Group led by developer Bill Hutchinson sues over Kaaboo Texas, calling festival a ‘colossal failure’

Kaaboo Texas organizers promised an “upscale” event centered around music, comedy, art and Las Vegas-style luxuries during the three-day festival at Arlington’s AT&T Stadium. And while attendees shelled out hundreds of dollars for indulgent VIP amenities — poolside cabanas, a pop-up spa and bottomless drinks — a Dallas Morning News review of the May 2019 festival pointed out that relatively small crowds made a band’s performance look like a sound check and said the VIP aspects created an off-putting dynamic. Now, a federal lawsuit claims investors were misled about how lucrative the festival would be and accuses the event’s founders of fraud.

Dunhill Festival Fund filed the lawsuit Thursday in a U.S. District Court in Delaware, naming Kaaboo Texas and Kaaboo co-founders Bryan Gordon and Seth Wolkov as defendants. Dunhill’s president, Dallas-area developer Bill Hutchinson, was recently accused of sexual misconduct in Texas and California, charges he denies. Attorneys for the defendants were not listed in court records. Efforts to reach Gordon and Wolkov were unsuccessful. Kaaboo Texas was announced in 2018 as the San Diego-area music festival looked to expand to new locations, taking its “five-star live entertainment experience” to Arlington, as well as the Cayman Islands. According to the lawsuit, Kaaboo founders Gordon and Wolkov “dazzled” Dunhill with their vision for the festival and said that, although the event would initially lose money, it would give its investors a healthy return on their investments during a 10-year commitment to the Texas site. Dunhill invested $3 million in Kaaboo Texas, expecting to make money as quickly as three years into the partnership, the lawsuit says. Instead, the inaugural — and only — Kaaboo Texas “was a colossal failure and was completely mismanaged from an operational standpoint, but also from a financial perspective,” the lawsuit says, citing “an awkward gathering of touring acts, with most past their prime, resulting in an incredibly low turnout.”