A drunk male passenger onboard Delta Airlines sexually assaulted a woman and her teenage daughter on a nine-hour flight from JFK Airport in New York City to Athens, Greece.
The male passenger was served 10 drinks of vodka and a glass of wine. A $2 million lawsuit has been filed against the airline for gross negligence, according to a report by the Fox Business.
According to the lawsuit, flight attendants “blatantly ignored” the pleas of help from the plaintiffs and kept serving the man alcohol despite him being visibly drunk and aggressive. "The intoxicated Delta passenger appeared to be getting drunker and drunker as the Delta flight attendants continued serving him alcohol," the complaint filed in the Eastern District of New York stated.
The intoxicated male passenger, seated next to the plaintiffs on the flight, made several attempts to try and talk to the 16-year-old girl, who tried to ignore him. As a result, the drunken man turned hostile and began yelling at the girl. He continued to harass the girl, demanding to know her address and other personal information, making "obscene gestures" at her, and and grabbed her, putting his hands on her back, which "frightened" her.
Her mother intervened, telling the accused that her daughter was a minor and still in school. He allegedly replied that he did not care about that and reached over the girl to pull the mother’s arm.
The victims tried telling the flight attendants that they felt unsafe around the drunk man, but the attendants told them to just “be patient” and apparently walked away without doing anything.
Many other passengers also noticed the unruly behaviour as the man kept screaming.
The accused continued harassing the teenager, touching her while mumbling that he is from Connecticut. He kept “mumbling drunkenly and forcefully kicking the seats in front of them causing the rows of seats to shake.” The man then leapt out of his seat towards the toilet, where he was allegedly heard puking. He then returned to his seat and had a glass of red wine.
The women pleaded the flight attendants once more, who then requested the man to “stop talking to them”, which resulted in an outburst of profanities directed at the family.
The teen was "terrified" and began to have a panic attack. Following which, the teen put her head on her mother's lap — and that's when the man allegedly slid his "clammy fingers" underneath her shirt and groped for the clasp on her bra strap. "Trembling, petrified and crying," the teen leaped out of her seat and away from the man, the lawsuit stated. The man then proceeded to place his hand on the mother’s thigh and “began moving his hand up the inside of her thigh.”
The mother requested for a seat change, but the flight attendants said that there was nothing that they could do. Another male passenger then offered to switch seats with the daughter and sat in between the accused and the mother for the rest of the flight.
Once the flight landed, the flight attendants apologised and offered the victims 5,000 free miles with the airline. The attendant, however, allowed the drunken man to exit the plane at Athens without alerting local authorities or US law enforcement about the alleged sexual assault.
While Delta did not offer specific comment on the pending litigation, it told the publication that the company "has zero tolerance for customers who engage in inappropriate or unlawful behaviour."