The airline has been the subject of significant “bad buzz” on social networks since the young woman denounced an “aggression” by a hostess on a Rio-Paris flight.
The French influencer Crazy Sally, followed by nearly a million people on Instagram, is formal: she was “attacked” by an Air France flight attendant on a flight between Rio and Paris on June 18. And decided to file a complaint.
In a long post on the social network liked more than 340,000 times, she recounts in detail the chronology of events, videos in support.
As often, it is at take-off and for a smartphone story that the tension has risen. According to Crazy Sally, a stewardess asks her “in a super aggressive way” to switch her device to airplane mode and “allows herself to aggressively grab my hand”.
“I look at her in shock, because I could not believe that she had allowed herself to touch me” she continues, adding that passengers, having seen the scene, would also have denounced this gesture of the hostess.
“Shocked”
The young woman finally complies and falls asleep during the flight. When he woke up, the altercation would have continued.
“When I landed, I was sleeping (…) this stewardess arrived, she ripped off my blanket so I woke up suddenly, and she was yelling at me” so that ‘she fastens her belt and pulls up her tablet.
The tone rises and, still according to the influencer, “her manager throws me a notebook with the mark on it ‘violent passengers face sanctions’. They tell me that they are going to call the police for me, as if I was a criminal,” she wrote.
According to her, the crew “gathered against me” and then wrote “a report on me, reversing the facts by saying that it was I who was aggressive, that it was I who attacked the hostess” .
Again, in the videos posted by the influencer, other passengers come to her defense, deeming the hostess “aggressive”.
And on leaving the aircraft, two police officers called by the crew are waiting for the young woman. “I was in tears to see how much you can end up in front of the police for nothing, how much they can lie” she laments.
“When I gave my version of the facts to the police, even they did not understand why they had been made to move for that” she believes.
Air France tries to verify the accusations
Faced with an increasingly bad buzz, Air France is forced to communicate, but stresses that it must first cross-check the versions. In a statement, the company says:
“Air France has taken note of the video testimony of a customer declaring that she was attacked by a crew member on board a flight from Brazil. The facts related by this passenger in no way correspond to the standards of personalized attention and dedicated service that our teams owe to all our customers. Our cabin crew are committed to serving all of our passengers in a spirit of respect and kindness”.
And to continue: “Air France takes this report very seriously and immediately contacted the passenger. The company’s teams are currently collecting all the information relating to this flight in order to understand this event”.
Olivier Chicheportiche Journalist BFM Business
