American Airlines Passenger Wants to Press Charges After Seat Was Repeatedly Hit

Paula Liu
By Paula Liu
February 16, 2020US News
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American Airlines Passenger Wants to Press Charges After Seat Was Repeatedly Hit
An American Airlines jet is parked at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

A woman whose airplane seat was repeatedly punched by the man sitting behind her said that she wants to press charges against him.

Wendi Williams told TMZ that she also wants the airline to fire the flight attendant who threatened to throw her off the plane if she didn’t delete the video of the incident, which has since gone viral.

Williams said that she was flying American Eagles, a subsidiary of American Airlines, on Jan. 31 when she reclined her seat, knocking over the drink belonging to the man behind her. Fox News reported that he complained about the cramped space, and asked Williams to put her seat back up so he could finish eating, to which she obliged. When he was done, Williams reclined her seat again. That’s when he started punching the back of her seat, according to Williams.

“He was angry that I reclined my seat and punched it about 9 times—HARD, at which point I began videoing him, and he resigned to this behavior,” Williams wrote on Twitter, along with a now-viral video of the man lighting hitting the back of her seat.

She said she started filming after he wouldn’t stop punching her seat and that once she began filming, he hit her seat much lighter.

“Everybody thinks that when I say he was punching me, that’s what was happening in the video. I started taking the video because he was punching my seat, literally,” Williams told TMZ on Feb. 14. “It happened every 20-30 seconds. It probably happened eight times. That’s when I started videoing,” she said.

While taping the passenger behind her, Williams called over a flight attendant and told her that the passenger behind her was repeatedly hitting her seat. Williams said she stopped recording when the flight attendant approached her. She said the employee then talked to the passenger behind Williams, to which Williams assumed that the passenger behind her told the flight attendant about the video, according to TMZ.

According to Williams, the flight attendant told Williams to delete the video she took and that if she didn’t, she would be removed from the plane adding that she was also handed a “passenger disturbance notice.” Meanwhile, according to Williams, the flight attendant offered the man sitting behind her an alcoholic beverage.

Williams ultimately complied and deleted the video but later retrieved it from the “recently deleted files” folder on her iPhone and uploaded it to Twitter, where it’s gotten more than 850,000 views.

American Airlines is conducting an investigation into the incident and steps are taken to help solve the issue, a representative told TMZ.

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