Wicked actress Marissa Bode claims that she was allegedly barred from boarding a commercial flight as a wheelchair user.
“I was denied boarding a flight because I was disabled. I wish that were clickbait [and] I wish that were false, but that is what happened,” Bode, 25, said in a TikTok video shared Thursday, April 23, tagging Southern Airways in her caption. “As long as airlines are s***y, I’m going to continue talking about it.”
She continued, “For my other disabled peers out there, do not fly Southern Airways. I had never heard of Southern Airways [or] Airlines before. It’s extremely, extremely small and they think, because they are so small, that disabled passengers couldn’t possibly fly with them.”
Us Weekly has reached out to Southern Airways for comment.
“Picture this: I have a speaking engagement in a very small town in Pennsylvania. My first flight was with United,” Bode, who played Nessarose Thropp in the Wicked movies, recalled. “I was very sleep-deprived, so naturally, I was looking forward to clonking out on my second connecting flight.”
According to Bode, flying Southern Airways was her “only option” to travel into the small Pennsylvania town.
“Because I was traveling with United first and then transferring over to Southern for my second flight, the boarding pass situation was strange,” the actress alleged. “I just didn’t see it on my ticket or within my phone [via] the United app. I just couldn’t find it virtually. I got to the gate, I was like, ‘Hey, can you help me locate my boarding pass?’”
Bode alleged that the two gate agents subsequently looked at her, asking whether she “could stand.”
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@Southern Airways you should be ashamed
“I said, ‘No,’ and they said, ‘I’m sorry, but because of that, we’re going to have to deny you boarding,’” Bode claimed, adding that she was allegedly told her wheelchair was too heavy to store on the small aircraft. “They proceeded to tell me [that] all the planes within this airline have stairs to get on the plane. … To which, I said, ‘I’ve never heard that before. You’re telling me none of the people that have flown on your plane before are disabled?’ They said, ‘No, even the elderly have a hard time getting up those stairs.’”
She continued, “Disabled people are not an afterthought. Knowing that disabled people exist, which y’all clearly often forget, do you choose not to update your planes? I [told the gate agents], ‘This is blatant segregation.’”
