Passenger Files Lawsuit Over United Airlines Bathroom Incident
Small space: inside the airplane toilet. In January 2025, a passenger suffering constipation was ... More allegedly pulled out of such a lavatory naked after the pilot broke the lock on a United flight from Mexico to Houston.
United Airlines has been accused of a significant violation of passenger privacy. And the alleged antisemitism of an unnamed pilot is part of the story, which United declined to discuss with me.
A young Orthodox Jewish man, Yisroel Liebb, 20, was traveling on a United flight from Tulum, Mexico to Houston Bush Intercontinental Airport. Suffering from constipation, Liebb spent 30 minutes in the aircraft lavatory—until the pilot allegedly broke down the door.
Liebb says in a recently filed lawsuit that the pilot then pulled him out with his pants around his ankles, exposing his nakedness to passengers and crew. Meanwhile, the pilot launched an antisemitic tirade about 'how Jews act.'
Liebb and an acquaintance, Jacob Sebbag, were flying to Houston on United Airlines flight 1601. Both men were wearing traditional Orthodox Jewish garb.
During the flight, Liebb left his seat to use the restroom. After 20 minutes, a flight attendant woke up Sebbag and insisted he check on Liebb, who still hadn't returned to his seat. Sebbag spoke to Liebb through the bathroom door. Liebb said he was fine but experiencing constipation, according to the complaint filed in the Southern District of New York.
After another 10 minutes, Sebbag was approached by the flight's pilot, who asked him to check on Liebb again. According to the complaint, the pilot began shouting at Liebb through the lavatory door. He then turned to Sebbag and 'began loudly demanding he force Liebb out of the bathroom.'
An United Airlines plane sits at the gate at Cancun International Airport (CUN) on May 26, 2023. ... More (Photo by Daniel SLIM / AFP) (Photo by DANIEL SLIM/AFP via Getty Images)
Liebb spoke through the door, notifying the pilot that he was okay, that he was finishing up, and that he would be out momentarily. The lawsuit claims that the pilot became visibly enraged, broke the lock on the door and forced it open, pulling Liebb out of the bathroom with his pants still around his ankles. This inadvertently exposed his genitalia to Sebbag, several flight attendants, and nearby passengers. Liebb quickly pulled his pants back to his waist after being allowed to get back on his feet.
The pilot then allegedly proceeded to repeatedly push Liebb and Sebbag back to their seats while 'making threats of getting the Plaintiffs arrested.' The pilot allegedly made 'scathing remarks about their Judaism and how 'Jews act.''
When the flight laned at 5:53PM CST, Liebb and Sebbag were in fact arrested by 'five to seven agents" from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or Customs and Border Protection, (CBP) who pulled Liebb from his seat, bent his arms behind his back and cuffed him. Sebbag and Liebb were marched off the plane and confined in separate cells, handcuffed to tables. The lawsuit claims that their 'persons and luggage were subjected to intrusive, unconsented, unwarranted and unreasonable searches.'
Paragraph 28 of the lawsuit is particularly chilling. 'An employee of Defendant United Airlines [allegedly the pilot of the aircraft] knowingly and intentionally caused physical contact with, and harm to, the persons of the Plaintiffs by pulling Liebb out of the bathroom by force and shoving the Plaintiffs through the aisle while shouting about his hatred for them because of their religious beliefs.'
Among the charges raised in the civil lawsuit are 'unlawful detention and search' resulting in 'bodily injuries and emotional distress.' Liebb and Sebbag said they suffered severe wrist pain from the handcuffs for several days following, while Liebb said his head and legs were also injured.
The men also missed their connecting flight to New York and had to stay over in Houston. United Airlines gave them complimentary flights for the following day, although they had to pay for their hotel rooms and food.
The George Bush International Airport in Houston, TX where the two passengers were detained after ... More the incident on United Flight 1601.
Obviously, the allegations raised by the attack by the unnamed United Captain, the invasion of passenger privacy and of antisemitic taunting are extremely serious.
We contacted United Airlines for more information about what happened. We were told only, 'We don't have anything to share on this.'
This has not been a good week for United, which was also accused of trying to shut off the ventilator of a sick one-year-old child. The child's mother, New Jersey resident Melissa Sotomayor, was reportedly told that her disabled son who relies on a tracheostomy, ventilator, and portable oxygen concentrator, 'would be fine' once the flight reached a high altitude.
