A 16-year-old girl is speaking out after, she says, she was sexually assaulted while traveling alone on a United Airlines flight from Seattle to Newark, New Jersey, last month. She and her mother asked us to protect their identities in an interview you will see only on “CBS This Morning.”
It was a big trip for the teen. She had won admission to a prestigious young women’s leadership academy at Princeton, but she says her red-eye flight soon took a traumatic turn, reports CBS News correspondent Anna Werner.
“I knew what was going on but like, I just thought I was dreaming or something, like, this cannot really be happening,” she said.
Sleeping on the overnight flight, she says she woke up to find the stranger sitting next to her, touching her.
“I could feel his hand on my thigh, and one of his hands had like, came between my legs and he was rubbing in between my legs and then he tried to put his other hand underneath my pants and I kind of woke up and was like ‘What are you doing?'” she said.
She reported it to a flight attendant, who moved her to another seat a few rows up. Still, she was terrified.
Later that day, police and the FBI, which handles incidents in the air, did track down a passenger and arrest him.
