Absolutely infuriating story of a man who, with his pregnant wife, lost his temper with a Portland airport security screener who’d made his wife lift her shirt in view of 100+ passengers. He was cuffed, arrested, charged, banned. When he tried to defend himself, he ran into a wall of omerta and revisionism, as the authorities manufactured sins to compound his crime with and refused to let him see the videotape of the incident, which, he claims, would exonerate him.
After some more grumbling on my part they eventually finished with me and I went to retrieve our luggage from the x-ray machine. Upon returning I found my wife sitting in a chair, crying. Mary rarely cries, and certainly not in public. When I asked her what was the matter, she tried to quell her tears and sobbed, “I’m sorry…it’s…they touched my breasts…and…” That’s all I heard. I marched up to the woman who’d been examining her and shouted, “What did you do to her?” Later I found out that in addition to touching her swollen breasts – to protect the American citizenry – the employee had asked that she lift up her shirt. Not behind a screen, not off to the side – no, right there, directly in front of the hundred or so passengers standing in line. And for you women who’ve been pregnant and worn maternity pants, you know how ridiculous those things look. “I felt like a clown,” my wife told me later. “On display for all these people, with the cotton panel on my pants and my stomach sticking out. When I sat down I just lost my composure and began to cry. That’s when you walked up.”
Of course when I say she “told me later,” it’s because she wasn’t able to tell me at the time, because as soon as I demanded to know what the federal employee had done to make her cry, I was swarmed by Portland police officers. Instantly. Three of them, cinching my arms, locking me in handcuffs, and telling me I was under arrest. Now my wife really began to cry. As they led me away and she ran alongside, I implored her to calm down, to think of the baby, promising her that everything would turn out all right. She faded into the distance and I was shoved into an elevator, a cop holding each arm. After making me face the corner, the head honcho told that I was under arrest and that I wouldn’t be flying that day – that I was in fact a “menace.”
(Thanks to everyone who suggested this)