Fate of Flight Attendant Who Accused Army Vet of Trafficking His Daughter Is Now With Virginia's Supreme Court
The teen began to cry when the plane hit turbulence. He comforted his daughter—and aroused the suspicions of flight attendant Cheryl Thomas.
I've yet to read about a U.S. sex trafficking prosecution in which perpetrators took young victims on commercial airline flights, let alone one in which this crime was thwarted by vigilant airline staff. But I have encountered multiple cases in which innocent parents or partners of people on a flight have been senselessly mistaken for human traffickers and had police called on them by flight staff.
That's what happened to Nicholas Cupp, a father and U.S. Army veteran who was flying with his 13-year-old daughter and other family members in December 2019.
You are reading Sex & Tech, from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Get more of Elizabeth's sex, tech, bodily autonomy, law, and online culture coverage.
See Something, Say Something
On a Delta Air Lines flight from Atlanta, Georgia, to Newport News, Virginia, the teenage girl began to cry when the plane hit some turbulence. Cupp comforted his daughter—and in so doing, somehow raised the suspicions of flight attendant Cheryl Thomas.
Thomas concluded from observing this interaction that Cupp could be trafficking and sexually abusing the girl.
It's a perfect example of how propaganda and misinformation about sex trafficking combine with bad policy—in this case, a federal requirement that airline attendants receive dubious training on how to spot the supposed signs of trafficking—can combine to make people's lives worse.
Only someone operating under the delusion that child sex trafficking is absolutely rampant and involves brazen criminals openly flying child victims around the country would look at a dad comforting his daughter on a turbulent flight and think, yep, probably sex trafficking.
In reality, most cases of coerced and forced prostitution seem to involve adult or older teen victims and happen close to where both the victim and the perpetrator live. But the Department of Homeland Security—which made its bones in the "see something, say something" era of the War on Terror—has a clear interest in perpetuating the idea that sex criminals are flying their victims all over the country on commercial flights. Just like the old "terror level" alerts of yore, it works to keep people vigilant, jumpy, likely to alert authorities about anyone who seems "off," and ready to perpetuate the agency's image as a heroic necessity.
After seeing Cupp comfort his daughter, Thomas told the flight's captain that she suspected human trafficking. The captain reached out to a Delta station manager, who called the police, who were waiting when the plane arrived.
Malicious Intent?
Apparently neither Thomas or anyone else on staff thought to first check passenger records before calling the cops. If they had, they would have seen that Cupp, his daughter, and several other family members—including his wife—shared a last name and had checked into the flight together.
The crew had "at hand passenger manifest information that showed that [Cupp] was the father of the teenaged female and that the mother of the teenaged female was seated just across the aisle, and that all three possessed government-issued identification," noted Nicholas Cupp in court documents.
Instead, Thomas leapt right to "trafficking" and higher ups went along with it. She later told the cops that she thought Cupp had been touching his daughter "inappropriately."
After the flight landed, police detained and interrogated Cupp and questioned his daughter. They quickly concluded that "there was no probable cause to charge or arrest."
Cupp sued Thomas, Delta Airlines, and the Delta subsidiary—Endeavor Air—that had been operating the Atlanta to Georgia flight. He accused all three of false imprisonment and Thomas of negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and interference with parental rights.
Since the incident, Cupp had become fearful of interacting with his daughter in public, he told the court. He had also experienced flare-ups of the post traumatic stress disorder he got in the army, he said.
The airlines and Thomas moved to dismiss the claims, citing a Virginia law that grants immunity to anyone who makes a good faith report of suspected child abuse or neglect. This immunity is only negated if the reporter acted "in bad faith or malicious intent," they pointed out.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia agreed to dismiss Cupp's case.
Federal Court Sends Case to Virginia Supreme Court
Cupp appealed. He argued that the Virginia immunity law only applies when complaints were made to a department of social services, not to law enforcement. He also argued that there had been bad faith and malicious intent on Thomas' part.
In a recent opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit agreed with the lower court that the malicious intent claims were not valid.
But the court couldn't decide whether Cupp was correct that reporters to police are not entitled to civil immunity.
