Airplane Bathroom Incident at Center of New Lawsuit

Did a United Airlines pilot act correctly when he removed a passenger from a plane’s bathroom — and did the Department of Homeland Security make matters worse by detaining that passenger and another traveler on the same flight? These questions are at the heart of a lawsuit filed this month in New York’s Southern District.

The incident that sparked the lawsuit took place on a United flight traveling from Tulum to Houston. One of the plaintiffs, Yisroel Liebb, got up to use one of the plane’s bathrooms; when he hadn’t returned to his seat after 20 minutes, a flight attendant asked another passenger, Jacob Sebbag, to check in on Liebb. According to the lawsuit, Sebbag did so, at which point Liebb told him that he was constipated and would be out soon.

Ten minutes later, one of the flight’s pilots approached Sebbag and asked him to check on Liebb again; Liebb said that he was almost done and would be out soon. At this point, the lawsuit states that the pilot’s mood turned hostile. The pilot then “broke the lock on the door and forced the door to the bathroom open, pulling Liebb out of the bathroom with his pants still around his ankles, exposing his genitalia to Sebbag, several flight attendants, and the nearby passengers on the plane.”

Things took an even more unpleasant turn from there. As the Associated Press reports, both Liebb and Sebbag are Orthodox Jews, and their lawsuit alleges that the pilot subsequently made “scathing remarks about their Judaism.” When the flight landed, both men were taken into custody and searched by Customs and Border Protection officers.

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As Matthew Klint at Live and Let’s Fly pointed out, the fact that United Airlines has yet to comment on this lawsuit means there are still things about the incident we don’t know. If this is indeed a case of an airline employee having an anti-Semitic meltdown and harassing a passenger who was dealing with gastrointestinal issues, it seems pretty open-and-shut. We’ll see what develops as this lawsuit moves closer to trial.