And unfortunately, the alleged antisemitic incident on United Flight 1601 is not the first time a major airline has been accused of such behavior. A 2022 incident involving the German airline Lufthansa resulted in the largest fine the U.S. Department of Transporation (DOT) has ever levied for a civil rights violation.
In the 2022 incident, Lufthansa refused boarding to 128 Orthodox Jews who were wearing traditional garb. The Lufthansa passengers had flown to Frankfurt from New York. They had tickets on Lufthansa to travel to Budapest . The men, many traveling separately, were on a religious pilgrimage to a Hungarian town formerly known as Kerestir.
But instead of dealing with a couple of individuals who refused to comply with the mask mandate, Lufthansa denied boarding to more than one hundred passengers because they were 'visibly Jewish.'
This photo taken on March 10, 2025 shows the Lufthansa service desk at the Frankfurt Airport in ... More Frankfurt, Germany. Over 100 Orthodox Jews flying from New York to Budapest were denied boarding in 2022 in what the U.S. Department of Transportation determined was a civil rights violation. (Photo by Zhang Fan/Xinhua via Getty Images)
Although many did not know each other and were not traveling together, the men told investigators that Lufthansa treated them as if they were a group. They denied boarding to all over alleged misbehavior by a few passengers.
Eventually a phone video emerged, with a Lufthansa supervisor saying to a Jewish passenger that those who were banned are 'Jewish from JFK.' The supervisor was recorded saying 'It's Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems, everyone has to pay for a couple.'
In October of 2024, the U.S. Department of Transportation fined Lufthansa $4 million for its treatment of the passengers, the largest fine the agency has issued against an airline for civil-rights violations. The department said most of the 128 passengers who were denied boarding 'wore distinctive garb typically worn by Orthodox Jewish men,' as did Liebb and Sebbag in the United case.
In the aftermath of the incident on Flight 1601, Liebb and Sebbag reportedly believe that the United Airlines pilot deliberately shared misinformation with the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and the Transportation Safety Administration. The men believe that the pilot's 'tip' led to them to be unlawfully detained and searched.
Lufthansa reached a settlement with most of the affected passengers in 2022. Whether that will ultimately happen in the Flight 1601 case, where Liebb and Sebbag are seeking damages for emotional distress, and the costs of their legal fees, is unclear.
But financial damages alone do not erase the lingering pain of discrimination and embarrassment at the loss of privacy. United needs to do a full and transparent investigation into what occurred, particularly if the actions of the pilot were as inappropriate as described.
Global antisemitism has surged 340% in the last two years. It is dismaying that it appears to have spread to the 'friendly skies' as well.
Stock image of mature man having nausea on a plane.
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Unearthing the Deep Fascist Roots of the Unite the Right Rally
On August 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists carrying tiki torches mobbed the University of Virginia's campus, shouting racist and antisemitic slogans and violently attacking the students who stood up to them. The next day, the same hateful crowd rallied in a Charlottesville park that held a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The city of Charlottesville had recently engaged in a public debate over whether to get rid of the statue, and supposedly the white supremacists were there—summoned by a number of neo-Nazis, chief among them Richard Spencer, and a local racist troll named Jason Kessler—to defend it. Really, they had come to court attention and cause harm. They succeeded on both fronts. Their event, called Unite the Right, became national news when they swarmed the UVA campus, chanting, 'Jews will not replace us.' (This had what to do with Robert E. Lee?) It became a national tragedy when, on August 12, James Alex Fields Jr., who kept a framed photo of Hitler by his bed, rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The biographer and essayist Deborah Baker's Charlottesville: An American Story is both an account of those two horrifying days and an intellectual history of the far right in the United States. It mixes investigative rigor—Baker must have listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of archived Charlottesville City Council meetings, as well as far-right podcasts and YouTube videos—with emotional intensity and wide-ranging cultural critique. Baker reaches from Virginia's slaveholding history to the poet Ezra Pound's deluded post–World War II fascism to the misogynistic trolls of Gamergate in her quest to understand Unite the Right. The result is not merely smart but shattering. It joins the ranks of some of the best American nonfiction in recent years—Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing; Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show—as testimony to events we'd be unwise to forget. Baker's approach to her material is distinct in two ways. One is that, like Schulman but unlike many authors of researched nonfiction, she's not a reporter, and shows no deference to the norm of representing both sides. She did not interview any of the white supremacists