A 72-year-old former American Airlines flight attendant is suing the company for age discrimination, alleging she was wrongfully terminated in 2024 on a false allegation of having taken snacks from a first-class flight cart and kept them for herself.
Valerie Nelson’s Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit allegations also include sex and gender discrimination, retaliation, harassment, failure to accommodate and engage in the interactive process and failure to prevent discrimination, harassment and retaliation. She seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
“Defendants used a disputed snack cart allegation as a pretext to terminate an older employee and remove her from the workforce,” the suit states.
An AA representative did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the suit.
Nelson was based out of Los Angeles International Airport. Her lawsuit states that AA terminated her in December 2024 on an allegation that three months earlier on a flight from Philadelphia to LAX, she broke the seal on a first-class galley cart, removed snacks and placed them in her bag upon boarding the aircraft.
Nelson maintains the theft allegation was both false and pretextual and used as justification to end the career of an older female employee with medical and disability issues. Nelson was age 70 at the time and she says AA records reflect that Nelson previously had received approval for intermittent family leave and that AA’s medical, human resources, leave-administration and supervisory systems were aware of plaintiff’s protected medical leave right.
Nelson further contends that AA’s investigation into the accusation against her was unfair and that she was unjustly found to be not credible. She further says AA did not provide her a meaningful chance to review and respond to the specific alleged evidence against her and did not identify any witness who allegedly saw her break a seal and place snacks into her personal bag.
Instead, AA “selected the most stigmatizing possible characterization — theft and dishonesty — and ended plaintiff’s employment,” the suit states.
Nelson has suffered lost income and emotional distress because of her firing, the suit states.