An ex-United Airlines flight attendant who was fired by the Chicago-based carrier after her bosses discovered she was running an OnlyFans account in her spare time has been granted permission on appeal to sue United for retaliation.
Alexa Wawrzenski was hired as a flight attendant by United Airlines in 2015 at its Los Angeles base, but she claims she frequently received comments about her body shape and the way she looked in uniform.
Despite wearing her uniform correctly, Wawrzenski says supervisors would sometimes threaten to discipline her because of the silhouette that her small waist and large hips created while wearing it.
On some occasions, supervisors would even force Wawrzenski to change into larger ‘loaner’ uniform items, while on at least two other occasions, flights were delayed while managers scrutinized Wawrzenski in her uniform.
In order to fire her, United relied upon Alexa’s social media account, which not only had photos of her posing in her flight attendant uniform but other pictures where she wore nothing but a skimpy thong bikini – these photos linked to Alexa’s OnlyFans account where she promised to share ‘exclusive private content’ for a fee.
Shortly after her termination in 2020, Alexa attempted to sue United Airlines, claiming that male flight attendants who frequently posted photos of themselves in a state of undress alongside pictures that clearly identified them as United crew members didn’t face the same harsh treatment as she had.
At the time, United’s social media policy directed employees not to post anything that could be perceived to have a negative effect on the airline’s family-friendly reputation and brand image.
Flight attendants were also subject to a ‘conflict of interest’ policy, which applied to workers seeking any form of employment outside of their day-to-day work. In other words, performing saucy video or camera work would place flight attendants in breach of United’s code of ethics and business conduct policy.
In July 2020, Wawrzenski was dragged into a meeting with her supervisors, where she was grilled for more than six hours about her social media presence and the contents of her OnlyFans account, during which she was chastised for posting ‘explicit’ and ‘suggestive’ photos on Instagram.
During this lengthy meeting, Wawrzenski refused to show her bosses the subscription-only page she was running on the side but told them that it focused on diet, nutrition, and lifestyle.
In the end, Wawrzenski agreed to remove any photos of her in United uniform from her Instagram page, despite objecting to the fact that there were male flight attendants who posed in speedos alongside pictures of them in United uniform.
Soon after that meeting, however, the manager overseeing the investigation into Wawrzenski decided to terminate her on the grounds that she had failed to remove just one photo from her Instagram page that appeared to show her in uniform.
A union representative helping Wawrzenski described this photo as “so filtered” that it was difficult to make out that she was wearing a United uniform and that she had to look “really, really hard” to make out the uniform.
Wawrzenski also agreed to remove this photo, but it was too late. United terminated her employment on the grounds that she had violated the airline’s social media policy by posting ‘suggestive’ photos of herself to ‘solicit’ business on her OnlyFans account.
Just months after her termination, Wawrzenski attempted to sue United for discrimination and retaliation, but a Los Angeles court granted the airline’s application to have her case dismissed through a summary judgment.
That decision was, however, partially rescinded in October by the California Courts of Appeal in a three-panel opinion which concluded that United fired her shortly after she complained to her managers about the airline’s alleged disparate enforcement of its uniform and social media policies.
United has declined to comment on Wawrzenski’s lawsuit.
Earlier this year, a relatively new Delta Air Lines flight attendant potentially saved herself from being terminated after she first asked colleagues on social media whether she could get away with earning a little extra money on the side by starting a racy OnlyFans page.
The crew member explained that with just three years seniority at Delta, she struggled to make a living wage and that additional income from an OnlyFans account would help her top up her salary.
Her solution to a not-that-uncommon problem among flight attendants could, however, land her in a lot of trouble.
That’s not to say that some flight attendants don’t run OnlyFans pages, but they put a lot of effort into hiding the fact that they are crew members or what airline employs them.
