A few days ago, a blogger named Nic on the site My Bottle’s Up (I don’t know what that means, but judging from the header graphic, it has something to do with drinking and parenting, which perhaps explains what follows) posted a long and dramatic story about how TSA Agents Took Her Son.

Excerpts:

As I sit and write this post, 24 hours after this event took place, my hands still shake… with rage and with terror…

My son was taken from me.

Taken.

…

I handed him my son and he walked away with my child.

My eyes welled up with tears, I stood up from my chair and I asked the female TSA agent, “Where is he going? Where is he taking my child? Why is he leaving?”

And so on. She describes a harrowing ordeal that “felt like hours… days even,” during which her son was “out of eye sight,” and that she called her husband, her mother, and nearly blacked out from panic.

Interestingly, it turns out those TSA checkpoints are pretty heavily monitored, and it also turns out that the TSA has a blog, and is feeling a little more push-back-y and transparent these days.

The same day as Nic’s post, a TSA blogger posted a video of the woman’s time in the screening area.

After watching the video footage, you’ll see the video clearly shows that this individual was never separated from her baby by TSA. You’ll also see that a lot of the other claims are also unfounded.

In response to her non-apology a few days later, in which she asked herself some tough questions about the situation (“am i a dramatic writer? most definitely. did my son and i suffer a traumatic experience? absolutely. was my post written when i was extremely emotional? yes.“) but still didn’t really cop to making the whole thing up, the TSA posted the complete video sequence from 9 different camera angles. TSA FTW.

What a weird story.

Anthony Hecht is The Stranger's Chief Technology Officer. He owns no monkeys.

30 replies on “Government Denies Stealing Baby, Provides Evidence”

  1. Do I love the TSA? No. Shoes on, shoes off, bag up, bag on its side. Make up your mind.

    However, they have a hard job. They have to deal with people who are trying to get somewhere else. Or they are mad. Or hungry. Or tired.

    So when someone like this woman gets overdramatic, I feel for them. She was running late, forgot about the pacifier clip and was pissed they wouldn’t do things her way. She knew it the clip but they didn’t. So they had to do their jobs. Of course, they wouldn’t take the kid so why lie?

    I love the way, on her blog, she says she shut it down for a couple of days because “of course it’s about my life and my family”. Honey, if you put out all the details of your life, don’t get upset if people call you out. Why does she have this blog with the minutiae of her life?

    She’s pathetic.

  2. The tip-off for me was her mentioning:

    I had an emergency Xanax in my jeans pocket. I always carry an emergency Xanax in my pocket. The result of severe anxiety.

    Yeah. On the other hand, as the reality of being constantly monitored by increasingly militarized authorities becomes more and more obvious, it’s going to become harder and harder for those fractured not to crack.

  5. I happen to know from the PR shill side that mommy bloggers are greedy, self-involved, hysterical whacknuts, as a rule. What a dumbass, this one.

  8. With all the anti-government hysteria on the blogs these days, it is kind of refreshing to have a government blog strike back.

  9. OK, the story she gave was bullshit. She was still terrorized by TSA goons for FIFTEEN MINUTES over a little metal clip.

    Fuck the TSA. FUCK THEM HARD.

  11. I thought the TSA was there to protect us from terrorists. Instead they pay people to blog against motherhood? It’s wrong. Just wrong.

  15. She set off the metal detector, so she COULD be handling contraband. AND, its been shown that smugglers and terrorists are perfectly willing to use children and other seemingly innocent folks to get their stuff onto planes. GOOD on them to make sure she wasn’t going to blow shit up or give drugs to babies!

    Also, shouldn’t we be applauding the fact that she’s a white woman? That shows that they don’t only go for blacks and arabs.

    Oh, and FUCK mothers. Stupid bitches act like they’re so cool when all they managed to do was spread their legs and not use protection.

  16. Man, I just wish they had two lines at the airport: Upper middle class and upper class professionals who dress properly for air travel and know how to travel and another line for every-fucking-one-else.

  17. Most nice pretty white women skate through life without ever having to eat shit from police and security agents. And eating shit from the man, even if it’s just a trivial secondary airport screening process, makes a person mad. You feel vulnerable, violated, accused, and powerless. I empathize with her frustration, especially since she’s probably not experienced anything like a secondary screening process before.

    Her lying is ridiculous. But the outrage? That’s the what drives civil rights.

  18. Dear Batshit Insane Woman Who Should Not Have Bred:

    Thanks for wasting my tax dollars. Please stop flying, give up your child, and have yourself fixed. Then, give up your computer and go rock back and forth on the floor, over and over again, forever.

    Thanks,
    Humanity

  19. I love how all the commenters on the TSA site are saying, ok, “so the 9 differet video angles show her story _appears_ to be bullshit, but I still trust one xanax-addled neurotic whiney mommy-blogger over that sinister US GOVERNMENT with all their black helecopters, socialism and athiestic gay influence and what have you.”

    All my glee over this event doesn’t change the fact that 90% what the TSA does is just window-dressing annoyance to make us all feel “safe”. But I figure, we get the security we deserve. If we weren’t being inconvenienced by the TSA, the majority of the Amwrican people wouldn’t feel that the TSA was “doing something” about air travel security, and they wouldn’t fly, and then there would be a lot fewer flights, and I’d have fewer flight options to get where I want to go. That would be a lot _more_ inconvenient for me. On those rare occasions when I screw up and the TSA confiscates my shampoo bottle for being 0.5 fl oz. too large, I tell myself it’s the price I pay for the American people to fell safe enough to travel enough that United can offer two nonstops a day Denver-Vancouver instead of just one. And the weird thing is, the TSA isn’t actually lying. Air travel is really safe, even if you just take the statistics from, say, the second half of 2001.

  20. “ost nice pretty white women skate through life without ever having to eat shit from police”

    So you mean with the TSA, we’re all niggaz?

  21. To clarify my last sentence @19, the TSA _is_ lying to the extend it pretends that confiscating your shampoo is what _makes_ air travel so safe. But if all they say is “We’ve confiscated your shampoo. Air travel is safe.” with no conjunction between their sentences, then they are correct.

    By the way, excellent comment, seandr @17, both paragraphs.

  22. WHOA! in one of the videos, you can see that they must have asked her to lift her pant leg, BECAUSE SHE HAD SOMETHING CONCEALED under her pants, strapped to her calf.

    so no wonder they took their time. what an entitled freak.

  23. Just another of the millions of nut-jobs with a computer, where everything is about “me me me and my feelings” and to hell with everyone else…

  24. I read somewhere else about this story (don’t remember where . . . nytimes maybe?) that she tweeted she would only reveal juicier details when somebody would pay her.

  30. She has munchausen:
    Münchausen syndrome is a term for psychiatric disorders known as Factitious disorders wherein those affected feign disease, illness, or psychological trauma in order to draw attention or sympathy to themselves.

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