Indignities of travel: Fliers recount humiliating incidents
— -- The Transportation Security Administration's airport screening agents are most often the source of complaints by fliers in the USA about enduring humiliating treatment.
And the complaints most often involve the more aggressive screening techniques — requiring full-body scans in machines and a pat-down of passengers if something on a machine shows up or passengers refuse to go through the machines — that the agency adopted in 2010.
That's according to a USA TODAY survey of very frequent business travelers who voluntarily provide information to the newspaper, and a review of complaints to passenger-rights advocate FlyersRights.org.
Among the complaints reviewed and examined:
•Mary Beth Ruskai, 68, a retired mathematics professor, says she was "violated" during four pat-downs by security screeners on flights during the first four months last year. Each time, screeners touched her breasts and twice touched her "groin area," she says.
In April at Boston's Logan airport, Ruskai says, she was arrested after shouting for any passenger on the security line to witness her pat-down. Her subsequent court case was dismissed Jan. 20 "for lack of probable cause," she says.
TSA policy allows a passenger to have a traveling companion as a witness, but screeners at Logan would only allow a nearby state trooper to witness, says Ruskai, who was traveling alone.
Ruskai says she intentionally wore very short shorts and pulled them up, so screeners could see underneath without touching her groin area. A screener insisted a pat-down was necessary, she says.
Since the beginning of last year, Ruskai says, she was patted down by non-TSA screeners at many European airports, and none of the pat-downs "even came close to the pelvic area."
•Drew Rosenblatt wasn't permitted to board his Christmas Day flight to see his family in Mississippi after yelling at a TSA screener at Richmond's airport in Virginia.
"The agent began moving his hand up the inside of my leg and continued all the way up to my genitalia, making a firm, inappropriate, groping contact," says Rosenblatt, a construction worker in Richmond. "Right after he did this, I interrupted the pat-down and yelled at the pervert, calling him out for groping my genitalia."
When he warned screeners that he would yell if they again touched him inappropriately, he says they refused to screen him, and police escorted him out of the airport.
•Andrew Larrabee, a federal government employee who lives in Austin, says he was told by TSA agents that he would not be allowed to board his Southwest Airlines flight after objecting to a pat-down at Denver's airport in December 2010.
A TSA agent "shot both hands up my leg until the inner hand jarred my scrotum," Larrabee recalls. "Being rammed in the scrotum from behind by a total stranger surprised me, which caused me to instinctively raise my right leg away from his hand while swinging my right hand down across my back to knock his hand off my genitals in self-defense."
Larrabee says he and his wife, Heather, who were returning from a Christmas visit with their family, were told by Southwest's customer service agents that a lot of passengers had complained about TSA's "aggressive and invasive pat-down procedures."
The Larrabees rented a car and drove 16 hours to get back home.
"The entire experience left me feeling humiliated and violated," Andrew Larrabee says.
TSA: Invasive searches necessary
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