It was shortly before 10 p.m. on June 16 when Aubrey Lane boarded American Airlines Flight 1280 at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, eager to meet up with family in New York for what she described as a bucket-list trip.
Several hours into the red-eye flight, she got up to use the bathroom.
There, Lane said she was trapped in the lavatory and raped by a noticeably intoxicated man who’d been sitting next to her during the flight.
The following hours were a blur of trauma and confusion, Lane said, as she was moved to a seat toward the back of the plane, met by police officers when she got off the plane at JFK International Airport and then transported to a nearby hospital.
"I was feeling overwhelmed ... all of a sudden, I was thrown in a middle seat, bawling. On top of being sad and hurt and scared, I was also embarrassed," Lane said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.
The News does not typically name victims of sexual assault, but is using Lane's name with her permission, and after having reviewed her booking receipt, hospital admission documents and her correspondence with the FBI and American Airlines.
Lane, a 31-year-old real estate professional who lives in Colorado, is speaking out in hopes that American will take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen to others.
“I would like to see some sort of human response. I would like them to acknowledge this is a problem,” Lane said.
Hers is the latest report to shine light on what the head of the country’s largest flight attendant union calls a silent epidemic of sexual assault and harassment aboard airplanes.
No comprehensive statistics are kept on on-board sexual assaults. But a 2017 survey by the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA of nearly 2,000 members found that 1 in 5 had received a report of passenger-on-passenger sexual assault while working a flight.
Most said they had no knowledge of written guidance or training on how to handle such reports, according to the union.
Sexual misconduct aboard aircraft — whether crude verbal harassment, unwanted touching, or worse — is a problem that has persisted for years, directed toward both passengers and a predominantly female flight attendant workforce. Known instances of rape aboard aircraft are exceedingly rare, with several industry insiders and attorneys who have been closely tracking the issue for the past few years unaware of other publicly reported cases.
Scattered media reports have documented individual cases of sexual misconduct, but there’s been little in the way of coordinated action by the industry and regulators to measure or tackle the issue.
Victims of sexual abuse on planes speaking out could push the airline industry closer to a reckoning it has long avoided, experts said, as cases of sexual misconduct dominate headlines in Hollywood, Washington, D.C., New York and elsewhere in the #MeToo era.
‘Nuisance claim’
Nine months later, Lane’s case is still in the hands of the FBI with little visible sign of progress. The agency did not return a request for comment.
Lane offered to meet with American to discuss what happened, her attorneys said. But the airline declined, in part due to the ongoing FBI investigation, according to the December letter. Lane has retained legal counsel and is planning to sue the Fort Worth-based carrier.
American described Lane’s allegations as a “nuisance claim” in a December letter that offered her $5,000 after her attorneys brought her allegation to the airline.
American spokesman Ross Feinstein declined to comment specifically on Lane’s case, citing the ongoing FBI investigation. He said the carrier regularly works with law enforcement agencies when a crime is reported on its aircraft.
“We want all of our customers to feel safe on our aircraft,” he said. “We care deeply when we hear of these types of cases ... our team offers investigative support as needed to federal, state and local law enforcement.”
In a subsequent interview with The News, American said it should have immediately followed up with Lane to assure her the incident was being taken seriously.
"We want to apologize that we missed the mark on assuring Ms. Lane how seriously we take her complaint," Feinstein said.
He said the company has put new procedures in place in recent months that call for proactive passenger outreach from the customer relations department after reports of onboard disturbances, including sexual misconduct.
The alcohol factor
Lane was sitting in a window seat she paid $20 to select shortly before departure when her assailant — whose identity she still does not know — sat down next to her and began talking to her almost immediately.
“My first thought was this guy’s drunk. He was super chatty,” she said. “I’ve flown a lot. I’m used to people saying hello. This is the most anyone has sat down and started talking to me.”
She said she could smell the alcohol on his breath, even as he continued to be served drinks during the flight.
Her attorneys say Lane’s assailant never should have been allowed on board in his intoxicated state and shouldn’t have been served more drinks.
Feinstein, the American spokesman, said the carrier does not allow “knowingly” intoxicated passengers to board aircraft, and flight attendants have the discretion to stop serving alcohol to a passenger.
Alcohol has been a recurring theme in recent reports of sexual misconduct on planes. More broadly, it's a factor in one-third of reported passenger disturbances on aircraft, according to 2016 figures from the International Air Transportation Association.
“American’s ultimate responsibility is the safety of their passengers,” said Lane’s attorney, James McDonough of Downs, McDonough and Cowan law firm in Durango, Colo. “Based on the actions of American Airlines’ flight crew, the safety of Aubrey was not their No. 1 priority.”
Holding airlines liable for harm suffered during a domestic flight typically means proving negligence, said Abe Bohrer, a New York attorney who specializes in flight injury cases. Bohrer is not involved in Lane’s case, but represents two victims in other onboard sexual assault cases.
“Airlines are on notice that these kinds of attacks are taking place,” Bohrer said. “The next thing you have to ask is, what are they doing to prevent them from happening in the future?”
How big is the problem?
It’s not clear how widespread the problem of in-flight sexual misconduct is on U.S. airlines that carry an average of 2.1 million passengers a day. Sara Nelson, head of the largest flight attendants union in the U.S., is worried it might be getting worse.
“It has to do with seats being closer together, more people being packed together in a tight space. You’d think that with more people, it would be more difficult. But it makes it easier for the perpetrator ... there’s less line of sight,” said Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. “There’s fewer flight attendants, all the airlines have cut back staffing. ... That has a real strain in many ways.”
