A Black passenger who flew with American Airlines in 2022 claims in a lawsuit that he and his white wife were wrongly imprisoned after crew members reported to local authorities that they suspected him of trafficking his wife.
On Sept. 13, 2022, retired police officer Anthony Williams boarded a flight from Phoenix to Miami for his honeymoon with Katsiaryna Shasholka. A fellow passenger told American Airlines employees that he believed Shasholka was being trafficked, according to the lawsuit filed last week in the Southern District of Florida.
The airline employees who took the passenger’s report did not question Williams or his wife but instead reported him to law enforcement, the lawsuit says. When they landed in Miami, Williams and Shasholka were escorted off the plane by American Airlines employees.
Williams and his wife say they were humiliated and confused as other passengers walked past them as they were made to wait at the airport, according to the lawsuit. The two were then questioned together by police.
American Airlines did not immediately respond to a HuffPost request for comment.
Now Williams and Shasholka are seeking damages in excess of $75,000 from American Airlines, the passenger who accused him and the employees who reported him to police. The couple is being represented by civil rights attorney Jasmine Rand, who had represented the families of Trayvon Martin, a black teen killed by a white vigilante in Florida in 2012, and George Floyd, a black man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.
“My client is a retired police officer. He spent his life fighting crime, and now to be accused of a crime so heinous as trafficking his own wife is unfathomable,” Rand told HuffPost in an email. “He is committed to fighting for justice for himself and for others that have suffered racial discrimination at the hands of American Airlines.”
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According to Rand, “acts of racial discrimination are widespread throughout American Airlines.” She alleged that there is “a clear failure to train its employees and to hold them accountable when they engage in discriminatory misconduct.”
The lawsuit mentioned other incidents of alleged racial profiling by American Airline employees, including in 2023, when Black musician David Ryan Harris was accused of trafficking his own biracial children.
American Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment from HuffPost.