This question, the circuit court ruled, is ultimately one for the state of Virginia. "Given the importance of this issue to the operation of Virginia's reporting statute and finding no controlling decisions by either the Supreme Court of Virginia or the Court of Appeals of Virginia," the appeals court decided to send the case to the Virginia Supreme Court to answer the question of whether immunity applied in this case.
This, it decided, is ultimately a question for the state of Virginia. "Given the importance of this issue to the operation of Virginia's reporting statute and finding no controlling decisions by either the Supreme Court of Virginia or the Court of Appeals of Virginia," the federal appeals court decided to send the case to the Virginia Supreme Court to answer the question of whether immunity applied.
"If the answer to the certified question is 'yes,' then the district court correctly [dismissed] Cupp's claims against Thomas," the 4th Circuit held. "If, however, the answer to the certified question in 'no,' then we will reverse the district court's…dismissal of Cupp's complaint and remand the case to the district court for further proceedings."
A Simple Mistake?
Ultimately, this case kind of turns on a technicality. And while an important point for Virginia to work out, that's not particularly interesting.
More interesting to me is who is morally and practically in the right and the wrong here. And that's complicated.
Obviously, we want people who suspect child abuse to be able to report good-faith suspicions without fear of consequence. If people have to fear being sued over good-faith reports, it would clearly chill reporting and likely deter discovery of actual abuse. (To that point, the idea that this should turn on whether they report to police or to child services seems sort of silly, since reporting to police may be more practical in certain situations and, in any event, we shouldn't really expect every citizen to know the finer points of child abuse reporting law. But that's for the Virginia Supreme Court to decide.)
I think the federal courts are probably right, too, that there's no indication Thomas acted out of malice. Negligence, perhaps. Bad judgment, certainly. But nothing in Cupp's complaint suggests she had it out for the Cupp family and was maliciously trying to smear them.
But there is also something more going on here than a simple mistake made by one misguided flight attendant. In fact, every year brings new stories of family members or friends falsely accused of trafficking their flight companions—and this, of course, is only the stories that make it into the press or the courts. It's not just happening with one airline, either, so we can't simply attribute it to bad policies at one particular company.
Situations like these are the logical outcome of the trafficking panic that authorities have been stoking for several decades.
If there was evidence that a few people would be falsely accused while many more are correctly identified, that would shift the balance of considerations here. But that's not what's happening. We have a situation in which activists, lawmakers, and the Department of Homeland Security have stoked paranoia among airport and airline staff—and that is directly leading to absolutely nonsensical suspicions of sex trafficking.
I don't think this 100 percent absolves those making the unfounded allegations. The fact that, in this case, Thomas could have easily checked that Cupp was the girls dad but didn't bother does seem pretty damning.
But their paranoia isn't random, and it isn't happening in a vacuum. Many Americans have internalized decades of disinformation put out by people in power. And those people in power have a vested interest in using human trafficking as a cover for not just online surveillance, sex stings, border control, and immigration busts, but for convincing Americans to be more distrustful of their fellow citizens—so distrustful that they're willing to do authorities' surveillance for them and reach out on even the flimsiest of suspicions.
More Sex & Tech News
• Texas teens are suing over the state's App Store Accountability Act, which requires all app stores users to verify their ages before downloading apps or making in-app purchases. "The Act imposes content-based prior restraints on speech that replace parents' freedom to moderate their children's access to sources for learning, communication, and creativity," the lawsuit states.
• Do artificial intelligence programs "think" differently in different languages? "I set out to learn whether the language in which you ask AIs questions influences the answer that they give you," writes Kelsey Piper at The Argument. "Large language models…are, in essence, elaborate engines for predicting what text would follow other text. It seems entirely plausible that the language they are speaking profoundly shapes the values and priorities they express."
• A bill under consideration in Wisconsin would require adult websites to block virtual private networks (VPNs). "It is not yet clear how lawmakers plan to implement this VPN blocking requirement, nor how websites displaying adult-only content could practically restrict only the VPN traffic coming from Wisconsin's users," notes Tech Radar.
• Meanwhile, Mozilla is building a free VPN into its Firefox browsers.
• Andrew Cuomo is trying to make prostitution a major issue in New York City's mayoral race.
Today's Image
