A college professor and his husband were kicked off a JetBlue flight after the pair confronted Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner on a plane in New York City Thursday morning.
In a series of now-deleted tweets, Matthew Lasner, a professor of urban policy at Hunter College in Manhattan, said his husband calmly expressed displeasure at being on the same flight as the Trumps.
But shortly before that tweet, Lasner said his husband planned to chase down Trump and Kushner to harass them, KTLA sister station WPIX in New York reported.
Lasner first spotted the the president-elect’s daughter and her husband, now a key adviser to Donald Trump, in John. F Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal Five.
Lasner tweeted at 8:29 a.m. ET: “Ivanka and Jared at JFK TF, flying commercial. My husband chasing them down to harass them. #banalityofevil.”
What actually occurred is unclear, and Lasner’s entire Twitter account has since gone down. The account originally identified him as the author of a book on affordable housing in New York and a professor at Hunter College.
A transition official said Trump and Kushner were headed to Hawaii for vacation. As of Thursday, the president-elect remained in his Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago, where he has spent the past several days.
A Trump Organization spokesman told CNN, “The story speaks for itself. It’s an incredibly unfortunate situation.”
JetBlue Airways issued the following statement:
The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly. 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 reaccommodate the party on the next available flight.
This is the second time this week an airline has made the news for removing a customer from a plane.
Adam Saleh, a YouTube prankster, was removed from a Delta Airlines flight in London on Wednesday. Saleh claimed he was kicked off his flight after he was overheard speaking in Arabic.
