Ex-NFL player Brendan Langley spoke out about his viral fight with an airport worker in Newark, NJ on May 19.
An attorney for the ex Denver Broncos cornerback told TMZ that the United Airlines worker provoked him into a fight.
The worker objected to Langley using a wheelchair to transport his designer luggage rather than use a $5 luggage cart.
“Brendan Langley was minding his business walking through the airport with his bags when he was accosted by a United Airlines employee who claimed to ‘run the airport,'” his attorney Alan Jackson said in a statement.
“When Brendan tried to ignore him, the assailant followed and harassed Brendan, calling him a ‘d— and a ‘p—y’ and challenging him to fight,” Jackson said.
Jackson said Langley yelled for help, but no one stepped forward.
“Footage from the airport security cameras establishes without question that Brendan was in reasonable fear of physical harm, and reasonably and lawfully defended himself,” Jackson said in the statement.
Cell phone footage shows the employee slap Langley in the face. Langley, 27, retaliated by throwing several punches that dropped the hapless worker.
When the employee slapped Langley again, the shocked athlete asked a bystander, “Did you see that sh*t?” Before throwing a flurry of punches that sent the employee sprawling behind a counter.
Langley was arrested, charged with simple assault and released. He was suspended indefinitely by the Calgary Stampeders pro team of the Canadian football League, according to CTV News.
“After learning details of the incident including the filing of a criminal charge, we are indefinitely suspending Brendan Langley,” Stampeders President and GM John Hufnagel told CTV News in a statement.
Head coach Dave Dickenson said Langley should have known better.
“[M]y only real comment is that we live in a world that everybody’s got cameras and we’re trying to represent our city, we take it very seriously,” he said, according to CTV News.
The employee wasn’t charged, but United Airlines fired him and issued a statement, saying the airline “does not tolerate violence of any kind at our airports or on board our planes and we are working with local authorities to further investigate this matter.”
An airline employee tried to put hands on a customer…And the brotha took flight with them hands
????#Ogun#Arutisuse pic.twitter.com/i1HQvPRRIG
— Tariq Nasheed ?? (@tariqnasheed) May 23, 2022
