A black woman claims Southwest Airlines unfairly subjected her to its policy requiring large passengers to buy two seats because of her race

Kathy McCormack:

Nadine Thompson of Exeter, president of a cosmetics company, sued Southwest in federal court for discrimination in 2004, saying the company doesn’t uniformly enforce its policy requiring obese passengers to buy two seats.

Thompson, who had flown on Southwest frequently, was on her way to a business conference in Chicago in June 2003 when she boarded her flight at Manchester Airport. Not long after she took a seat in the back of the plane, put the arm rest down and buckled her seat belt, an employee she saw at the check-in counter asked her to get off, Thompson’s lawyer, Neil Osborne, said in opening statements.

She was told at the plane’s loading bridge she needed to buy a second seat for “her comfort and safety,” Osborne said, even though no one was sitting next to her. At the time, the 5-foot-8-inch Thompson weighed between 300 and 330 pounds, according to court records.

When Thompson asked for an explanation, she didn’t get one. “It was never made clear to her that she was too big to fit in her seat,” Osborne told the six-person jury.

She refused to leave and decided to return to her seat. An employee told her that if she left, Southwest would give her a refund, Osborne said. She declined, but she became increasingly agitated and decided to leave — only to be met outside the plane by a few Southwest employees and two Rockingham County Sheriff’s deputies. At that point, she started yelling at the group, at times using profanity.

“Did you ask me to purchase another ticket because I’m too fat to sit in the seat? Did you ask me to purchase another ticket because I’m a black woman?” Thompson said, according to court records.

Thompson, who got a refund, said she was humiliated and suffered emotional distress. “Southwest just asked me to get off the plane either because I’m too fat or too black or just a woman,” she said to people as she was being led to the ticket counter, according to court records.

Thompson is not challenging the passenger seat policy itself, Osborne said.

“This is not a case about weight discrimination,” he said. “This suit is about the inappropriate application of a policy in a discriminatory manner.”

Garry Lane, a Southwest lawyer, said the airline’s “customer of size” policy, introduced in 2002 in response to “squished customer” complaints and safety concerns about evacuations, wasn’t written clearly at the time. Employees made some mistakes in explaining it, but did not act out of racial bias, he said.

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