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I am the co-creator and producer of the Fyre documentary

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I am the co-creator and producer of the Fyre documentary

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Does that mean I have biases?

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Hello everyone. I am Mick Purzycki,  CEO of Jerry Media. I am also the producer and co-creator of the documentary, "FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened." My documentary depicts the Fyre Festival, an epic failure that will not soon be forgotten. I made this documentary to expose the unethical behavior of one Billy McFarland and the deceit that accompanied those behaviors. According to Aristotelian Ethics, people become good by doing good. In the Fyre documentary, Billy may have thought he was doing good, but in reality, he was not. He lied to investors about money and funding, he kept employees, such as myself in the dark, and he deceived his customers. By Aristotelian Ethics, Billy acted poorly, making him a bad and unethical person. Billy hired me to run the social media for Fyre. As an employee, I put my trust in him, as did other employees. Trust is an important factor in interpersonal communication and ethics. I did my job, advertising the festival, reaching out to platforms for other advertisements, etc. I did my job, unwavering, because I trusted Billy's vision. However, Billy was not trustworthy, leaving the majority of us employees in the dark. People, like Billy, have a moral responsibility to protect and promote the interests of those who rely on them, and Billy failed to do that, thus making his decisions unethical. Billy was irresponsible, especially when it came to finances. According to the Association of Independent Certified Public Accountants Code of Professional Conduct, there are 6 principles for professional standards. These include being responsible, serving the public interests, maintaining objectivity and independence, due care, and following the principles in all activities. Billy's actions in misleading his investors and stealing money from clients break these principles, thus demonstrating unethical financing behavior.

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As the person in charge of Fyre social media, seeing this broke my heart. I now knew the extent to which I had accidentally misled these people simply because I trusted Billy. I made my own moral decision, and that was I no longer would post lies to social media about the Fyre Festival.

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Would you trust him now?

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Now he's sending out smoke signals.

Convicted Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland exclusively tells The Post he is starting a new endeavor from inside prison: crowd-funding money for other inmates to be able to call their loved ones during these trying times.

"Coronavirus is driving families apart . . . and visits are canceled across every federal prison," McFarland says. "I'm launching an initiative called Project-315 to bring together and connect in-need inmates and their families who are affected by coronavirus. We're going to pay for calls for as many incarcerated people across the country as possible."

Prison, he says, has changed him.

"I see the important things in life . . . way more," he says via phone from Elkton Federal Correctional Institution in Lisbon, Ohio. "I got lost during Fyre - thinking that I had to make it work at all costs. I realize how immature and wrong that thought process was. I've grown up in jail.

"There's no question I totally messed up. It really makes me sick."

In October 2018, the 28-year-old New Yorker was sentenced to six years in prison and three years' probation for wire fraud in relation to his ill-fated April 2017 Bahamas-based music Fyre Festival. He was ordered to pay $26 million in restitution to his victims, but right now he's focused on footing the $3.15 standard cost for a 15-minute prison phone call.

He'll be collecting donations via his new Project-315.com.

"First, I'd like you to know that I know how badly I messed up," McFarland writes in a letter posted on the site. "I lied, deceived, and ultimately hurt many people in pursuit of what I thought would be successful business ventures. What I did was absolutely despicable, and the responsibility for the damages caused starts and ends with me."

Still, he admits to The Post, "It's totally reasonable that people would think this is a scam. The good thing is, this isn't for me - it's for the families of inmates, who are suffering because of what their loved ones did."

To get the ball rolling, "My friends are contributing off the bat, so we'll help the first few thousand families and we'll go from there," he says. "I have a small business team of four or five people, a mix of tech and entertainment people" - none of whom were involved in the Fyre Festival - helping.

"All the money that's coming in is going directly to the initiative," he says. "I'm not on any of the bank accounts or documents and I don't have access to any of the funds."

Family members can apply online on behalf of their locked-up loved ones, and McFarland's team will allocate funds to prisoners' phone-call accounts on a first-come, first-served basis.

McFarland has managed to convince at least one person he's gone legit.

"Billy's been a godsend - he helps so many people," Elkton inmate Jebriel, 42, tells The Post. "I've never met someone in the business world - I've always been a street guy."

Jebriel was touched last week when McFarland had $10 added to his account so he could speak to his father last week for the first time in six years. "I wanted to hear his voice, and Billy helped me out."

McFarland was transferred to Elkton in October, after being thrown in the "SHU" - the solitary confinement unit known as the special housing unit - for three months at upstate New York's minimum-security Otisville, for sneaking in a USB to work on a forthcoming novel. While he grew up in affluent Short Hills, NJ, McFarland still has to save his pennies for the prison commissary, where foaming hand sanitizer costs $1.55.

McFarland tells The Post he's not worried about catching the coronavirus, but he supports the release of prisoners most at risk: "Elderly people who are at the greatest medical risk should definitely be considered for release."

Meanwhile, he's already making plans for his own future release - and he hasn't totally let go of his Fyre Festival dream.

"I want to focus on the theme of Magnises [the credit card company he founded] and Fyre, which was to bring people together and create value through that," he says.

And someone call Ja Rule, because there will always be a bit of the old concert promoter in McFarland. Although he wouldn't reveal names, he swears one more thing about his charitable new endeavor: "We'll have artists backing the project."

