A Cherry Hill Bride is Suing American Airlines for Ruining Her Wedding Dress

Photo by Alexis Brooke Photography

Planning a destination wedding can be an immense source of anxiety. Picking out vendors from afar, not being able to do walk-throughs before your day, dealing with the different laws and practices of a foreign country … the last thing a bride needs to worry about is getting her wedding dress safely to her destination. Especially because, theoretically, that’s the one thing she CAN control (brides are typically advised to bring the dress on board with them as one of their carry-on items).

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for former Cherry Hill resident Yewande Oteh. According to NJ.com, Oteh boarded a fight from Philadelphia to Jamaica for her August 14, 2015 wedding with her dress in tow after the attendant at the ticket gate instructed her not to check it. She had been instructed at the gate to hang the dress in a closet on the flight, but, once on board, Oteh claims flight attendant Melanie Masters quickly grew hostile while instructing Oteh, who was also carrying her 9-month-old son, to instead place the dress in an overhead bin. Oteh claims she later saw Masters “open the bin with her right hand, while something was occupying her left hand.” 

When the flight landed, Oteh claims the dress was soaked through with red wine and irreversibly ruined. In the lawsuit filed by Oteh’s mother and attorney Yvette Sterling, Oteh also claims that the stress over the lost gown caused her to become sick and miss wedding activities.

You can read more about this #weddingnightmare over at NJ.com and the Courier-Post. Make it through a wedding nightmare of your own and live to tell the tale? We want to hear about it! Sound off in the comments.

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