that came to—or came from—Charlottesville. Baker saw them as tricking 'conscientious journalists into following them down rabbit holes,' or taking advantage of those who 'couldn't imagine they believed what they said they believed. [The media] thought it was a game, not a calculated strategy to spread their message.' Nor does she show a journalist's inclination to suppress her judgment. Baker writes damningly about the intellectual cowardice and inconsistency that set the stage for the city of Charlottesville's and University of Virginia's mismanagement of Unite the Right: At both the march and the rally, police not only failed to defend the counterprotesters, who were left to protect themselves against heavily armed, malevolent throngs, but, in some instances, attacked them. The author knows some of that inconsistency personally, which is the other distinctive piece of her approach. She grew up partly in Albemarle County, Virginia, where Charlottesville sits. Her father, though he came from a family of New England abolitionists, was also raised there, and he lends the book a telling moment. In 1968, when Baker was in elementary school, he published a 'thin volume' called Strike the Tent: In the Steps of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In its preface, he wrote that, although his account might seem 'a bit sentimental and slanted' toward its Confederate subjects, he wanted not to glorify or redeem them, but to comprehend why it is that, as he wrote, '[w]hat men may sincerely believe they are fighting for is often unrelated to the consequences of their doing so.' Any Confederate who thought he was defending 'individual liberty and freedom' was risking his life for its opposite. Baker isn't caught in this rhetorical (or maybe emotional) trap, but she's intimately acquainted with its distinct Virginian manifestation. All over the country, Americans tell themselves romantic stories about the Confederacy, narratives in which Southern troops were scrappy underdogs who didn't care about saving slavery. Of course, this narrative has its own moral bankruptcy: Not caring about slavery is differently, not less, rotten than championing it. But Virginia's white elite, squinting backward from Lee and Stonewall Jackson to George Washington, James Madison, and Charlottesville's own Thomas Jefferson, have their own set of 'fairy tales. That the South stood for something fine and brave. That Virginia was exceptional in the same way that America, above all other nations, was [and] Virginians were a breed apart from the regular run of Americans. Finally, to be a Virginian was to live in accordance with the most exacting code of chivalry, 'for here the ideals of the nation were born.'' Because Baker knows this vision of Virginia, she can—and does—write against it. She suggests that for white Charlottesvillians, a real reckoning with history would involve not only removing Confederate statues, which the city did in 2021, but confronting the toxic effects of Virginian exceptionalism: state, city, and university authorities' refusal to admit the presence of hate; white Charlottesvillians' unwillingness to listen to Black ones; an overriding inability to react to new information. Of course, the whole country suffers from these issues. We always have. One of Charlottesville's central arguments is that the nation's refusal to reckon with history is connected to its most violent, authoritarian elements. Donald Trump, of course, is radically anti-historical. During his first term, he created a commission for 'patriotic education' in reaction to The New York Times' 1619 Project, which described the centrality of slavery to America's founding, and this March, he issued an executive order banning 'anti-American ideology,' which seems to mean any discussion of race, from exhibits at the Smithsonian museums. It is as if he believes that, by erasing racism from the historical record, he can also erase its effect on our present, though the effect he and his supporters have in mind isn't structural inequality but what they call 'wokeness'; as if, by forbidding talk of racism, he can prevent protest of it, too. Charlottesville is full of this absurd way of thinking, and Baker makes no bones about its link to fascism. Fascist movements, from Benito Mussolini's to Richard Spencer's, claim they will turn back time to an illusory past in which the dominant social order went unquestioned. Trump wants to do the same. In 2020, a Charlottesville clergyman who counterprotested the rally told Baker, 'We're in the shit. America is Charlottesville now. Everywhere is Charlottesville.' In 2025, he's more right than ever. During the two days of Unite the Right, Charlottesville, Virginia, was the place where the nation's better ideals came to die, and one of the places its dark new ideology, the one now ripping civil society and the civil service to shreds, was starts with the statues. In 2015, a Charlottesville high schooler named Zyahna Bryant launched a petition to get the city's sculptures of Lee and Jackson taken down and the parks where they stood renamed. At 15, Bryant wasn't a stranger to activism: Baker, who has a novelist's instinct for detail, writes that, after Trayvon Martin's murder three years earlier, Bryant had organized a 'protest at the federal courthouse: a twelve-year-old girl corralling ten-year-olds with popsicle stains on their shirts.' In high school, she called the city's vice mayor, Wes Bellamy, and asked him to get on board with removing the statues. He