Gayle King mocked for whining about windowless first class seat

Gayle King was slammed online for apparently thinking she’d be relatable to her fans by complaining that her first-class seat on a United Airlines flight from Hawaii did not have its own window, according to the Daily Beast.

“I always like the window seat,” the celebrity journalist and CBS news anchor said in a video she posted this week to Instagram, according to the Daily Beast and The Sun.

“So I sit down, I go, ‘oh great, okay, let’s look out the window,'” King said in her video, shared with her 1.1 million followers. “Oh, hm. There is no window.” King, famously Oprah Winfrey’s best friend, then complained that she knew her eight-hour flight from Maui, Hawaii to New York was “gonna be a long ride” after taking her seat and finding out she didn’t have a window, from which she could look out and watch the passing Earth below.

In her video, King also showed that the person seated in front of her had a window, but the person occupying it had closed the shade. “United and I have very different ideas about a window,” King said. “What’s a girl to do?”

It appears that King has since deleted the video, presumably after negative comments poured it. Instagram said the link to the video “may have been broken, or the profile may have been removed.”

“Boohoo Gayle. Flying business class is so challenging,” someone commented with a crying emoji, the Daily Beast reported. Another person wrote: “Gayle. There are times we just ‘Let Go’ and thank God for our blessings.”

According to The Sun, King’s ticket was visible during her video, showing that she was flying from Maui’s Kahului Airport to Newark International Airport. A round-trip first- or business-class ticket for that route can cost anywhere from $2,500 to just under $5,000. By comparison, economy fares for the same round trip start at $420.

Meanwhile, a third person commenting on King’s post made a pointed reference to another King controversy, when she was similarly accused of being clueless about her privilege. The person said: “Gayle you’ve been to space what more do you need to see mama.”

The space reference stems from King’s massively hyped but widely derided participation in an 11-minute ride aboard one of billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space rockets. The April 14 ride with Bezos’s wife, Lauren Sanchez, and singer Katy Perry, was heavily promoted as a supposed feminist mission in space because the participants were all women. But  critics were quick to point out that it was nothing more than a brief space-tourism jaunt that others with lots of money have previously enjoyed.

Even as King tried to defend the ride as a “flight,” and she, Sanchez and Perry all proclaimed that they deserved to be called “astronauts,” critics furthermore accused her of hubris and slammed the trip as a P.R. stunt and “audacious display of power” on behalf of ultra-wealthy “oligarchs” like Bezos and Sanchez, both of whom have come under fire for trying to curry favor with the Trump administration.

King faced further criticism for flaunting her friendship with Bezos and Sanchez when she joined Winfrey as guests at the couple’s extravagant June wedding in Venice.

But as much as King faced criticism for complaining about her windowless seat, the Daily Beast pointed out that others told the anchor that they had dealt with similar circumstances on flights, where they didn’t get the window seat that was advertised to them.

The Daily Beast also reported that both United and Delta Airlines are facing a class action lawsuit regarding the sale of window seats that are actually windowless. But United has argued that the term “window seat” essentially means the seat is next to the cabin wall, and does not guarantee a passenger an actual window.