Here is an article that states she walked off the plane voluntarily, expecting to get her ticket refunded. She was wrong.
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Here a Portland Trib article regarding this story:
Lorrie Heasley says she just wanted to give her Democratic parents — waiting at Portland International Airport to meet her flight from Los Angeles — a laugh.
They never got the laugh. Because Heasley didn’t make it to the Portland airport. The Woodland, Wash., woman was kicked off her Southwest Airlines flight at a stop in Reno, Nev., on Tuesday because of the T-shirt she was wearing.
Two days later, Heasley calls it an egregious violation of her free-speech rights.
The airline says it’s simply a matter of following Southwest rules and dealing with someone whose profane T-shirt was offending other passengers.
The T-shirt Heasley was wearing was both political and profane.
It’s imprinted with photographs of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with words under it alluding to a recent movie, “Meet the Fockers.” The shirt changes one letter in the movie title.
Heasley, 32, bought the T-shirt at a shop at Venice Beach, Calif. — “there were four stores down there that had them,” she says. She meant to buy the shirt for her mother, she says, but when she couldn’t find her mother’s size, she decided to buy one for herself and wear it when her parents greeted her at the airport. “Because I knew it would make them laugh,” she says.
Apparently, some of the passengers on the morning flight from Los Angeles did not share her parents’ sense of humor.
Flight attendants, saying passengers had complained, first asked Heasley when the plane stopped to let off and pick up passengers in Reno to change into other clothes, Heasley says. She told them she didn’t have any other clothes on board, but agreed to partially cover the T-shirt with her husband’s sweater. When the sweater fell down into her lap as she was napping, flight attendants asked her to change out of the T-shirt, turn it inside out or leave the plane, Heasley says.
When attendants told her that Southwest would refund her money for the flight, Heasley says, she and her husband, Ron, decided to leave the plane. But she says Southwest officials have since rejected her request for a refund. Forcing her off the plane, she says, was both ridiculous and a violation of her right to free speech.
“We have soldiers dying in Iraq to free Iraq, yet I get kicked off an airplane because of a T-shirt I was wearing,” says Heasley, who says she has voted for both Republicans and Democrats and agrees with some of the things President Bush has done. “That’s not freedom to me.”
But a spokeswoman for Southwest Airlines suggests that free speech ends when the F-word begins.
“We support free speech,” says Southwest’s Beth Harbin. “But when it comes down to things that are patently offensive or threatening or profanity or just lewd … then we do have to get involved in that.”
Harbin says Southwest’s “contract of carriage” with passengers, similar to rules all airlines have, specifies that passengers can be barred from a plane if they’re wearing clothing that is “lewd, obscene or patently offensive.”
“A political statement in and of itself is not unusual,” Harbin says. “We see that all the time. The basis for our concerns was the actual word used.”
After leaving the airplane in Reno, the Heasleys rented a car and took two days to drive the 12 hours back to the Portland area. Heasley wore the T-shirt all the way.
“There was no way I was going to take that T-shirt off.”