A woman who declined to give up her pre-booked window seat on a GOL Airlines flight has filed a lawsuit after a secretly recorded video of the incident went viral. She claims the unwanted filming and online harassment caused serious emotional and professional harm.
A video that went viral again this week on X and TikTok shows a woman refusing to give up her window seat on a Brazilian GOL Airlines flight. The clip, originally recorded in December last year, has resurfaced on social media and is drawing fresh attention, with the repost alone getting nearly a million views.
The woman in the video, 29-year-old Jennifer Castro from Belo Horizonte, has now filed a lawsuit against both GOL Airlines and the passenger who recorded the incident.
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What seemed like a small disagreement about a seat has now turned into an important case about privacy, public shaming and how quickly a person can become the centre of global online debates.
According to Castro, the incident began right when she boarded the flight. She had pre-selected a window seat, but a toddler was already sitting there.
She said,
“I said, ‘This is my seat,’ and waited for him to leave.”
A man sitting across the aisle then tried to convince her to switch seats, telling her,
“Change with him, you sit next to the aisle and he’ll have your place.”
Castro refused. She later explained that the child’s mother behaved rudely towards her, and that only strengthened her decision not to swap seats.
She also said,
“The boy cried the entire flight, it was around 50 minutes from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte.”
The argument might have ended inside the plane, but a fellow passenger began filming the exchange without her permission. The clip showed the crying child, the disagreement about the seat, and Castro looking uncomfortable.
When the video was posted online, it was turned into a debate about whether she was right or wrong to keep the seat she paid for. Social media users quickly passed their judgments, and Castro suddenly became someone people around the world felt free to criticise.
Speaking about the impact, she said,
“Since that incident, my life has taken a turn I could never have imagined. What should have been just an ordinary flight turned into an extremely embarrassing situation, exposing me unfairly and causing consequences that affected both my personal and professional life.”
She said she continued to hear the crying throughout the flight, but what shocked her most was realising she was being secretly filmed.
As she put it,
“What surprised me was the fact that a person who had nothing to do with the situation started filming me without permission, insulting me and trying to publicly embarrass me simply because I didn’t want to change seats.”
Castro has now taken legal action because the video has gone viral again and is still affecting her life. She has filed a lawsuit against both the airline and the person who recorded her, claiming that she faced emotional stress, damage to her reputation, and violation of her privacy.
She has not revealed how much compensation she is asking for. Citing court restrictions, she said she cannot share the details, but added that her purpose was not just financial.
In her words,
“This lawsuit is not just about reparations, but also about setting a limit on this type of behaviour,” and “We all have rights, and they must be respected, regardless of other people’s opinions.”
Castro also said that she felt ignored by the airline staff during the incident. She said,
“What I went through wasn’t easy. The flight attendants could have asked me if I needed anything, or if I was bothered by the passenger, but they didn’t. They stayed out of it.”
According to her, the online attacks that followed were so harsh that she stopped leaving her house and even had to change her profession. Describing the experience, she said,
“My reaction was complete shock. I never imagined that something so simple could take on such proportions. Professionally, my life has changed a lot, so much so that today I am no longer in the field I worked in before. I was a banker. In my personal life, at the height of the repercussions, I practically didn’t leave the house.”
She clarified that she is not suing the child’s mother, saying,
“There is no action against the child’s mother, only against those who violated my privacy.”
The reappearance of the clip has once again sparked a broader debate about travel etiquette, personal boundaries and how much people owe each other in tight public spaces like airplanes. For Castro, however, the issue is very clear.
She said,
“I believe that we should respect people’s choices and decisions, especially when they are within their rights,” and added, “It’s essential to normalise ‘no’ and understand that no one should be forced to justify something they simply don’t want to do.”
She also hopes her case sends a message about how casually people take out their phones to record strangers today. As she explained,
“No one deserves to go through what I went through, being filmed, insulted, and attacked just for exercising a basic right.”
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