NEW YORK — A JetBlue passenger was removed from his flight along with his husband and their child after a confrontation with Ivanka Trump last Thursday.
Passenger Marc Scheff told Reuters that when fellow passenger Dan Goldstein saw Ivanka and her family in the economy section of the New York to San Francisco flight on Thursday, he did a double take and said: “Oh my God. This is a nightmare!”
Goldstein, a 35-year-old attorney from Brooklyn, continued his rant, saying: “Why is she on our flight? She should be flying private.” Meanwhile, Goldstein’s husband Matthew Lasner, a professor at New York’s Hunter College, tweeted on his twitter @MattLasner that his husband was going to harass Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner, adding the hashtag #banalityofevil.
The plane was still boarding when the incident occurred, and JetBlue’s cabin crew was able to escort Goldstein, Lasner and their child off the flight.
Scheff told CNN he overheard Ivanka tell JetBlue staff, “I don't want to make this a thing.” Scheff said it seemed like Ivanka was fine with letting her harasser stay on the plane.
When JetBlue staff approached Goldstein to “make sure he was calm,” he said: “They ruin our country, now try (to) ruin our flight!” As Goldstein and his family were being escorted off the plane, he could be heard asking: “You're kicking me off for expressing my opinion?!”
The couple were put on the next flight. Lasner defended his husband by tweeting: “My husband expressed his displeasure in a calm tone, JetBlue staff overheard, and they kicked us off.”
Responding to the incident on Fox News, a Trump spokesman said: “To do that to a woman who was on there with her children, I don’t care what your political background is or what your thoughts are, that’s not the way we as Americans need to act.”
