‘What’s wrong with that man?’ Passengers on flights to CLT charged with masturbation
After exposing himself to two female passengers and masturbating for at least 10 minutes during his flight into Charlotte, Derek Rawlings expressed shock when an American Airlines flight attendant moved the women to different seats, court documents show.
“They don’t want to sit with me?” he yelled as he stood up and adjusted his pants.
This week, the Memphis man was charged in connection with his alleged sexual misconduct on a May flight from Newark, N.J. An arrest warrant was issued Tuesday, according to court filings in his case.
Meanwhile, a second American passenger — Evan Thomas Carter — was arrested Tuesday after being charged with similar auto-erotic behavior last August on a cross-country flight from Seattle to Charlotte Douglas International.
Both incidents appear to be part of a growing wave of sexual misconduct aboard commercial flights, including assaults.
In June, a New York man was convicted of repeatedly groping a female passenger on a Spirit flight from Chicago to Myrtle Beach. He later received the maximum punishment of two years in prison.
Mid-air masturbation appears common — and in some cases extreme. In 2018, a 20-year-old Malaysian man stripped naked in his airline seat while he watched porn on his laptop, then attacked a flight attendant, according to multiple published reports.
Why? The theories range from power and control to a misguided search for positive feedback.
“People who are like this often have a distorted kind of thinking when other people are seeing them,” psychotherapist Tashna Felix told Men’s Health magazine in 2018. “They think, ‘Oh, they’ll really like this,’ and then they’re shocked when the reaction is negative.”
In the Charlotte-related incidents, Rawlings and Carter could not be reached for comment Wednesday. Both are charged with the same crime — Application of Certain Criminal Law to Acts on Aircraft.
FBI affidavits filed in both cases remove the mask of legalese and lay out an eerily similar set of details.
On May 3, Rawlings, 29, sat by the window in Row 16 on American flight 1372 from Newark. Women occupied the two seats beside him.
Some 20 minutes into the trip, Rawlings pulled a black jacket over his lap and eventually began making sounds. The woman in the middle seat, identified in court documents by the initials LH, told the FBI that she saw the man’s penis. She then tried to get the attention of SH, the passenger beside her.
“Are you OK?” SH asked, in a note she typed out on her phone.
LH tried to write, “This guy is masturbating.” But the message on her phone came out garbled.
SH got enough of the point to go looking for a flight attendant, who moved the women elsewhere. The attendant asked a Delta pilot who was on the flight to take the aisle seat on Rawlings’ row. He later told the FBI that Rawlings appeared to resume masturbating.
Carter, 42, of Seattle, was a passenger on the Aug. 27 flight from Seattle-Tacoma to Charlotte. A Charlotte-Mecklenburg police report cited by the FBI said two female passengers saw Carter fondle himself under his tray table during the flight, with one of the witnesses videotaping some of the behavior with her phone.
Eventually one of the women pushed the flight attendant call button, then showed the attendant a message she’d typed out on her phone on what had been going on beside her.
When the attendant left, according to the affidavit, Carter zipped his pants and put the tray table back in the upright position.
The two women were moved to other seats. But Carter’s behavior resumed, according to the affidavit.
Another female passenger, traveling with her 14-year-old daughter and a granddaughter who was 10, sat near Carter and also noticed his behavior. She told the FBI she sat on the edge of her seat to block the children’s view of what was happening across the aisle.
The daughter had to walk past Carter on a trip to the bathroom. After returning to her seat, according to the affidavit, the teen asked her grandmother a question:
“What is wrong with that man?”
This story was originally published July 28, 2021 at 5:01 PM.