did, and Charlottesville created a special commission to examine the issue, but conversation stagnated. Baker writes that, at community forums (which she listened to after the fact), the statues' white defenders 'believed that four generations in Virginia, or a Confederate ancestor who was by Lee's side at Appomattox, or simply their childhood memories should give special weight to their testimony.' Many of the city's longtime Black residents steered clear of the debate, recognizing that in the face of such willed obliviousness, 'Silence was the only power [they] had.' And the obliviousness was intense. One white Virginian wrote to the commission that, although she agreed that the story of slavery needed telling, the statues should remain in place because she appreciated their beauty alongside the parks' blooming trees: She imagined, Baker writes, that 'these two histories might peacefully coexist, one ugly and painful, the other framed by flowers.' But not all the statues' defenders prevaricated in this way. In fact, as the commission stalled, local white supremacists—whose presence, Baker notes, was widely known, though rarely acknowledged—came out of the woodwork, so that instead of parks without Confederate statues, Charlottesville now had ones full of Confederate flag-wavers 'protecting' the bronze generals. One of Charlottesville's most impressive qualities is Baker's subtle insistence on keeping her eye on guns. She links gun culture to video game culture, to whiteness, to the Civil War. She summons the writer Tony Horwitz's argument that just as 'Americans had once appeased and abetted the Slave Power, they were now appeasing and abetting the spread of guns.' Baker excoriates a dominant culture that accepts mass shootings and armed vigilantism as part of life, that tolerates a gun lobby that bullies and railroads anyone who considers 'the proliferations of guns unsettling' or sees 'freedoms curtailed by the shadow guns cast over our lives.' In Charlottesville, after the statue debate and, of course, on the weekend of Unite the Right, this shadow was overwhelming. Baker describes armed white supremacists telling injured, unarmed counterprotesters that 'this is what you get when you get in the street,' as if their weapons gave them the right to hurt anyone in their way. Of course, those white supremacists weren't only local. The statue debate got Spencer's attention, too. A University of Virginia graduate and professional hate-monger who coined the term 'alt-right,' he was, in 2017, as Baker writes, 'openly audition[ing] for the role of Trump's brain.' He was also adopting harassment techniques he'd learned from Gamergate, the concerted threatening, stalking, and doxing of the game designer Zoë Quinn in 2014. In writing about Spencer, Baker decodes an aspect of Unite the Right that initially bewildered her. Early in Charlottesville, she writes that after the virulent antisemitism of the torch march, she 'was hard pressed to see the connection between Charlottesville's Confederate statues and Hitler Youth, between Southern white supremacy and European fascism. Which histories—whose histories—were in play?... It felt as though American and European national creeds were being remixed and weaponized in ways I couldn't wrap my mind around.' She wasn't alone in her confusion: She writes that even a Charlottesville rabbi she spoke with struggled to see why neo-Confederates hated Jews. I can relate. I'm Jewish, and a branch of my family settled in Richmond, Virginia, not long before the Civil War. One of my ancestors was conscripted into the Confederate Army, a shameful bit of family history that is part of a greater legacy of Jewish complicity with slavery: Consider the Lehman brothers, who built their fortune on plantation cotton. In my estimation, the involvement of many Jews in one of America's great sins binds us to the nation; it's proof of Jews' Americanness. We're obligated to do what we can to remediate slavery's harms. Unite the Right didn't change my mind about that. But it did make me take seriously the alt-right's belief that Jews aren't American at all. Baker takes it seriously, too. In researching the history of fascism in the United States, she came to understand that 'Jews were the glue that held the ideology of white supremacy and white nationalism together.' She traces this idea to the 1930s, when Ezra Pound, who had moved to Europe, became a fascist. Hoping to ground Mussolini's and Hitler's ideas in U.S. history in order to better promote them at home, he turned to Virginia's sage, Thomas Jefferson. He argued that Jefferson's vision was, in fact, the same as Mussolini's, and, in the 1950s, acquired a young protégé, John Kasper, who he hoped could help spread these ideas and 'give fascism an all-American face.' Kasper did so, Baker writes, by going to Charlottesville in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and arguing that Jews had put Black people up to demanding integration. Some 50 years later, Spencer took the Confederate statue debate as an excuse to do precisely the same. Baker writes that fascists like Pound, Kasper, and Spencer, looking to Hitler, argue that the 'liberal elite driving the conversations in media, business, and culture, were either Jews or in the pay of Jews, and thus hostile to a political order in which Christian white men claimed ascendancy.' This conspiracy theory allows them to reject the idea that Black Americans might achieve something on their own: Really, the Jews are behind them. It