lose the potential to be told and set the stage if it’s not done before the next events take place.” Read the full report here.

Raab ultimately turned down the project (because, why wouldn’t he?), and is able to spill all the tea thanks to a botched non-disclosure agreement that the team forgot to send him.

In other news, co-founder Ja Rule is tossing around the possibility of throwing Fyre Festival, part deux. Happily, the rapper has been mercilessly mocked by people who actually know how to events.