Airplane stowaway trial takes off in Brooklyn 

BROOKLYN (CN) — It should be a short journey. Federal prosecutors on Tuesday opened their case against Svetlana Dali, a 57-year-old woman who snuck onto a full Delta Air Lines flight from New York City to Paris last year without a boarding pass or passport — only to be discovered by a flight attendant shortly before landing — at a trial expected to wrap up by Wednesday afternoon.

“She almost got away with it,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Brooke Theodora said during openings. “Most of the passengers were sleeping; there wasn’t a line for the bathroom.”

Videos played in court show Dali evading multiple security checkpoints at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Nov. 26, 2024 — two days before Thanksgiving. After trying once to get through an initial ticket check, she entered a line for flight crews and employees. Staff then directed her to the economy boarding line, where a security manager who reviewed footage said she appeared to go around the TSA check podium.

She slipped between two groups of passengers at the gate, skipping a set of face scanners, to board the plane, then hid in the bathroom pretending to be ill for most of the transcontinental journey, prosecutors say.

Flight attendant Cleomie Meme, the government’s first witness, described discovering Dali in the bathroom about an hour into the flight, when she noticed the door had been locked for a long time.

“She motioned with her hand in front of her mouth, like she was vomiting,” Meme testified.

Meme said she offered Dali water and, when she went on break, told her colleagues that a passenger was ill in the bathroom. Dali remained in the bathroom for the rest of the flight — until just before landing, when the captain ordered everyone to their seats, crew included, for a turbulent landing.

“She was very reluctant to come out,” Meme said. When she did, wearing a large backpack with a smaller one strapped in front, “she quickly went inside the other lavatory.”

With the crew knocking on the door repeatedly and landing imminent, Dali finally emerged. She gave Meme two fake names, “Amy Hudson” and “Emily Hudson,” Meme said, and presented an Amtrak train ticket listing a man’s name instead of a boarding pass.

Meme had Dali sit in a seat reserved for crew, 56G, and the plane landed a minute or two later. The flight attendant said Dali’s demeanor then changed.

“She went from seeming sick and pale … All of a sudden, I looked at her, and she seemed very defiant,” Meme testified.

“Defiant” describes Dali’s demeanor in court, too. The permanent U.S. resident from Russia tried to interject several times during Tuesday’s trial and asked through her attorney to question Meme herself.

“That’s not how it works,” U.S. Judge Ann Donnelly said, warning Dali that she didn’t want to hear any more about it.

If convicted on a count of knowingly and intentionally stowing away on an airplane, Dali faces up to five years in prison. Though she was presented with a plea deal that may have resulted in a sentence of time served, she opted not to take it.

Michael Schneider of the Federal Defenders of New York represents Dali. His opening statement focused on airport staff’s failure to detect Dali in her brazen journey through the airport.

“She didn’t wear a disguise, she didn’t dress like a flight attendant, she didn’t wear a mask, she didn’t duck down,” Schneider said.

When cross-examining Meme, Schneider pointed out that passengers were supposed to be seated long before Dali was discovered.

“That rule, that all passengers have to be sitting during landing — it also applies to takeoff, right?” he asked.

Meme replied that the bathroom wasn’t locked during takeoff, so the light wasn’t activated to show it was in use. “There was no indication that anybody was in there.”

French law enforcement arrested her as soon as the plane landed in Paris, and after she was returned to the U.S. a week later, she “admitted to flying on Flight 264 without a ticket, evading airport security measures, and knowing her conduct was illegal, among other things.”

In that voluntary, two-hour post-arrest interview at JFK airport, Dali told FBI agents that, “though France is the ‘worst country,’ she ‘had to leave this country (the United States)’ because police refused to protect her from people who were poisoning her.”

Schneider asked jurors to pay attention to the context of that video when they’re shown clips on Wednesday during the last leg of the swift trial.

“When was the last time she slept? Had she been in jail for the prior week, or had she been free?”

Dali was released on a recognizance bond following her December arraignment and ordered to stay with a friend from church in Philadelphia — but she ended up back in custody less than two weeks later, after she cut off her ankle bracelet and tried to board a bus from Buffalo to Canada.

According to prosecutors, Dali evaded airport security twice before the November flight to Charles de Gaulle Airport: Two days earlier, she entered a secure departures area at Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Connecticut, and in February 2024, she was discovered hiding in a bathroom in a secure zone for international travelers at Miami International Airport, after which she was detained, luggage-searched, fingerprinted and released.

Donnelly, the presiding judge, is a Barack Obama appointee.

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