Billy McFarland, the convicted fraudster responsible for the 2017 Fyre Festival scam, has requested to be released from prison early amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The Fyre Festival is a defunct luxury music festival that left thousands of clueless attendees stranded at a run-down, half-built concert site in the Bahamas in April 2017.
It was co-founded by McFarland and American rapper Ja Rule and was documented in Netflix‘s 2019 film Fyre. Since March 2018, McFarland has been incarcerated at Elkton prison — Ohio’s only federal prison — where 60 inmates have tested positive for the coronavirus and six have died as a result of complications from COVID-19, as reported by Dispatch.