A Nigerian woman has filed a civil rights lawsuit against United Airlines, claiming employees kicked her out of a flight departing from Houston because a white man had complained of her “pungent” odor. Queen Obioma and her two children were heading from Lagos, Nigeria to Ontario in March 2016 seemingly without a hiccup until the second leg of the trip from Houston to San Francisco. That is when Obioma, who was in business class while her kids were in economy, found a white man seating in her seat. Both she and the flight attendant asked the man to get up, but he refused so she sat in another seat, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in Houston.
The same passenger allegedly tried to block her from getting to her seat until she was finally able to squeeze through and sit down. But that’s when a flight attendant asked her to go outside and an airline employee told her she would be removed from the flight. The employee alleged the pilot himself had asked her to be removed from the plane after the white male passenger complained he didn’t want to travel next to her because she was “pungent.” When she asked what that meant, the employee straight out told her she smelled.
“At that point Ms. Obioma was lost, confused and disoriented. Her mind went blank and she was utterly befuddled,” according to the complaint. She tried to explain she wanted to take her children to school in Canada but the crew members refused to let her board the plane. “Ms. Obioma watched her minor children marched out of the aircraft like criminals, confused and perplexed … She sobbed uncontrollably for a long time,” the complaint says, according to the Washington Post.
Although airlines can technically kick a passenger out for smelling bad, Obioma’s lawsuit claims that had nothing to do with it. The airline “wrongfully singled out Ms. Obioma and her children because they were blacks, and punished them because a white man did not want them on the plane,” according to the documents filed in court.
United declined to comment, telling the Houston Chronicle it had yet to be served with the suit. The company has not had a shortage of bad press in recent months after a viral video showed how security dragged a passenger from a fight in April 2017. More recently, in March, a passenger’s dog suffocated to death after a flight attendant forced the owner to place the dog in an overhead compartment.
