The Woman From That 'Airplane Love Story' Has Issued A Statement Through A Lawyer
Update, July 13: After more than a week of silence, the woman involved in the #PlaneBae story has finally broken her silence by providing a statement to Business Insider through a lawyer.
I am a young professional woman. On July 2, I took a commercial flight from New York to Dallas. Without my knowledge or consent, other passengers photographed me and recorded my conversation with a seatmate. They posted images and recordings to social media, and speculated unfairly about my private conduct.
Since then, my personal information has been widely distributed online. Strangers publicly discussed my private life based on patently false information. I have been doxxed, shamed, insulted and harassed. Voyeurs have come looking for me online and in the real world.
I did not ask for and do not seek attention. #PlaneBae is not a romance – it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent.
Please continue to respect my privacy, and my desire to remain anonymous.
Since the initial story went viral, things took a strange turn. Rosey Blair — the woman responsible for putting the story online by posting photos of two strangers to Instagram and Twitter — continued to talk about the story to her social audience, which was larger than it ever had been. She posted a video goading her followers into doxxing the female half of the #PlaneBae couple, who had managed to stay relatively anonymous up until that time.
On July 10, Blair posted an apology. The dox-inciting video and parts of the original thread have since been taken down.
Previously: On July 2, actress/writer/photographer Rosey Blair witnessed what she thinks might have been a spark of true love appear before her very eyes. On an airplane flying from New York to Dallas, Blair sat behind two people who seemed to quickly go from being total strangers to having an instant connection.
So, Blair did something that has become somewhat common: she took out her phone, took some photos and posted her account of the meet-cute online for her Twitter and Instagram followers to see.
Here's the post that kicked off her thread, which has since gone mega-viral:
It's almost entirely made up of screenshots from Blair's Instagram story, which looked like this:
The story's virality was likely helped by the fact that Blair already had sizable Instagram and Twitter followings (30,000 and 60,000 followers, respectively) but the story's wholesome relatable-ness and romcom-like nature also probably contributing to making it the super viral sensation it's become in the last few days.
"People Think This Story About A Guy Meeting A Girl On A Plane Is The Best Thing Ever," wrote BuzzFeed. "After a midflight love connection went viral, a mystery couple gave everyone a glimmer of hope for a happy ending," wrote ABC News.
Blair, Blair's boyfriend and Plane Bae himself (former professional soccer player Euan Holden) even appeared on a Today Show1 segment:
Right now, the first tweet in Blair's thread has more than 300,000 retweets, with another 800,000 likes to go with that. It's a story that reaches far and wide.
But some Twitter users thought the idea of an interaction like this one going mega-viral was a little unsettling. Take a look at these tweets:
To be completely honest, after reading through Blair's thread I felt a little weird even just combing through the tweets of strangers voicing their concerns for the #planebae couple's privacy.
With viral fame constantly on the line, it doesn't take much for someone to take their phone out to document the intimate details of someone else's personal life — even if that person is a complete stranger. Especially when an entire genre of internet content has emerged around the practice of mining the dramatic stories of others to rack up internet points (social media engagement, blog post clicks, video views, etc.)
The first instance of this sort of widely-lauded breach of public trust might have been this 2013 breakup of a New York couple on a rooftop documented by their neighbor, a comedian, and then aggregated by BuzzFeed.
More recently, the internet — including Digg! — went nuts for the story of an office lunch thief who was caught by her hungry coworker.
The wild stories about people interacting with one another in both ordinary and unusual ways can be some of the most fun and rewarding parts of the internet. And that's especially true when the subjects are involved in the tellings of their own stories, like that time two University of Wisconsin-Madison students found out they have mutual crushes on each other over Snapchat, and their love story played out for the entire campus and internet to see.
But with a third party in the driver's seat and the protagonists unknowingly being brought along for a ride with potentially millions of spectators, things cross into an ethical gray area. Especially when some of the content can dip into murky territory like this:
Add in the fact that Rosey Blair had sizable Instagram and Twitter audiences before a single snap of the #planebae saga went live, and suddenly things seem about as cute as "The Truman Show."
Was Blair wrong to post about a cute couple she saw (and maybe even accidentally helped set up) on an airplane? Probably not.
Was she wrong to post photos of various parts of their bodies2 without their consent? Yeah, probably. It was also probably wrong for her to broadcast assumptions and wink/nod allegations about sex between two strangers in an airplane bathroom to her large (and quickly growing) online audience. All of a sudden the entire story looks like a lapse in responsibility.
Two people were lucky enough to get paired with a seatmate they got along with on a long flight. Hopefully, if they choose to maintain any sort of relationship or publicly clarify the one they already have, they can do so on their own terms.
