WTF, OP? I had to find an archive to get the rest of the text, and there was a lot more to the story. As usual, United has fully lived down to its abysmally low standards.

For anyone else who has zero intentions of paying for a NBC subscription for one article, here's an archive link. There are known problems with the site, but I could not find another archive that had the content. Use at your own discretion:

https://archive.ph/xUswb

Anyone who got past the paywall know what protocol was violated? From the information available, I'm sincerely unsure of what they could have done. Were they supposed to go up the aisle asking someone else to sit next to the masturbator? Were they supposed to swap one of them to one of the flight attendant seats? Can they even detain the guy after landing? I legitimately don't know what they're supposed to do in this situation, other than provide information for the victim to press charges

I don’t think this reads like an onion.