Aviation securityCNN commentator complains of inappropriate TSA pat down

Published 17 October 2012

A CNN commentator says she was molested by TSA agents when a routine security pat-down ended with federal agents repeatedly touching her private parts and refusing her a public screening

Radio host and CNN contributor Dana Loesch says she was molested by TSA agents when a routine security pat-down ended with federal agents repeatedly touching her vagina and refusing her a public screening.

RT reports that Losech, 34, said the incident occurred on Sunday at the Phoenix International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona. As she prepared to board a flight, she passed through a primary screening without incident, but says she was told she tested positive for explosive residue and required a secondary private pat-down.

TSA said I was covered in explosives, took me to a private room and touched my vagina. So how was your day?” the commentator wrote on her Twitter page.

Loesch’s husband caught some of his wife’s encounter with TSA agents on camera and uploaded the clip on to YouTube, which quickly got thousands of views. On the video page, Loesch goes into more detail about the incident.

“It began after I was ‘randomly selected’ for an additional screening which consisted of swabbing my hands with paper strips. The strips were then taken to a machine for analysis and an alarm sounded. TSA agents determined that I had a suspicious, possibly explosive, residue on my hands and required another, ‘enhanced screening,’” she wrote

“They performed the regular pat-down and then the agent informed me that she would be using the front of her hands to “sweep” my groin. She pressed and swept across my crotch three times horizontally and three times vertically. In any other circumstance this would be sexual assault.

“After concluding that I wasn’t a terrorist hiding weapons in my vagina, the TSA agents allowed me to go,” she writes.

RT notes that Losech said she insisted that she twice requested a public search, but was denied both times. On her twitter account she recited the agency’s official rules, “as per their Web site,” but was still refused.  Losech says she does not have an issue with the TSA agents that subjected her to what she equates to sexual molestation.

“The agents themselves were friendly and smiled, yet I was still denied a public screening and no witness of my own present for the screening itself (a second agent was in the room at the time). I had no reason to be angry with the agents themselves, yet I was angry, and still am, at the regulations which require them to routinely violate men, women, and children in the name of a false sense of security,” she wrote.

Even though Losech said there were no hard feelings, she plans on filing an official complaint with the TSA and asks others who are subjected to similar searches to do the same.

In January, video footage was leaked of U.S. troops urinating on the bodies of dead Afghan fighters. Losech, a conservative commentator, saluted the soldiers on her show, saying,  “I’d drop trou and do it too,” and suggesting the guilty persons were worth of receiving “a million ‘cool points.’”