A 72-year-old former American Airlines flight attendant is suing the company in Los Angeles Superior Court for age discrimination, alleging she was wrongfully terminated in 2024 on a false allegation of taking snacks from a first-class flight cart and keeping them for herself.
Valerie Nelson’s 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’s seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
A representative of the airline did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the suit, which alleges the carrier “used a disputed snack cart allegation as a pretext to terminate an older employee and remove her from the workforce.”
Nelson was based out of Los Angeles International Airport. According to her court papers, the airline 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 70 at the time and she says the airline’s records reflect that she previously had received approval for intermittent family leave and that American’s medical, human resources, leave-administration and supervisory systems were aware of her protected medical leave right.
Nelson further contends that the carrier’s investigation into the accusation against her was unfair and that she was unjustly found to be not credible. She also alleges the airline 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, her employer “selected the most stigmatizing possible characterization — theft and dishonesty — and ended plaintiff’s employment,” the suit alleges.
Nelson has suffered lost income and emotional distress because of her firing, according to her court papers.