Rodrigo Benefit Festival Raises $20m, Snarls Irvine
The inaugural Daisy Chain Fields festival at Irvine's Great Park raised money for women's charities, then left thousands stuck for hours getting home.
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The Festival and the Money
Olivia Rodrigo hosted the first Daisy Chain Fields music festival on Saturday, a single-day benefit event that brought together female artists to raise money for non-profits supporting women and girls.
Rodrigo announced at the event that the festival had raised at least $20 million. The Guardian reports the concert itself raised $10m, which Melinda French Gates then matched to reach the $20m total.
The Guardian says the beneficiary organisations are women-focused non-profits whose funding has been cut by the Trump administration.
Stranded at the Great Park
Voice of OC reports that thousands of attendees at the Great Park in Irvine, California, were stranded for hours after the performances ended. People were stuck in traffic, sitting on curbs waiting for rideshares, or unable to get cell service to reach family and friends.
Many of the festival-goers, a majority of them women, walked for miles at night to find rides home. Some who paid $95 to park on-site could not get out of the parking lots, and some who paid $50 for a shuttle from the Honda Center or UCI faced delays returning to their vehicles.
According to Voice of OC, the performances and the experience inside the festival grounds received high marks. Most of the criticism concerned getting home afterwards.
Irvine's Response
Melissa Haley, Irvine's director of communications and engagement, told Voice of OC in a Monday afternoon phone call that the city considers the event a success. "The fact that Irvine was selected to be a home base for this for its inaugural year is resounding," she said.
Haley said the city is in discussions with C3 Presents, the company that produced the event, about bringing the festival back next year, but nothing has been settled. She said officials would debrief before deciding.
Voice of OC notes the traffic problems mirrored Irvine's Fourth of July event last year, when the city expected about 20,000 people at the Great Park and more than 40,000 arrived. This year's Fourth of July celebration was cancelled after city leaders ran out of time to secure vendors for street closures and other needs.
Rodrigo's Record on Politics
The Guardian's Arwa Mahdawi writes that Rodrigo, who is 23 and Filipino American, has repeatedly used her platform on political issues rather than staying neutral.
She condemned the overturning of Roe v Wade on stage at Glastonbury in 2022, when she was 19. She publicly told the Trump administration not to use her music in what she called "racist, hateful propaganda" after one of her songs appeared in a government video urging undocumented immigrants to self-deport.
Last year she wrote on Instagram that "mothers, fathers and children in Gaza are starving, dehydrated and being denied access to basic medical care". The sources do not say which artists performed at the festival or how many people attended.
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