Tiffany Gomas's 'not real' plane rant explanation met with speculation

The woman who shot to notoriety after launching into a bizarre rant on a plane has addressed what “actually” happened in the lead-up to that fateful moment – but not everyone’s convinced.

Tiffany Gomas, 38, who was filmed uttering the now immortal words “that motherf**ker is not real”, has given her first interview since what was to become one of the most viral incidents of the year.

Speaking to the ‘Pardon My Take’ podcast four months on from her meltdown on an American Airlines jet, the marketing executive spoke about the aftermath of her outburst, as well as what prompted the whole thing.

However, whilst the hosts of the show were sympathetic to her plight, streams of social media users weren’t persuaded by her defence.

During their chat, the podcast’s host Dan Katz asked Gomas outright “what [she] saw” to prompt such an extreme reaction.

She replied: “Yeah, the reason why I probably haven't come out yet… it's so cringe…

“I did not see anything.”

Elaborating, she said: “I got into a bit of an altercation. It spiralled out of control. It was not my best moment, I mean, it was actually a horrible moment – absolutely mortifying.”

Trying to console her, Katz pointed out that “everyone has bad moments on planes.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “But mine – 450 million plus people have seen it.”

Clarifying, the interviewer then asked: “So what you're saying is, that clip that we all saw – ‘That motherf***ker is not real' – is not you thinking that if someone is an alien, it was just the tail end of an argument?”

“It was an expression of speech,” she confirmed.

“So it was just like you had an argument with some guy on the plane and then as you're leaving, you're like, that motherf**ker's not real?” Katz asked.

“Yeah,” she replied.

However, one Twitter/X user was quick to suggest that there was clearly more to the fallout than Gomas was letting on.

Entrepreneur Ariadna Jacob pointed to bodycam footage that had been captured at the airport immediately after the 38-year-old disembarked the flight.

It showed Gomas, who was still visibly distressed, telling airport staff: “I’m being dead serious, do not let that flight leave,” and “that flight’s not going to make it to Orlando”.

Walking through the terminal, she then suggests that the flight is going to “f**king blow up”.

The bodycam vids also show her firing expletives at a police officer “who was seemingly just trying to be nice and help her”, according to Jacob.

At one point, Gomas even tells him: “My dad’s a cop, f**k you, dude.”

The footage then shows a man, who is apparently “the guy that she was having the altercation with”, telling officers that Gomas pushed him, unprompted.

He chooses not to press charges against her but, as Jacob points out, he initially doesn’t even know what “assault” means, because English isn’t his first language.

“It seems like everybody kind of let her have a pass, but she expressed a lot of vitriol towards that man,” Jacob says in her analysis of the clips.

“That kind of brings me back to why she said the plane was going to blow up – she's associating [...] her vitriol towards that man to the plane blowing up.

“That kind of seems a little messed up.”

She then adds: “Call me crazy, but I think the reason why [Gomas] may have been freaking out that the clips were going to go viral is because maybe she was afraid that she would be accused of bigoted statements towards that man.”

Jacob then notes that the 38-year-old “doesn't have any explanation [for] what exactly he did to her, except just existing”.

A number of fellow Twitter/X users seemed to agree that something was off with Gomas’s description of what happened.

One commentator said the “not real” video went viral “partially due to her behavior and also partially because she’s attractive.”

“The whole story feels like we’re missing context that is not being provided,” he added.

“The likely answer is she was not exactly sober, and mental health issues take on many shades and flavors which cannot be discounted.”

Another argued: “I find it fascinating that NO ONE is talking about the threats she made.

“Anyone of us would have been arrested for pubic disturbance, public intoxication, terroristic threats, ect. And probably even put on the no fly list. Why does she get a pass?”

Commenting on her own video, Jacob said: “I don’t believe in cancel culture and it’s likely true [Gomas] was having a bad day - but she’s retelling the story in a way that totally disregards the man she seemed to be profiling and she gets around it by acting as if there’s some ongoing investigation.

“I think she doesn’t want people to connect the dots that perhaps she was accusing someone of blowing up the plane [because] she was mad at them. I dunno.”

Gomas has since rebranded herself as a motivational mental health guru@tiffanygomas/Instagram

During her ‘Pardon My Take’ interview, the 38-year-old accepted that she “did look absolutely crazy” during her breakdown but said she was really just “highly distressed” and needed to get off the aircraft.

Stressing that she “didn’t want to get into all the details” of the altercation, she said she had given up her aisle seat and moved into a middle seat, where “there was just a really bad energy”.

She later pointed out that she’d put out an apology video because she was “really sorry to everybody on the plane”.

“I disrupted a lot of people and I travel a lot, and that's just really not my character,” she said. “It was just a wild situation that I was in and I did need to get off.

“I just wish I would've done it peacefully, not making some outlandish comments.”

Earlier in their chat, the 38-year-old clarified that she “did not get arrested” following her inflight freak-out but said that as soon as she exited the plane she realised what was going to happen.

“I'm in [an] Uber calling my mom, I'm like, ‘This is bad, mom, this is bad’. And I'm like, ‘I'm going to go viral tomorrow’,” she recalled.

Gomas said she got home that evening and kept searching “American Airlines” on TikTok, explaining that she knew footage of her “crazy” moment was “going to come out” and that she was “freaking out inside.”

“That night I literally got off of all of social media – I deactivated every account, deleted every photo,” she recounted, adding that the only photo internet sleuths could find was “like 10 or 12 years old”.

She also admitted: “After this all went viral my life did change. I didn’t come out of my house for over four weeks – literally blinds down, everything.”

But trying to reassure her, Katz insisted: “Anyone who's judging you long-term is crazy. They're not real.

“Those motherf**kers aren't real because who doesn't have a bad moment? Who cares?”

Hundreds of millions of people, apparently.

Indy100 has contacted Tiffany Gomas for comment.

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