Content warning: This article contains sexually explicit language.
A former employee of SkyWest Airlines at DFW International Airport testified in federal court Tuesday that going to work each day “was like a form of torture” because of constant crude and demeaning sexual harassment by her co-workers.
Sarah Budd took the stand on the first day of a jury trial in a lawsuit by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against SkyWest, a Utah-based regional carrier that principally provides flights between smaller airports and large hubs for American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Alaska Airlines.
Budd, the first witness called by the EEOC, is to resume her testimony Wednesday morning.
The trial, before Senior U.S. District Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater in Dallas, is expected to last six or seven days.
Budd testified that from the day she showed up for work at DFW in August of 2019 — after about a dozen years with SkyWest in Utah — she was subjected to harassment that made her feel not only uncomfortable but unsafe. She said she was the only young woman in SkyWest’s parts and maintenance department at DFW, working with about 20 male mechanics.
On her first day on the job, she said, one colleague “asked me if I liked whips and chains and leathers,” adding that if she did, she “would get along well here.” Another co-worker who heard the comment laughed, she said. “They thought it was funny.”
In occasionally X-rated language seldom heard in Judge Fitzwater’s courtroom, she described what she called an endless onslaught of jokes about rape, oral sex and anal sex, comments about her breasts, references to women as “bitches” and more.
“They didn’t seem to care if I was uncomfortable,” she told the jury. “In fact, it only spurred them on more. … It’s like they enjoyed my discomfort.”
Liz Drumm of Fisher Phillips in Dallas, lead attorney for SkyWest in the case, said in her opening statement to the jury that Budd’s complaints to SkyWest about the “disgusting things that had been said to her” were vague at first, then uncorroborated, and that the airline acted responsibly to investigate the matter and enforce its policies against sexual harassment.
Budd never provided any details “as to what had been said to her or around her” until December 2019, four months after the alleged harassment began, Drumm said.
“This case does not add up,” Drumm said.
In addition to Drumm, SkyWest is represented by Chad A. Shultz of Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani in Atlanta.
The EEOC is represented by, among others, Alexa Rae Lang of the agency’s Dallas office. Budd, as an intervenor plaintiff, is represented by Edith Thomas of Zipin, Amster, & Greenberg of Silver Spring, Maryland.
Budd took an unpaid medical leave of absence from SkyWest in October 2019 and resigned in May 2020, according to court documents.
Budd, often sobbing on the stand, testified that when she initially complained on Sept. 4, 2019, to her supervisor — who lived in Oklahoma City and whom she’d never previously met — he seemed more annoyed at her complaint than interested in resolving it, telling her that if he did anything, it would only make matters worse for her because there would be “a target on my back. … He didn’t do anything.”
The EEOC, after receiving a complaint from Budd, sued SkyWest in August 2022. The suit seeks unspecified compensatory and exemplary damages.
Budd, a victim of sexual assault in her teens, testified that the workplace environment at SkyWest at DFW reawakened long-ago traumatic emotions and led her to contemplate suicide by consuming an overdose of a prescription pain medication.
Earning only $13 an hour, she testified, the free-flight benefits she enjoyed as a SkyWest employee were necessary for her and her children to continue visiting relatives back in Utah.
At the same time, she said, going to work every day made her physically and emotionally ill.
“The only option that seemed to make sense to me was to remove me from the equation,” she said.