Picture this: You’re a Biglaw partner with an important international corporate and immigration practice, and you’re presumably traveling to London, England, from Charlotte, North Carolina, on a business trip. Your flight is supposed to take off at 10:30 p.m., but it gets delayed, doesn’t wind up in the air until around 11:15 p.m. You’re probably pissed off.
Once you take your seat in first class, you pop a Zaleplon sleeping pill — one you’ve been prescribed for your insomnia — to help you get some beauty rest during the flight. Maybe the sleeping pill isn’t working fast enough for your liking, or maybe you need a little something extra because you got so stressed from the delay, but you then decide to order “at least three glasses of wine” from a flight attendant. You don’t want your dinner, and you tell a flight attendant not to serve you.
Things get a little fuzzy for you after that, and the next thing you know, you’re “being physically restrained by an unknown male,” and your flight is being diverted to Philadelphia. You land at the airport at about 4:30 a.m.
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What the hell happened?
According to law enforcement reports, Sarah E. Buffett, 41, a graduate of Cornell Law and a partner at Nelson Mullins, one of the largest firms in the country, caused a scene so huge while aboard her flight that the pilot was forced to turn around when the plane was over Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. Here’s more information from PhillyVoice:
Buffett, seated in first class, allegedly became physically aggressive and was damaging her seat, according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday. She allegedly tried to smash the aircraft window with an entertainment system remote before getting out of her seat and acting in a menacing manner in front of the cockpit door.
Yikes! This partner sounds like she’d be an aggressive litigant.
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Buffett was allegedly so unruly that flight attendants weren’t able to restrain her, and had to ask passengers for assistance to put her into plastic restraints. The criminal complaint claims that Buffett removed those restraints twice before a passenger was forced to hold her down while someone wrapped her legs with tape.
When the diverted flight landed in Philadelphia, it reportedly took several police officers to remove her from the cabin. Buffet was charged with intimidating a flight crew member and interfering with a flight crew member’s duties in violation of 49 U.S. Code § 46504, a crime punishable by a fine and/or possible imprisonment of up to 20 years.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has the details on what happened at Buffett’s arraignment:
At an arraignment Wednesday afternoon, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacob P. Hart released Buffett on her own recognizance, conditional on surrendering her passport and not traveling on a commercial airline until the disposition of the criminal charges.
When the defendant told the judge she did not remember what happened, he asked a federal public defender in the courtroom to step in and advise her.
We hope that Sarah Buffett’s mid-Atlantic meltdown will serve as a lesson to all Biglaw attorneys: don’t pop pills and drink excessively while you fly — you’ll likely regret it.
UPDATE (1:30 p.m.): According to a statement issued by Nelson Mullins, Sarah Buffett has been suspended from her duties at the firms thanks to her alleged behavior:
Nelson Mullins is sympathetic to the inconvenience suffered by the passengers and crew of US Airways Flight 732. While we do not know all the details yet, the firm does have an expectation of personal responsibility on the part of all of our partners. Nelson Mullins has and continues to expect the highest standards of professional behavior among all its employees. Sarah Buffett has been suspended pending an investigation.
UPDATE (2:00 p.m.): As we predicted would happen, Sarah Buffett has been removed from the Nelson Mullins website. If you’d like to see her bio, flip to the third page of this post, or click here, where we’ve saved it on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
(Flip through the following pages to see the criminal complaint against Sarah E. Buffett, and her Nelson Mullins bio — in case it gets scrubbed from the web by the firm.)