According to Billboard, Jeffrey “Ja Rule” Atkins has been dismissed from the $100 million class-action Fyre Festival lawsuit.
The rapper co-founded the failed festival with Billy McFarland and heavily promoted it to the millions of followers on his social media accounts. Grant Margolin, who was the chief marketing officer for the Fyre Festival, was also dismissed from the lawsuit at the same time. U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel determined that the attendees of the festival who filed the claims against the two should be dismissed because they had not sufficiently proven that Ja Rule or Margolin had committed fraud by their actions.
“This Court rejected plaintiffs’ conclusory assertions that they relied on defendants’ representations about the Festival as insufficient to state a claim for fraud,” Judge P. Kevin Castel ruled. “In the case of Atkins, plaintiffs alleged an actionable false statement, but failed to allege that they acted in reliance thereon.”
“In July, the Court dismissed all Fyre Festival claims against Mr. Atkins. After this loss, plaintiffs’ law firm Geragos & Geragos appealed that decision in an attempt to keep Ja Rule and Margolin involved in the case, and the Court denied their appeal. This ruling is nothing short of a total vindication of Mr. Atkins,” said Ja Rule’s attorney Ryan Hayden Smith in a statement provided to Billboard.
Ticket holders for Fyre Festival paid between $1,000 and $100,000 to attend the event in the Bahamas, which was supposed to take place on April 28, 2017. He is notorious for his role in the failed Fyre Festival. The disastrous affair was unpacked on two separate documentaries: Fyre Fraud on Hulu and FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened on Netflix.
The class-action lawsuit against Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland is still ongoing.
In 2014, Ja Rule published a memoir, Unruly: The Highs and Lows of Becoming a Man (Amistad, $16.99), where he addressed his past struggles with a difficult adolescence, his breakout success, beefs, fatherhood, and his two-year prison sentence for tax evasion and gun possession. Currently, Ja Rule is part of the Growing Up Hip Hop: New York cast.
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