A teenage girl from Arkansas is suing Delta Air Lines for $2.35 million after a flight attendant for the Atlanta-based carrier’s wholly-owned regional operator, Endeavor Air, falsely accused her father of human trafficking and sexually abusing her on a flight to Newport News in Virginia.
The incident dates back to December 2019, when the Cupp family was traveling from Memphis to attend their son’s graduation from the United States Coast Guard, although details are only now emerging after a lawsuit was filed in a Virginia district court.
Mom and Dad, along with their teenage daughter, who was only thirteen at the time, along with her grandparents, had booked tickets with Delta Air Lines to attend the graduation, which involved a connection at Atlanta Hartsfield.
The first flight went without any issues whatsoever. The family then boarded their second flight from Atlanta to Newport News, a Delta Connection flight which was operated by Endeavor Air.
During this flight, one of the flight attendants “wrongly and recklessly” came to the belief that the teenage girl’s Dad, a disabled veteran of the US Army, was human trafficking his own daughter.
The flight attendant informed the pilot and instructed him to alert airport staff in Newport News, who, in turn, called law enforcement, as part of Delta’s mandatory reporting policy for cases of suspected human trafficking.
As the flight progressed, the plane encountered turbulence, and the teenage daughter became upset and started to cry. Her Dad “comforted his scared daughter as any good father would under the circumstances,” but this simple action raised even more suspicion by the flight attendant.
After witnessing the girl’s father comforting her, the flight attendant reported to the pilots that he had sexually assaulted his daughter by toucher in “inappropriately.”
“This report, too, was entirely false and without probable cause,” the complaint against Delta and Endeavor Air reads. “Plaintiff was not sexually assaulted by her father; rather, she was comforted by her father at a time when she was nervous about experiencing turbulence for the first time and at a time when she was literally surrounded by other family members.”
In fact, her grandparents were sitting in the row directly ahead, while her mother was sitting just across the aisle from her.
No one in the Cupp family had any idea about the allegations that had been made against them until the plane landed in Newport News, where law enforcement officers boarded the aircraft and removed the girl from the rest of her family.
The girl was left upset and crying as officers asked her if she had ever been hurt or touched inappropriately by her father. Meanwhile, Dad was read his Miranda Rights and asked if her had ever sexually abused his daughter.
The lawsuit claims this interrogation took place in a public part of the airport, where passengers were able to look on.
Delta Air Lines has trained more than 80,000 staff in how to identify and report suspected cases of human trafficking, earning the company an award in 2020 from the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s ‘Stop Slavery Awards.’
However, the Cupp family’s lawsuit against Delta claims the airline’s training was severely lacking, leading to a situation in which a flight attendant falsely accused a father of human trafficking his own daughter.
The complaint slams Delta’s policy that mandates “employees report possible human trafficking without implementing any simple common sense due diligence procedures to avoid making false, public, and harmful accusations against passengers.”
In the aftermath of this incident, the lawsuit claims the teenage plaintiff’s life was “fundamentally and severely altered.” Once an outgoing and keen student, the girl stopped wanting to go to school, refused to show affection towards males, and was left scared that her family would be taken away on false charges.
The lawsuit is claiming $2 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages. Delta Air Lines has yet to respond to the lawsuit.
This is far from the first time that an incident like this has occurred. In 2021, for example, a Delta Air Lines frequent flyer claimed a flight attendant accused him of trafficking his special needs daughter and then called the cops to have him arrested during a flight between Minneapolis (MSP) and Dallas (DFW) as the pair visited family for Father’s Day.
Following the incident, Peter Espinosa wrote an open letter to Delta’s chief executive Ed Bastian, accusing the carrier of racially profiling its passengers.
The police officers sent to investigate the allegation quickly released Espinosa after it became apparent this wasn’t a case of human trafficking. One officer allegedly told Peter that flight attendants were trained to spot trafficking, but “this set of flight attendants had not been properly trained,” the letter claimed.
And in 2023, an American Airlines flight attendant accidentally mistook a young girl’s father for a human trafficker on a flight from Seattle-Tacoma Airport to Charlotte, North Carolina.
On this occasion, one of the flight attendants waited for the girl’s father to go to the restroom before approaching her and asking a series of questions. Unfortunately, this didn’t dispel the crew members’ suspicions, and law enforcement were once again waiting to interrogate the father once the plane had landed.
In February 2017, Alaska Airlines flight attendant Shelia Fedrick helped rescue a human trafficking victim on a flight from Seattle to San Francisco. Fedrick became suspicious of an older, well-dressed man traveling with a young teenage girl who “looked like she had been through pure hell.”
Sheila left a note in the bathroom for the victim – when the young girl wrote a reply asking for help, Fedrick was able to get in touch with law enforcement in San Francisco, who were waiting to arrest the perpetrator when the flight landed.
