Filing a lawsuit against a company for causing you to feel ashamed and distressed is an interesting claim. It seems an especially ridiculous one, however, when the claim is based on having gotten in a fight with a gate agent at the airport following a missed connection. It is doubly so when the basis of demanding better service from the agent was throwing your elite card at them and expecting them to "hop to" and move worlds because of that. And yet even more ridiculous when you cannot even properly do that, instead presenting your debit card to the agent.
The woman demanding $150-300,000 for having spent 15 hours in jail as a result of being such a block-headed, self-absorbed, over-entitled moron doesn’t even deserve the $10-30,000 that Delta supposedly offered in a pre-trial mediation.
I know that it will cost delta more than the settlement cash offered in legal fees to see this one out. Hopefully the plaintiff learns another hard lesson here. What a moron.
There’s also a chance that I’m completely misreading the situation and that she really was maliciously prosecuted by the company for quite calmly asking for help and the debit/Medallion card thing was completely made up by the gate agent. But I’m betting against it.
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I will be very discouraged is she is given a single dollar. Flying is a privilege not a right and these days being aggressive towards an employee is a quick way to lose this privilege. I recently witnessed an almost identical situation between a passenger and a GA and wrote about it in my blog , here is the link to the post http://www.captcarryon.com/2011/12/25/nonrev-tales-dont-piss-off-the-gate-agent/
Although I enjoy the blog you write, I don’t think you have lived up to providing your readers with a reasonable objective evaluation of the situation here.
The fact is that you drew conclusions from a short newspaper article. You also assumed that the passenger’s story was wrong and the airline agent’s story was right. There is simply no way to tell. It is therefore totally inexcusable for you to draw such a conclusion and call the passenger “a moran.”
Let’s see more objectivity please.
Hi Craig from NY. Sorry that you find Seth to be too judgmental, but I find myself being so as well and judging by your spelling, find your opinion of very minor value.
Maybe a blog isnt the place for you. For objectivity, please see some news source who’s bias matches yours.
Greg
Craig, based on the article, she comes across as a moron. She handed over her debit card. That’s a difficult error to make for even a half-wit. But startlingly routine for a careless or pompous moron.
She crossed enough people to land herself in jail. That’s enough for me and most to gather that she’s a moron.
Unfortunately, she’s also litigious and believes her shame, distress and “false arrest” are somehow worth between $150,000 and $300,000.
In a sh*tstorm, don’t be an a**hole. She was the only one who missed that flight and ended up in jail.
She deserves no sympathy. A moron would think otherwise, as she does.
“Airline employees told an officer to arrest Tuxworth and Brown on disorderly conduct charges. Tuxworth remained handcuffed and jailed for 15 hours, according to her lawsuit. ”
I find it deeply disturbing that airline employees now tell police officers what to do.
IMO if you fly over 50k MQM you should be good enough to know how DL works and be able to work it without being and idiot. Between medallion line, @DeltaAssit and redcoats you can have them do everything to make you happy! I am with Wandering Aramean on this one. We are smarter thank this at GOLD or higher level!
The woman really was a moron. She should have took the 10K and dashed. I had no idea that she was looking for that sort of payout when I heard the case. As one of her jurors, I got to hear all the crap they were spewing.
As the story goes, the plane leaving Charleston was 2 hours late for reasons never really explained. So, when the women got to Atlanta, they already had a chip on their shoulders,(and a couple of frodkas under their belts(sworn testimony)). Since they got perked up to first class from business, (perk for being a Gold/god Medallion card holder, which later got confused with a debit card) they were first at the counter for re-booking. Everybody is in agreement on these facts, but here the departure begins. The gate agent, knowing that the IROP system would automatically re-book them on the next available flight, 6:45 AM Monday, asked them to follow her from T2 to T6 for confirmation and their hotel voucher because the plane they had just disembarked was being prepared for another run and the gate needed to be cleared for arriving passengers. But, the lady with the gold card didn’t want to go to T6. She wanted service right now, right there and was not about to leave and go to the back of the line @ T6. Her Gold Medallion card was her sword and shield! So she slides her card out of her wallet, her words, and tosses it onto the desk, and politely says that if this is all the Medallion card means, you can just keep it. Big mistake. The gate agent/red coat she was scrapping with insisted that she flew into a tyraid replete with vodka-induced profanities and threw the card and hit her in the face (this is when the police are called). So when the woman relized it was her debit card that was thrown(or slid over the counter depending on who you are most likely to believe), they moved into get-it-back mode. This is where the plantif comes in,(she probably should have just kept her mouth shut, but like Ron White says, she had the right to remain silent but didn’t have the ability). So Tuxworth’s story was that she reached out and with her two delicate fingers tried to take the card from the agent’s hand. The agent said she tried to jump over the counter and grab it from her hand. All of the witnesses claimed there was a lot of screaming and yelling, except, of course, the women who wanted $250K for being living angels.
So, that’s what we had to decide upon. Whether Tuxworth jumped over the counter or if she reached for the card like a princess and just caught the gate agent in a particularlly nasty mood. The ladies were arrested and charged with Disorderly Conduct that all three agents at the terminal agreed was justified; and the police agreed as well. So, off the jail they went. Do not pass Go, do not collect $250,000.
As much as they hated Delta at this point, they really, really, really didn’t like the Atlanta City Jail. Mostly because they were held in a gender-neutral holding area. Perhaps they should have been suing the City of Atlanta instead since they complained more about them than Delta.
Funny thing is, that neither of the women called their husbands to come get them out of jail, and one lady’s husband is, or was, (not sure about still), a Delta Pilot. Go figure. Not only that, but Tuxworth didn’t even consider filing suit until after she had Thanksgiving dinner with her family and told them what had happened (I gather she took her top-secret security clearance a little to seriously considering she didn’t tell her family she spent the night in jail until they were happily fed). Come to think of it, she didn’t even tell her husband until 3 days afterwards. Things that made us go, hmmm…
BTW, they were not handcuffed the whole time either.
So we had to decide if the arrest was justified. As it turns out, the jury spilt over the decision. They were all pretty solid in believing the first lady was justifiably arrested, but she was not a litigate in the case. So we had to decide if Tuxworth had done anything worthy of getting herself arrested. Before she jumped over the counter, according to the Red Coat agent, Tuxworth, after having been told the police had been called, began chanting, No one’s coming, give us back the card, No one’s coming, give us back the card, then circled around the counter and leaped over to grab the card…so was that worth going to jail for? Of course, Tuxworth said, “I reached over the counter and with two fingers, tried to gently remove the card from her hand”…
Reading this, you may get a feel for where I was in the debate. I thought the agent was right, but most of the other jurors disagreed. The thing that kept goint thru my head was what would have happened if this had taken place on a plane instead of in a terminal…Mostly I just shook my head and wondered why this went to trial at all…What would you have decided?
As a gate agent, I have very little tolerance for abusive language from my customers. I will try my best to bring the tension level down, but if there is alcohol involved, I can’t predict the outcome. Should the women have been arrested? I doubt it. Detained by the police, sure. Escorted to a quiet area by the police so that a supervisor or duty manager could speak to the women. Absolutely. But arrested? Probably not. There are other ways to de-escolate a situation without resorting to arrest.
Indeed, Glen, she probably didn’t need to be arrested. But if she was misbehaving enough that the cops got called over then I have no problems with the cops assessing the situation and making that decision if they feel it warranted.