Woman bombarded with 'vile' messages after coming forward about abuse on plane
A woman who was sent sexually explicit messages on an in-flight messaging app said she has been ‘bombarded’ with abuse since going public with the ‘crude’ messages she received.
Jessica Van Meir works as a legal analyst specialising in sexual harassment but said even working in her field, she was still left shocked at the messages she received on Virgin Atlantic’s chat service.
The plane’s chat system allows passengers to communicate to each other through a screen located on the back of the seat.
The first message referred to Ms Meir as “tidy babe”, while an emoji winking was sent from a passenger with the username ‘big d**k swinger.’
Shortly after a user called ‘dirty mike’ posted “welcome to hell” and later, “you are now in the danger zone.”
Each of the users could be identified by their assigned seat on the October 5 flight (local time), one of them sitting just nine seats away from Ms Meir, who was in seat 55C.
“It felt very upsetting that other passengers would be so disrespectful to me and to be so brazen as to send me those crude messages,” Ms Meir said appearing on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire program on Thursday.
Ms Meir said she was surprised that an airline would allow the chat service.
“I would think in designing such a system, the first thing that would come to mind would be the potential to be abused,” she told BBC.
After reporting the abusive messages to flight attendants who addressed the issue with the passengers who had sent the messages, Ms Meir said she took photos of the men in the assigned seats.
“What matters to me is not going after these guys, but making sure they understand why it was harmful,” she tweeted.
Yesterday I was on a @VirginAtlantic flight, and I unexpectedly received these sexually harassing messages on my screen (I was in 55C).
The flight attendants were helpful & dealt with it swiftly.
Have any other women had this happen to them?#metoo #cyberharassment @SCFGallagher pic.twitter.com/7tbVkRhpQp— Jessica Van Meir (@jessicavanmeir) October 6, 2019
When Ms Meir posted images of the messages on Twitter, she was initially “overwhelmed with support” but soon found herself the target of more abuse on her personal Facebook page.
“Stupid f**king w***e,” one of the messages sent to her read, “why don’t u (sic) crawl in your f**king bathtub and cut your f**king wrists?”.
Ms Meir spoke to the BBC about the backlash and said she wasn’t surprised that she had received more abuse from speaking out about the initial incident.
“It’s really upsetting that there are some men who are so enraged by a woman speaking about her experiences that they will go to the measure of looking me up and telling me to kill myself,” she said.
“Unfortunately I think anytime that a woman speaks out about being sexually harassed online she will get bombarded with abusive messages,” Ms Meir added.
The native from Georgia who now lives in London, said her experience is an example of how “sexism remains prevalent” and it can make women feel powerless in public.
“When you walk down the street or when you go on a plane, or go on the internet, you know you face the risk of being sexually harassed and that puts you on the defensive, it makes you feel unsafe it makes you feel less free to go wherever you want to and travel alone and it’s not acceptable,” she said.
Ms Meir posted that Virgin Atlantic had contacted her to advise they were in the process of removing the chat service from their flights.
Virgin Atlantic told Yahoo News Australia they were “extremely concerned” over the incident and apologised for the distressed caused.
“We’re grateful to our cabin crew who supported our customer following this incident and would like to apologise for the distress caused,” a spokesperson for the airline said in a statement.
“We are now reviewing our entertainment systems to ensure this does not happen again,” adding that seat to seat messaging was not included on any of the airlines new feet.
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