A woman says she was wrongfully put on American Airlines' no-fly list. She cold-emailed the CEO to resolve it.

• Erin Wright says she was shocked to discover she had been barred from flying American Airlines.
• The airline said she drunkenly "engaged in sexual activity" with a man on a previous flight.
• One problem with that claim: She's a lesbian. Here's how Wright fought the ban and won.

Erin Wright was growing anxious.

As she tried to check in for her American Airlines flight to her sister's bachelorette party, she kept getting an error message, both on her phone and at a kiosk at the airport. She didn't have any problems when she booked the ticket, so she assumed it was a system error and went to the airline's desk to ask for help.

"I've flown American a ton," Wright, a 24-year-old whitewater rafting guide based in New Mexico, told Business Insider.

The agents made a phone call to fix the check-in issue, but when they hung up, they told Wright they couldn't check her in because American Airlines had barred her from flying on its airline.

"I was really confused and then obviously started to tear up a little bit," Wright said.

She asked the desk agents to tell her why she had been barred from flying on the airline, but they said they could not. The desk agents also said the staffer on the phone told them it was "an issue of internal security" but that Wright should have been aware of why she was banned.

"I was like, 'Well, I don't, so what do I do?'" Wright said. The agents told her to email the customer relations department. She did that after booking a last-minute flight on a different airline to make it to her sister's bachelorette party on time. She said it cost nearly double the $471.95 flight she booked on American Airlines.

Business Insider has viewed all of Wright's emails with the airline. American Airlines did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Ban or spam?

During the ordeal at the airport, Wright recalled an email she had received in April that she had dismissed as spam at the time.

"I got this email from American, but it was from some really random email. It had numbers and letters — a very long, strange email and didn't have any contact information or anything in the email either — saying that I was banned," Wright said. "I hadn't done anything. I was like, 'This is just a phishing email.'"

Business Insider has seen the email, which contained the subject line "Permanent Loss of Flight Privileges," alerting Wright that she had "violated the passenger code of conduct" during a previous American Airlines flight. The email address included a string of numbers and letters, and the email itself did not list a specific allegation.

In the weeks after she was turned away at the airport check-in counter, Wright sent multiple emails to American Airlines, including one threatening legal action.

When she didn't get responses, she cold-emailed top executives at the company, including CEO Robert Isom, on a Friday afternoon in July.

The next day, she received a refund of $471.95 to cover the original flight cost.

By Monday morning, she received an email from a customer relations employee, who told her that she and a male passenger were "placed on the permanent Internal Refuse List after multiple eye-witness reports of the passengers being intoxicated and engaging in sexual activity" during a flight in February.

Wright confirmed she was on a flight in February, but there's one glaring problem with the airline's allegation: Wright is a lesbian.

"I was like, 'Well, I definitely didn't do that, so can we find a way to get this cleared up?'" Wright said. "It's really hard to prove that it wasn't me if they think it was, so I just had to try to be as diligent as I could."

Wright's appeal to the airline

Emails Wright shared with Business Insider show she was placed on American Airlines' "internal refuse list," which the airline can add passengers to at will. It is distinct from the Transportation Security Administration's "No Fly List," which is a list of known or suspected terrorists maintained by the US government.

Like all airlines, American Airlines has a "Conditions of Carriage" contract that passengers agree to abide by when they purchase a ticket. Among the requirements are that passengers "behave appropriately and respectfully with other passengers" and do not "appear intoxicated or under the influence of drugs."

"We may not let you fly (temporarily or permanently) for any reason," the airline warns, especially if customers refuse to obey the law or the flight crew.

During and following the COVID-19 pandemic, incidents of violence toward crewmembers and "unruly passengers" skyrocketed far above pre-pandemic levels. Airlines also banned thousands of passengers for not wearing masks, though many of those passengers regained their flight privileges with airlines once the mask mandate was lifted.

Because Wright was so sure she didn't do what she was accused of, she said she was even more committed to getting herself off of the airline's "refuse" list. She pulled out all the stops.

"In my email to them, I was literally like, 'I am a 24-year-old lesbian," Wright said. "I would never have sexual relations with anybody on a plane, but definitely not a man.'"

Business Insider has seen the emailed appeal to American Airlines in which Wright said she has "never been intoxicated on a flight" and is not acquainted with the man the airline accused her of "engaging in sexual activity" with. She said the situation "is definitely a mix-up with another passenger."

"I could have many people write letters on my behalf confirming that I would never engage in such activities. American Airlines has either mixed me up with another Erin Wright or confused me for another passenger," she wrote.

In the end, it worked.

"I finally got a call from corporate security saying, 'We haven't figured out what happened, but we feel like you've been diligent enough in your communication with us and genuine enough that we're going to take you off the no-fly list until we do figure out what happened. And if it was you, we'll put you back on it, but if not, you're not going to hear from us anymore,'" Wright recalled.

Her story went viral when she shared it on TikTok, and many viewers tagged American Airlines, which only compensated her for the June flight.

"They never offered anything," Wright said. "In one of my emails, I said, 'I expect to be compensated for the extra flight I had to book and for the inconvenience that this was."

The company did not reimburse her further for her trouble.