Ivanka Trump, her husband Jared Kushner and their three young children were harassed on a JetBlue flight by an unruly passenger who was eventually kicked off the plane Thursday morning for causing “conflict.”
Trump, 35, the elder daughter of President-elect Donald Trump’s five children, was boarding a JetBlue flight out of New York’s JFK International Airport when a male passenger began yelling at her, demanding to know why she wasn’t flying on a private jet and, according to TMZ, shouting at her, “Your father is ruining the country!”
“Why is she on our flight? She should be riding private,” the man, later identified as Daniel Goldstein, exclaimed, per TMZ. Another passenger told TMZ that Ivanka Trump simply ignored Goldstein and distracted her kids with crayons before he was taken off the flight.
As he was removed, the man continued yelling, saying “You’re kicking me off for expressing my opinion?”
Goldstein’s husband, Hunter College professor Matthew Lasner, stated on Twitter that he and his husband were kicked off the flight after Goldstein expressed “displeasure” about flying with Trump.
Lasner also tweeted that Goldstein was chasing the couple down in the terminal “to harass them.” He has since deleted his Twitter account but savvy Twitter users resurrected some of his tweets.
Dice, a media analyst, also called Lasner an “LGBT bully” on Twitter for being “proud” that his husband harassed the incoming first daughter and her family. Dice also put the word “husband” in quotation marks, as if potentially questioning whether Lasner and Goldstein are actually a married gay couple or simply posing as one in order to get publicity? Who knows why Dice chose to do this, really.
JetBlue released the following statement regarding the incident:
“The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly,” the airline said. “If the crew determines that a customer is causing conflict on the aircraft, the customer will be asked to deplane, especially if the crew feels the situation runs the risk of escalation during flight. In this instance, our team worked to re-accommodate the party on the next available flight.”
A spokeswoman for the Trump family declined comment but did not dispute the accounts.
Meanwhile, several Twitter users began criticizing Goldstein and Lasner (especially the former) for their treatment of Trump and her family.
There weren’t many tweets defending the gay couple’s behavior, although some did wonder why Trump — a successful businesswoman in her own right, the daughter of a billionaire with his own jet, — would be flying commercial, and especially in coach. Some even said it was probably staged, that it was a publicity stunt of some sort.
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