A passenger on a Delta Airlines flight silently cried ahead of a two-hour flight after she saw her seatmate sent a demeaning text complaining about being wedged next to a “huge woman.”
Vanessa, a TikToker with nearly 5,000 followers, shared a short video of her tear-streaked face to a remix of “Jump Around.”
Her Delta Airlines flight bound from Tampa to New York City had just taken off when she saw the disgruntled stranger sitting next to her sent his buddies a body-shaming text message about her.
“We’ve taken off, and I can’t stop crying. The man next to me, sends one text, ‘urgh HUGE woman sat next to me’ – I saw [because] I have eyes, and now I feel like a prisoner for the next [two] hours,” Vanessa wrote on TikTok.
“Be king. If you’re feeling so inclined, can you send me some love? I’ve lost 60+ lbs and have actually been feeling really good about myself,” she added.
In another video recorded during the flight, Vanessa was still wiping tears from her eyes and wrote that “flying while fat is hard.”
While the rest of the flight went off without a hitch, Vanessa later elaborated on the encounter in an interview with The Mary Sue.
“As I approached my row, I made eye contact with the man in the window seat of my row. I could see the man in the window, visibly sigh and roll his eyes. That is immediately when my radar went up,” she told the outlet.
Vanessa said the stranger’s text message was “right there in front of her face” soon after she sat down, though some people online criticized her for seemingly snooping over her seatmate’s shoulder.
She told the outlet that the man seemed to realize that his text was rude and quickly started to send a “series of empty texts” to push the body-shaming message further up his screen until it was out of sight.
In a separate video shared one day after her flight, Vanessa explained that she “didn’t need two seats” and that the man was “actually spilling more into [her] seat.”
Vanessa originally posted the now-viral video on Nov. 26. Since then, it’s garnered more than 1 million views and roughly 121,000 likes — and attracted a swath of new body-positive fans.
“I’m so glad that this little moment of lemons has turned into so much lemonade for so many people. The amount of kindness that’s been spread and shared is really unbelievable,” Vanessa said in a TikTok update welcoming her influx of new followers.
Vanessa, better known as “soberspouse” online, runs a family-oriented TikTok documenting her two sons’ lives and her day-to-day balancing parenting and self-care.
She added in a separate video that people’s response to her story helped “restore [her] faith in humanity.”
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