The incident took place on Saturday on an American Airlines flight.
US athlete Sha'Carri Richardson has claimed that an American Airlines flight attendant "harassed" and "intimidated" her, before having her removed from the flight. The incident took place on Saturday. The 22-year-old professional track and field sprinter said that the argument began when a flight attendant used a "tone" she did not like to tell her to end a phone call.
Taking to Instagram, Ms Richardson shared two videos of the incident. In one clip, she was seen discussing the actions of the flight attendant in question with a fellow passenger. In the second video, a male flight attendant asked her to stop recording, which she refused to do.
Ms Richardson claimed that when the flight attendant was demonstrating safety protocol, he leaned over to see her phone and demanded she put it in airplane mode.
"You're harassing me at this point, so I think you should stop," Ms Richardson told the crew member in the video. "Y'all see what he's doing?" she then asked others in the cabin, who seemed angry and started urging her to comply with the crew's instructions.
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"If I'm getting off the plane, I feel like they need to get a better flight attendant, he needs to get off too," she told a sympathetic passenger seated near her. After a few minutes, a different flight attendant asked the athlete to get off the plane. "May I ask why I'm being removed from the plane?" she asked the attendant, who responded by saying that it was the captain's call.
In the clip, Ms Richardson asked the staff member if the captain knew about the confrontation that happened. She claimed that the flight attendant in question had his hands "in her face" and she felt "threatened".
"Tel me if I'll be wrong to pursue legal actions against the airline @Americanair," the 22-year-old wrote in the caption of her post. "Not only did the man threatened me but also an innocent bystander who simply just wanted a picture with me," she added.
"Also the captain not doing anything to help the situation and this flight attendant has the applause when I exited the plane ... the disrespect I received would not have happened if I was a [sic] one of them," Ms Richardson alleged.
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Further, the athlete also went on to say that the situation culminated in "caucasian men and women yelling and disrespecting me because I won't let this man disrespect me by abusing his authority. She even claimed that some of the passengers clapped when she was being removed from the aircraft.
An airline representative said in a statement to NBC News: "We reaccomodated the customer on a later flight and a member of our team has reached out to learn more".