A mother who was ordered off an aircraft in the US for refusing to cover herself up while breast-feeding has reached a settlement with Delta Air Lines and two other airlines she sued.
Emily Gillette of Santa Fe, New Mexico, says she was kicked off a Delta Connections flight in Burlington in 2006 because she wouldn’t cover herself with a blanket while nursing her one-year-old daughter.
Gillette filed a complaint with Vermont’s Human Rights Commission and then a lawsuit against Delta, Freedom Airlines and Mesa Air for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, the Associated Press reported.
Her lawyer would not say how much the airlines have been ordered to pay.
The commission found that there was reasonable grounds to believe that Mesa and Freedom discriminated against Gillette based on a Vermont law that protects women’s right to breast-feed in public.
But the commission did not find Delta responsible because it was not the carrier. Freedom, a subsidiary of Mesa, operated the flight.