A Delta Air Lines employee stole a computer tablet left behind on a plane by a South Carolina child, then used it to record sexually explicit videos of himself – which saved to cloud storage and were discovered by the minor’s parents, a recent federal lawsuit alleges.
The child’s parents, Tory and Brooke Brewer, sued Delta in US district court in Charleston on 16 July, saying their family is owed damages for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress and harassment, among other causes.
“What should have been a fun family getaway was riddled with confusion and anxiety over unauthorized access to their personal devices, a breach of privacy, and the transmission of highly inappropriate, explicit video recordings sent through their child’s personal devices, something they never would have expected,” said a statement from the Brewers’ attorney, Tola Familoni of Motley Rice law firm.
Familoni added that his clients are aiming to “hold Delta accountable” for a lack of meaningful response to their complaints over the situation prior to the lawsuit and hope to “stop anything like this happening to any other families” who travel with US airlines.
A statement from the airline said “the accused individual is not a Delta employee but one of a vendor company” that it did not identify. Delta said in its statement that the airline has “zero tolerance for unlawful behavior of any kind but will decline to comment further on this pending litigation”.
According to the Brewers’ lawsuit, on 19 July 2023, the couple and their children traveled on a Delta flight from Charleston to New York City’s John F Kennedy international airport. They took a connecting flight from there to London, where they realized one of the children had forgotten an Apple iPad stored in a case featuring the children’s cartoon character Peppa Pig because Brooke Brewer began receiving random text messages about the tablet.
Brooke Brewer used Apple’s Find My app to track the iPad’s location and determined it was in New York City. The person with the iPad had logged out of Brooke Brewer’s account but was taking photos that were still being uploaded to her Apple iCloud account.
At first, the photos were relatively unremarkable: selfies of a man in his Delta uniform with his name badge visible. The Brewers filed a lost and found report with Delta by 20 July 2023, they recounted in their lawsuit.
But a little more than a month later, pornographic videos of the same man from the prior images showed up in Brooke Brewer’s iCloud account. They depicted him masturbating in his Delta uniform while wearing his name badge, the Brewers’ lawsuit said.
A second lewd video of the man in his Delta uniform – again wearing his name badge – appeared in Brooke Brewer’s iCloud account within days, the lawsuit continued. The Brewers also learned that the man had managed to access Brooke’s iTunes account and create his own personal profile.
Furthermore, the man – who is not named in the lawsuit – had used the iPad to hack into the Brewers’ Amazon account and created a profile titled “Gay” that one of the couple’s children detected and alerted them about, the couple alleged.
The Brewers said they filed a second report with Delta. The major airline – who did not acknowledge the first of the reports – responded with a generalized, “no reply” email saying it was searching for the iPad, the lawsuit asserted.
“We would have hoped, if not publicly, at least personally they would have acknowledged their role and responsibility for what happened to this family,” Familoni said, referring to Delta, in an interview Tuesday.
Familoni said the Brewers ultimately filed their lawsuit because Delta “unfortunately didn’t do that”.
“We hope that Delta will step up and take responsibility, speak to the family, and acknowledge their wrongdoing,” Familoni said.