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Fyre Fest's Billy McFarland reveals new project from prison, swears it's no 'scam'

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Now he's sending out smoke signals. Convicted Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland exclusively tells The Post he is starting a new endeavor from inside prison: crowd-funding money for other inmates to be able to call their loved ones during these trying times. "Coronavirus is driving families apart . . .

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Did Jerry Media help create the film so they could clear their name?

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Netflix and Hulu's dueling Fyre Festival documentaries are only slightly less dramatic than the failed music festival itself. According to a report from The New Republic, the CEO of Jerry Media - the firm responsible for advertising the festival, and a producer of the Netflix documentary - claimed to have "final cut" over the documentary. In a March 25 email to a freelance cinematographer hired by Fyre founder Billy McFarland, Jerry Media CEO Mick Purzycki wrote: "I have final cut on the film and will not be approving anything that is not done with integrity." (To make things even more confusing, that cinematographer, Michael Swaigen, eventually become an associate producer of the Hulu documentary.)

When contacted by The New Republic's reporter, Netflix disputed Purzycki's level of control. "Jerry Media did not have final cut. There was an initial agreement that either party could walk away at any point and retain the rights to what they came into the project with," Netflix said. "This was superseded by the distribution agreement where the final cut was with the director." Purzycki confirmed that he did send the March 25 email, but said that, later on, "all production companies ultimately agreed that final cut belonged to the director and the distributor of the film." Even with the director's cut, Jerry Media comes out looking squeaky clean in Netflix's telling of events.

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Jerry Media Reportedly Had Final Cut on Netflix's Fyre Festival Documentary

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Netflix and Hulu's dueling Fyre Festival documentaries are only slightly less dramatic than the failed music festival itself. According to a report from The New Republic, the CEO of Jerry Media - the firm responsible for advertising the festival, and a producer of the Netflix documentary - claimed to have "final cut" over the documentary.

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Jerry Media has been accused of stealing content from artists and not giving them credit where credit is due. Can a company that practices unethical behaviors condemn another for its unethical behaviors? #FyreFestival

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Elliot Tebele, founder of marketing firm Jerry Media and creator of the popular Fuckjerry Instagram account, said today that his company will no longer post content without being able to identify its creator and without that creator's express and advance consent. The change comes in response to backlash from the comedy world, which has long despised accounts like Fuckjerry's for profiting off jokes, memes, and other creative works on the internet without approval and, in earlier years, without crediting an original creator at all.

"In the past few years, I have made a concerted, proactive effort to properly credit creators for their work. We have also updated our policies to make sure we are responsive to creators whenever they have reached out to us about posts," Tebele wrote in a post published to Medium this afternoon. "It hasn't been a perfect system, but I do feel it was a significant improvement, as many of my peers have approached these issues in the same way. Given the conversations over the past few days, and the issues that have come to light, it is clear however, that we need to do better."

The backlash began after Vulture writer Megh Wright penned an article earlier this week detailing how Jerry Media, because it operates in the loose world of social media marketing, routinely uses comedian's jokes to help promote products - something the company is paid tens of thousands of dollars per post to do. Following the article, and Wright's accompanying viral Twitter thread, the hashtag #fuckfuckjerry began trending as a way to draw attention to how social media marketing, and the economy of likes and followers on platforms like Instagram, exploits small and independent creators mostly to market products and make money for aggregator accounts like Fuckjerry.

Social media marketing is being forced to move beyond stealing memes and jokes

Jerry Media, as the owner of the Fuckjerry account, is able to use its massive 14.2-million followers on Instagram to command high prices for branded posts and consulting gigs, all while still relying on the nonchalant, reposting meme culture from which the account was first born. In recent weeks, the company has also gained a bit of notoriety for having been partially responsible for hyping up the disastrous Fyre Festival, as the firm hired to be the event's social media strategist.

And yet, despite the Fyre Festival's legal and financial fallout, Jerry Media's direct involvement in Netflix's documentary on the subject has further earned it a reputation as a cutting-edge marketing firm. Case in point: The Atlantic's Taylor Lorenz reported earlier this week that Tebele's firm is now representing the world-record Instagram egg account, which appears to have inked a Super Bowl-related ad deal with Hulu, likely for millions of dollars.

The tipping point in this latest episode appears to have been Comedy Central deciding to pull advertising from Fuckjerry in response to the hashtag and Wright's article. The move threatened to instigate a full-blown advertiser boycott as more attention is brought to how freely large accounts steal other people's content and repost it for their own financial gain. And now, it's clear Tebele is trying to get out ahead of it.

"As the social media landscape changes, we know our policies will have to continue to evolve, and we look forward to engaging with our followers and Instagram in conversations about these important issues," he writes. "We want to apologize to anyone who feels we have wronged them in the past. We want to do the right thing by creators by seeking permission and giving them the credit they deserve."

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Fuckjerry founder apologizes for stealing jokes and pledges to get creator permission

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Elliot Tebele, the CEO and founder of marketing firm Jerry Media and creator of the popular FuckJerry Instagram account, said today that his company will no longer post content without being able to identify its creator and without that creator's express and advance consent.