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A man hurled racist insults at a black woman on a Ryanair flight. He kept his seat — she was the one to move.

A fellow passenger recorded the interaction and posted it to social media

By
October 22, 2018 at 1:54 p.m. EDT

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Amy B. Wang.

David Lawrence was in disbelief as he heard a man a few rows behind him hurl racial insults at a black woman on a Ryanair flight from Barcelona to London Stansted Airport.

So Lawrence turned on his phone camera.

I heard this man shouting at this woman, saying, ‘You’re in my way. Get out! I don’t want you here next to me!’ ” Lawrence told The Washington Post in a phone interview Sunday. “I couldn’t believe what I heard."

The woman’s daughter had confronted the yelling man, saying “ ‘Who are you talking to? Don’t shout at her. That’s my mother; she’s disabled,’ ” Lawrence recalled, noting that the woman’s mother had boarded the plane in a wheelchair. “He then was saying, ‘I don’t care.’ ”

In the video, the man can be heard yelling back at the woman’s daughter as other passengers continue shuffling down the aisle. A male flight attendant attempts to calm the situation, to little effect.

A man yelled racist slurs at a black woman and refused to sit next to her on a Ryanair flight traveling from Barcelona to London on Oct. 19. (Video: David Lawrence via Storyful)

A surprising seat change

The video captures the man repeatedly insulting the woman.

“I tell you, I hope somebody sits there,” the man tells the woman in the aisle seat, gesturing toward the empty middle seat between them. “'Cause I don’t want to sit next to your— ..."

The rest of the sentence is unclear, though he appears to call her “sickly,” “fat” and “ugly. ”

The flight attendant then asks the woman whether she would like to sit elsewhere.

The woman says something back at him, prompting the man to retort angrily: “Don’t talk to me in a f--ing foreign language, you stupid ugly cow!” and then “ugly black bastard.”

Surrounding passengers had mixed reactions to the scene. One man, wearing a black T-shirt and sitting in the row directly behind them, physically tried to intervene, sticking his hand between the seats in front of him and telling the irate passenger to keep his voice down.

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“Stop,” the man in the black shirt pleads. “There’s no need for that at all. Just stop. It’s really easy to close your mouth. ”

Lawrence, while recording the video, can be heard saying, “Throw him off the flight. Throw him off the flight. Get rid of him!”

Eventually, the woman asked to sit next to her daughter and, visibly fed up, started to move out of the row.

To his surprise, Lawrence said, the flight took off shortly afterward, with no apparent repercussions for the male passenger, who effectively enjoyed “extra leg room” in a row to himself.

“I thought the flight attendant was going to call someone and escort the man off the flight,” Lawrence told The Post. “They moved the woman instead of moving him. That was shocking to me.”

Social media response

Frustrated, Lawrence decided to upload his video to Facebook the following day. Over the weekend, the video garnered nearly 3 million views and has been shared tens of thousands of times. Lawrence later uploaded the video to YouTube, where it has more than 100,000 views.

THIS IS THE Ryanair passenger that was ALLOWED to racially and physically abuse an elderly woman and then WALK AWAY...

Posted by David Lawrence on Friday, October 19, 2018

“It was just so disturbing,” he said. “Because there was no response from the other passengers on the flight at the time, I thought, ‘Okay, well, somebody needs to know what happened here.’ That’s why I kept the video running and captured as much as I could.”

Scores of commenters expressed outrage over how the matter was handled and demanded to know why Ryanair’s flight crew didn’t remove the male passenger before the plane took off.

Ryanair said in an emailed statement that they had reported the incident to Essex Police. "As this is now a police matter, we cannot comment further,” it said.

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“We operate strict guidelines for disruptive passengers, and we will not tolerate unruly behavior like this,” Ryanair told BBC News. “We will be taking this matter further, and disruptive or abusive behavior like this will result in passengers being banned from travel.”

Essex Police confirmed to BuzzFeed News that it was investigating the matter and encouraged people with information to contact them.

“Essex Police takes prejudice-based crime seriously and we want all incidents to be reported,” the police department told the news site. “We are working closely with Ryanair and the Spanish authorities on the investigation.”

‘I feel very low’

On Monday, the woman, Delsie Gayle, told ITV that she and her daughter were returning from a vacation to mark the anniversary of the death of Gayle’s husband. The racist encounter has left her feeling depressed.

Gayle, who said she has not had contact with Ryanair since the incident, added that “He do it with me and he gets away, he’ll do it to somebody else."

The woman’s unnamed daughter told HuffPost UK that her mother immigrated to Britain from Jamaica in the 1960s.

Lawrence, 56, told The Post that he spoke with the woman and her daughter after the flight and said they were both disappointed and disgusted. His parents also were part of the “Windrush generation,” immigrants who moved from the Caribbean to Britain from 1948 to 1971, so he said he could understand why the woman agreed to switch seats rather than escalate the situation.

“The racism they suffered on a daily basis is historic. Our parents have learned over the years — because they have never received any kind of justice — they’ve just learned to live with it,” Lawrence said. “They kind of have this attitude, like, ‘Well, what can we do?’ sort of thing. The lady was like, this has happened so many times. I just want to go home.”

Lawrence has since posted multiple times about the incident on social media, urging people to put pressure on Ryanair for turning “a blind eye to racial discrimination.”

The airline’s acknowledgment of his video was hardly a sufficient apology, he said.

“It’s not good enough,” Lawrence said. “It certainly falls so short of what we expect an airline to provide for, in terms of protecting their customers. It’s shameful. It’s shameful. ”