also allows them to foment grievance. Baker describes the Nazi Andrew Anglin whipping up his followers' emotions by listing their humiliations—student debt, addiction, trauma and injuries from fighting in meaningless wars—and then, to 'relieve them of their shame, [directing] their attention to the root cause of their tribulations: Jews.' Immediately after, he led them into the streets of Charlottesville. There, the alt-right mob encountered no resistance from the University of Virginia's authorities—its president, Baker writes, assumed that because Spencer was an alum, he'd abide by the university's honor code—or from Charlottesville and Virginia police. Baker draws a direct line from the city's underwhelming response to the statue debate sparked by Zyahna Bryant to its failure to prepare properly for Unite the Right, although police intelligence analysts and anti-fascist activists had given warning. The city and state governments and police chiefs just didn't want to take seriously the threat that the alt-right posed. And the Unite the Right organizers applied for, and got, a permit for their march. In the city's eyes, this entitled them to do what they liked, even as their rally turned into a violent and then murderous riot. Meanwhile, the unarmed Charlottesvillians who opposed the white supremacists received no police protection. They were accused of unlawful assembly; cops watched blankly as armed men kicked, hit, and maced them. It seems that not one trooper or officer was present when Heather Heyer was killed. Charlottesville's counterprotesters and the anti-fascists from around the region who helped them are Charlottesville's heroes. One of Baker's central subjects is Emily Gorcenski, a local data scientist who went from monitoring fascist chatter on the internet to confronting Spencer and his cronies face-to-face, bearing a storm of physical violence and anti-trans abuse. Others are members of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, a group of Christian faith leaders who learned the techniques of nonviolent resistance in order to stand up to Unite the Right. She talks to a local arts administrator who turned into an activist after the statue debate, the founding members of Charlottesville's chapters of Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice, and citizen journalists who captured the riot in real time. Many of these people were both physically and morally wounded that weekend. Andy Stepanian, an activist who helped manage the counterprotesters' crisis communications, told Baker that, when he saw Heyer receiving chest compressions, it was as if his brain 'short-circuited. From that moment he lost the ability to live in the here and now. It has never returned.' All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish. Charlottesville is not a book of the here and now. It's too wide-ranging for that. In all its movement through time, through archives and forums and the intellectual history of America's ugliest movements, it seeks to locate 'the germ of the present in the past'—a mission of which Baker declares herself skeptical; maybe, she writes, it's 'just something writers tell themselves to exert control over events that are effectively beyond their control. But it was what I knew.' It's also a way of looking into the future. By linking Spencer to Pound, Baker demonstrates that American fascism is hardly newer than its Italian and German inspirations; by highlighting Pound's Jeffersonian pretensions, she reminds us of how deeply the crime of slavery affects not just the nation's founding philosophies but their later uses; and by tying the Jefferson-Pound-Spencer lineage to gamer culture, she reminds us how contemporary—how online—these problems are. Unite the Right happened through the internet. So did Trump's electoral victories. He's handed the reins of government, it seems, to alt-right activists who agitate on social media; he's letting Elon Musk, a tech billionaire who promotes far-right parties around the world and celebrated Trump's inauguration with a Nazi salute, dismantle the civil service. Charlottesville tells us how the country got here: by kowtowing to guns, by refusing to accept responsibility for racism close to home, by too many people ignoring what they don't want to see and not taking seriously what they don't want to hear. All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish, just as Charlottesville's white supremacists took the town's foot-dragging on removing the Lee statue as an opening to wave guns and Confederate flags in public parks. At the very end of the book, Baker challenges readers to attend closely not only to the hateful currents she investigates in chilling detail, but to the activists who resisted them in Charlottesville and continue to do so to this day. She is clear that these activists are responding to a deeply entrenched hate that preceded them and is more powerful than them—so powerful that its representatives are now in Congress and the White House. Yet these grassroots movements, she thinks, are our only hope. She writes that we must listen to them. 'We must regard them not as radicals … but as ordinary Americans standing up and fighting in a myriad of ways for what is right.' At this point, we've all got to do the same.
New York Post
5 hours ago
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Video shows LAPD cop shoot woman at point-blank range with rubber bullet as she was trying to get home
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