Lawsuit: She Said No to Sex, So Her Airline Boss Choked Her to Her Knees in Concourse E

Shortly after she clocked in at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, the gate agent says she saw her boss’s boss walk out of a Starbucks and make an angry beeline toward her through the early morning hubbub of Concourse E.

Michael Jackson, the duty manager at Piedmont Airlines that day, demanded to know the identity of the man with whom she had recently vacationed, according to a new federal lawsuit filed last month in Charlotte.

The agent told him it was none of his business. At one point, according to her complaint, she even laughed.

Jackson responded by taking out a sharpened pencil, pointing it at her forehead and threatening to stab her, the lawsuit says.

“Do you think I’m f****** joking?” he said.

In her court filing last month, the gate agent claims that Jackson had been harassing and stalking her for the two years the pair had worked together for the American Airlines affiliate.

He had mined her personnel file for her private information, the lawsuit alleges, and relentlessly pressured her on the job for nude photos and sex.

A month earlier, according to the lawsuit, Jackson had ordered her to report to his office, then blocked the door with his 340-pound frame to reach under her dress and grind himself against her, the lawsuit claims.

The gate agent reported this incident and others to her superiors, according to the court filing, but no one from Piedmont interceded even as Jackson became more insistent and threatening.

Now, on April 22, 2017, the escalating tensions between the two airline workers were about to explode into open violence.

It was just after 6 a.m. when the gate agent says she tried to end the confrontation with Jackson by walking away.

Instead, the lawsuit contends, Jackson caught up to her, squeezed his hands around her neck and dragged her to a corner of the concourse.

“I’m not f****** playing with you,” he yelled as he choked her, the lawsuit alleges.

The agent couldn’t breathe or cry for help, according to the lawsuit.

In the midst of the morning rush at one of America’s busiest airports, she thought she was about to die.

First, it was leers

Jackson could not be reached Thursday for comment.

The Observer does not identify the victims or alleged victims of sexual assault or harassment. The gate agent remains an employee of Piedmont Airlines but no longer lives or works in Charlotte.

According to her lawsuit, she filed a discrimination complaint with the Charlotte office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in July 2017. The agency gave her the right to sue on March 3. She filed her complaint two weeks later.

It names American Airlines, Piedmont and Jackson as defendants and claims sexual discrimination, negligence, assault and battery, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Her Charlotte lawyers, Sean Herrmann, Kevin Murphy and William Sitton, have asked for a jury trial.

An American Airlines spokeswoman said Wednesday that the airline was unable to comment on pending court matters.

Herrmann said what happened to his client should have been avoided. According to the lawsuit, one of the gate agent’s superiors told her that Jackson had similar bouts of misbehavior with female employees while working for Piedmont in Philadelphia, and that those incidents led the airline to transfer him to Charlotte.

“This is not the first time that sexual harassment escalates, becomes physical and then turns violent,” Herrmann said. “She had warned people above her what was happening. She told them over and over again and they said, ‘That’s his M.O.,’ and didn’t do anything to stop him. Then this escalated in the worst way possible.”

The problems began in December 2015, not long after the gate agent joined Piedmont, her lawsuit says. In the early stages, it was Jackson’s leering, then he began making comments about her body, while ordering her to meet in his office up to two times a week, the lawsuit says. Soon he had dug out her phone number from her work file and was calling her at home or stalking her gate-to-gate at the airport.

Early on, she requested a transfer, which never went through. According to the lawsuit, Piedmont told her that it had lost her paperwork.

On the morning of the Concourse E attack, the lawsuit says, Jackson only released his grip around the gate agent’s throat when others approached. She fell to her knees, gasping for breath, the lawsuit alleges.

Jackson fled, but later confronted the agent on the tarmac outside her assigned gate. According to the lawsuit, he repeated the same question: Why wouldn’t she sleep with him?

Two days later, the agent was hospitalized due to the injuries to her neck and throat, the lawsuit alleges. Her doctors called Charlotte-Mecklenburg police.

At 5:30 p.m. on April 24, 2017, Jackson was arrested and charged with assault on a female.

That October, according to court records, the charges were dropped at the victim’s request.

Sitton, who was the gate agent’s attorney at the time, told the Observer that his client did not oppose the dismissal against Jackson “because of his cooperation in our investigation of … a brutal assault.”

Gavin Off contributed.

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