Kendall Jenner has finally broken her silence over her connection to the ill-fated Fyre Festival and the fallout that followed its disastrous failure. The model and member of the Kardashian clan was part of the infamous promotional campaign for Fyre and was paid six figures for an advertisement post on Instagram.
According to a New York Times profile about the “business savvy” side of the Kardashian sisters, even when the siblings face “bad things,” they still manage to walk away making money. Jenner has faced a few bad things herself in the last two years.
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Jenner’s connection to Fyre Festival is only one of a few mistakes encountered by the young model. While she was the highest-paid model in the world in 2018, making $26.5 million for just over 50 sponsored Instagram posts according to the NYT, her missteps took center stage for most.
According to the profile, Jenner makes it clear that she wasn’t part of the music event and didn’t much about what went out behind the scenes outside of being paid $250,000 for a promotional post on the festival. She did call it a learning experience, though.
“You get reached out to by people to, whether it be to promote or help or whatever, and you never know how these things are going to turn out, sometimes it’s a risk,” Jenner tells the Times. “I definitely can do as much research as I can, but sometimes there isn’t much research you can do because it’s a starting brand and you kind of have to have faith in it and hope it will work out the way people say it will.”
Jenner notes that even when you have that trust in someone, “you never really know what’s going to happen.” She also adds that you never know what the response could be down the road.
While it is easy to target Jenner and others for their role in promoting the show, it is harder to hold her fully accountable for it because she was as much in the dark as anybody who attended the show.
The connection to Fyre Festival isn’t all that Jenner was dragged for in 2017. Pepsi was forced to scrap an ad starring the model that featured imagery from Black Lives Matter and other protests prior to the Fyre Festival fiasco. The ad in question showed Jenner joining with the protest and walking up to a police line with a Pepsi to apparently “defuse” the situation. A report in the Times referred to the ad as “tone deaf” and noted Pepsi’s reasoning for the ad where they said, “captures the spirit and actions of those people that jump in to every moment.”
Jenner and her sister, Kylie Jenner, were also recently forced to apologize for $125 shirts featuring Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. and pulled them from sale on their website. Many felt the shirts were disrespectful to the artists and were criticized for trying to “exploit the deaths” of Shakur and Smalls by the latter’s mother, Voletta Wallace.
The model hasn’t responded as well to controversies related to her in the past. Most recently the star has dealt with backlash related to her partnership with Proactiv.
“Kendall isn’t responding very to the backlash regarding her acne ad. She’s depressed and hurt by the comments,” a source told In Touch back in January. “It’s bringing up the same feelings she had when her Pepsi commercial was attacked as insensitive and tone-deaf. Looking for sympathy from bullying is one thing, but getting paid big bucks for it doesn’t fly.”
Two docs about Fyre Festival are currently streaming to provide more info: Fyre currently streaming on Netflix and Fyre Fraud on Hulu.
