Photo: @YazzGiraldo/Instagram
The wife of a former FBI agent claims she and her 3-year-old son were locked in an airplane bathroom by a flight attendant and accused of causing a "terrorist" incident.
Yazz Giraldo, 36, a Miami based former television host who is of Middle Eastern and Latin descent, said she suspects she was targeted by the flight attendant after she and her husband, Ali Moghaddam, 44, a former Pennsylvania prosecutor who served six years in the FBI, were speaking Farsi to their toddlers during a recent American Airlines flight from Fort Lauderdale to New York, the New York Post reports. Giraldo said both of her young children needed to use the bathroom and she took one of her 3-year-old son to the first-class bathroom closest to their seats.
“Everybody else was using it,” Girlado said, adding that a flight attendant prohibited her from doing so without an explanation.
Giraldo said she changed her baby's diaper at the rear of the plane, where her husband was sitting separately, before a second flight attendant told her she could use the closer bathroom, where she then took her son, according to a Brooklyn Federal Court discrimination lawsuit filed against American Airlines obtained by the Post. The first flight attendant then tried to stop her from first class as her child "was holding himself" and "about to lose it," according to Giraldo.
“I closed the door, when I’m inside the bathroom I start hearing the noise, ‘tick, tick, tick,'” she said while describing the sound of the door locking. “I freaked out. I was already under so much stress. … I started to panic, I banged on the door a few times and I said, ‘Let me out of here. She was punishing me for challenging her."
The 36-year-old said she lost track of time while locked in the bathroom before a supervisory loudly berated her in front of other passengers minutes later claiming “the pilot decided to put the plane under terrorist attack warning because of you.”
Giraldo told the attendant that she'd been misled about the bathroom and locked inside, to which the attendant accused her of lying.
“I immediately knew it was racism. I immediately knew I was being discriminated against,” she said via the Post. “I was humiliated.”
Moghaddam said he was unaware of the incident involving his family until police escorted them off the plane after it landed in New York.
“I dedicated about a decade of my life to public service, to protecting the community. Joint Terrorism Task Force, undercover, S.W.A.T., all of this … for my family to be labeled as terrorist and be marched off a plane just because we want to change a diaper?” Moghaddam told the Post.
Moghaddam requested to be taken to the airport's FBI substation and responding officers softened their approach after they realized his background. The family was released from police custody after 15 minutes, according to the Post.