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Private plane Peter Thiel His family had two pigeons, but somehow, on July 13, 2024, neither was readily available. One was stuffed in the back of the plane Travel luggage. The other, according to a court filing, was used to store cooler bags containing food and kitchen equipment. What happened next is the subject of a federal lawsuit that includes allegations of alleged assault as well as disputes over workers’ compensation and whether a confidentiality agreement could prevent a former flight attendant from suing the husband of one of the richest people on the planet.
Stephanie Bogar, the flight attendant at the center of the dispute, was an employee of Solairus Aviation — which did not immediately respond to a request for comment — but has worked more than 200 flights for Thiel and his husband, Matthew Danzeisen. On that July flight, Bogar says, Danzeisen — who is also head of private investments at Thiel Capital — pushed her aside and threw several heavy cooler bags at her, sending her crashing into the plane’s wall and leaving her collapsed on the cabin floor. She claims Danzeisen’s actions caused serious injuries to her ankle and knee.
Danzeisen says he was removing the bags from the bathroom so one of his children could use them. He says one of the bags may have accidentally hit Bogar’s leg.
(Like other allegations in this story attributed to Bogar and Danzeisen, they were made in court filings.)
In May, Danzeisen filed suit against Bogar in the Central District of the Southern District of California, after she sent, he says, a “demand letter” several months earlier. While Elliot Young, one of Bogar’s attorneys, told WIRED that the letter was an attempt to resolve the dispute out of court, Danzeisen’s complaint describes Bogar as waging a “campaign to extort” him and his husband. The complaint describes Bogar as a former flight attendant with a checkered aviation career, accuses her of waging a “smear campaign” and violating a confidentiality agreement, and asks the court to impose a gag order and award actual and punitive damages.
Bogar denied the allegations in a counterclaim filed Tuesday, adding Thiel Capital as a defendant and alleging battery, assault, emotional distress and neglect. She declined to describe her career as “volatile,” and alleged that Thiel Capital employees helped coordinate the private aviation account she worked on, knew or should have known about Danzeisen’s alleged behavior toward the flight crew, and failed to intervene before or after the July 2024 incident.
In an interview, Bogar’s attorney described Danzeisen’s lawsuit as a “bullying tactic” intended to intimidate a former flight attendant who was injured on a plane.
“Just because you have wealth doesn’t mean you have the right to just hurt people,” Young said.
“This is extortion over a bag that hit someone’s leg, and we don’t pay for extortion,” Alex Spiro, Danzeisen’s attorney, said in a statement. “So we’ll see everyone in court.”
According to both filings, the flight was scheduled to travel from Sun Valley, Idaho, to Washington, D.C., on July 13, 2024, coincidentally the same day as Donald Trump. He survived an assassination attempt At a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. But the plane had a serious storage problem.
Bogar says a personal assistant for Thiel told the crew that the family’s luggage would arrive in two batches, disrupting the usual process of loading bags before passengers boarded. With no ground assistance, Bogar, the pilot, and the first officer had to load and organize the bags themselves.
By the time the Thiel family boarded, the cabin was tightly packed, Bogar says. According to her file, excess luggage was clogging the back bathroom, while the front bathroom was used as storage for cooler bags and kitchen equipment from a private chef.