The industry’s federal overseers, the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration, don’t publish specific figures on reports of sexual assault. Airlines also don’t disclose the number of reports they receive, although Dallas-based Southwest Airlines said it has not seen an upward trend in recent years.
Crimes committed aboard aircraft generally fall under federal jurisdiction. The FBI said it formally investigated 63 cases of sexual assault on aircraft in the 12 months ending Sept. 30. It’s the fourth consecutive year of increasing investigations dating back to fiscal year 2014, when 38 were conducted.
Experts say many more cases likely go unreported. And even when passengers do speak up, the resolution can be uncertain.
Airlines contacted by The News said they have zero tolerance for sexual misconduct on their aircraft. They described similar policies for handling in-flight reports that call for flight attendants to notify pilots, who then request law enforcement to meet the plane at the gate. Until the plane lands, the most common response is to separate the passengers.
“Any type of potentially criminal activity, we hand that over to the law enforcement agency,” American’s Feinstein said.
In Lane’s case, law enforcement officials met her at the arrival gate and she was interviewed by the FBI after being transported to the hospital. But the man she alleges assaulted her wasn’t apprehended at the gate — a too-common occurrence after an incident is reported, experts said.
Investigating cases can prove challenging, given that there are few, if any, direct witnesses to the assault, especially on overnight flights when many people are asleep and the cabin lights are dimmed.
Paul Hudson, president of consumer advocate group Flyers Rights, said there’s no publicly available information about how many reported cases result in prosecutions, something his group has requested from the federal government through the Freedom of Information Act.
“What we’re hearing from people is the U.S. Attorneys don’t want to prosecute [and] don’t have time for these things,” Hudson said. “Often they are misdemeanors or are ‘he said, she said.’ That’s not what they do. They’re into terrorism and drug cases.”
There have been successful prosecutions, including in January when an Oregon man pleaded guilty to groping a 13-year-old girl traveling alone on a 2016 American Airlines flight from Dallas to Portland. A federal lawsuit filed by the girl’s parent on her behalf alleges negligence on the part of American and is pending in an Oregon court.
#MeToo taking flight
After decades of underreporting and silence around the issue of sexual assault on planes, the conversation appears to be shifting, driven by the courage of women who speak about their experiences and a growing focus on sexual misconduct in all walks of life in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
“When we first started having this discussion, one of the first things I said was I believe the CEOs of the airline industry would be shocked to know what’s going on in their planes,” said Nelson of the flight attendants union. “I don’t think this was intentional on their part to ignore this. It was not brought out into the light and the victims until recently have not had a voice. They do now.”
In November, Randi Zuckerberg, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, tweeted about explicit sexual comments made by a man sitting next to her on an Alaska Airlines flight, grabbing national headlines and prompting an airline investigation.
The following month, The Seattle Times detailed the experience of Allison Dvaladze, who said a man stuck his hand between her legs and groped her on a 16-hour flight from Seattle to Amsterdam. Delta offered her 10,000 frequent-flier miles for her "inconvenience" before later informing her it had no record of an incident on her flight, according to The Times. Dvaladze sued the carrier last month and has created a Facebook group that collects reports on incidents of sexual assaults on planes to bring awareness to the issue.
PBS NewsHour and CNN have also recently aired stories about sexual assault on planes.
Change at the institutional level seems to be occurring more slowly. A group of Democratic senators sponsored a bill last year that would require better training for flight attendants to handle sexual assault victims and create more centralized data collection on such incidents. The bill’s sponsors have said they plan to attach it to upcoming FAA legislation, but it will need Republican support to come to fruition.
At airlines, Nelson said, more attention should be put on the issue to make it clear there is zero tolerance for sexual harassment.
“There need to be [public service announcements] and clear statements from airlines about this,” she said, suggesting it could even be part of the pre-flight safety instructions.
Flight attendants also need training and an established reporting structure that recognizes sexual assaults as “a unique crisis,” Nelson said.
Alaska Airlines said it recently implemented additional efforts to raise flight attendant awareness around sexual assault, but didn’t provide specific details. United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz called out sexual harassment aboard aircraft in a 2017 letter to the carrier’s 90,000 employees, saying it has “no place” on its flights.
Hudson’s group, Flyers' Rights, is pushing the FAA to put together a working group to study the issue, but so far hasn’t heard back from the agency. He said he’s petitioned both the Obama and Trump administrations to take action, so far to little avail.
Since the start of the year, he said, his group has been contacted by three victims.
“If there is no action at the federal level to regulate this or to do anything, then I think you will see more civil litigation,” Hudson said.
Life on hold
After being picked up at the hospital by her family, Lane tried to move forward with her New York trip after the assault, spending time with her father, mother, cousin and grandmother. Her husband also flew out to be with her, an unplanned trip that required them to find someone to watch their 2-year-old toddler.
“I was trying to cope but also have family time. It changed a lot about that trip,” she said.
The eight months since have been filled with doctor’s appointments and visits with a counselor. Lane said she’s afraid to fly alone and has stopped working as a real estate brokers’ associate because she does not want to be alone with strangers.
She put plans to have more children on hold and moved across the state to minimize time apart from her husband, who is in the military.
“It’s caused stress on every level. It’s hurt my job, my homelife,” she said. “It’s affected every single part of my life.”
Lane said she worries that other women are vulnerable to sexual misconduct on planes and wants to see American and other carriers take steps to help prevent future assaults.
“I’m coming out now because [American] hasn’t made it evident it wants to change this,” Lane said. “What’s going to stop this from happening again unless I make a big fuss about it?”
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