A witness who saw Ivanka Trump’s alleged harassment on a JetBlue plane on Thursday described how the situation unfolded.
Several media outlets have reported that Matthew Lasner, a Hunter College professor, and lawyer Dan Goldstein were removed from the plane after berating Ivanka, who was with her three children.
Marc Scheff, a passenger on the plane, told Reuters that the man “did a double take and said ‘Oh my God. This is a nightmare!’”
Scheff said he was sitting in front of the row Ivanka was sitting in. The passenger who was removed had “started shaking” after he was removed.
JetBlue staff approached him to “make sure he was calm,” and the passenger responded: “They ruin our country, now [they] try [to] ruin our flight!” He added that the passenger was “clearly agitated” but didn’t “scream or yell.”
In a Facebook post, Scheff wrote that when JetBlue staff approached Ivanka, she told them: “I don’t want to make this a thing.”
“My assessment is that she was happy to let the man take his seat. She handled the situation calmly and with class. Security made the call to remove the man,” Scheff wrote.
Scheff added: “I did not witness his actual removal some rows back. If he screamed, I didn’t hear it.”
Gothamist later identified the passenger as Goldstein.
In several deleted tweets, Lasner wrote that Goldstein was “chasing them down to harass them.” An hour later, he wrote Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner were “on our flight” and Goldstein “expressed displeasure in a calm tone, JetBlue staff overheard, and they kicked us off the plane.”
JetBlue confirmed that a passenger had been removed as it was slated to depart New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, which was bound for San Francisco.
It said, “The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly. In this instance, our team worked to re-accommodate the party on the next available flight.”
