Pissed-up plane pervert who sexually assaulted flight attendant narrowly avoids prison

Sean Martin MacCullough was lucky not to be sent to jail on Tuesday for his mid-air molesting which followed a shocking sexual comment to the cabin crew member who was just doing her job – forcing the airline to ban him for 10 years.

The 55-year-old had been asked to put his bank card in the hands-free machine to pay for a large round of alcohol and responded by telling the shocked stewardess: “I know what I’d like to put into you”.

And as she walked away he compounded his outrageous behaviour by slapping her on her bum.

This week the tattooed boozer was confronted by the Sunday World but was reluctant to speak about the incident.

Standing at his front door in his dressing gown, MacCullough refused to discuss the issue on his doorstep and insisted we come into his home.

Having invited us in he said: “Look, I’ll tell you what happened, I was really, really drunk and it was really, really stupid.”

When asked if he’d ever done anything like this before, MacCullough then seemed to perform a ‘mid-air’ U-turn and chucked us out of his house without saying another word.

District Judge Oonagh Mullan told MacCullough this week that while his offending merited a prison sentence, his underlying issues would not be addressed by one so “what I will do is impose an 18-month probation order”.

MacCullough, from Drumawillin Park in Ballycastle on the County Antrim coast, had confessed to sexually assaulting a female on October 11 2021 in that he touched a female sexually when she did not consent, and he knew she was not consenting.

Antrim Magistrates Court, sitting in Ballymena, heard that he had been on board an EasyJet flight to Faro when he bought a quantity of drinks mid-air.

A prosecuting lawyer outlined how the amount was too much to use the contactless facility so when the victim told MacCullough he would have to insert his card into the machine, he gestured her forward and told her “I know what I would like to put into you”.

As the crew member turned and walked away, MacCullough stood up and “slapped her bottom”, explained the prosecutor.

The crew manager spoke to MacCullough and he apologised for his behaviour and when the plane landed, Portuguese police advised the victim to speak to the PSNI when she returned.

MacCullough wasn’t interviewed by the PSNI until some time later but he claimed he had spent three hours in a Portuguese police cell and had been fined so “he thought that was the end of it” – but police inquiries showed that to be untrue.

Defence counsel Alan Stewart said MacCullough had been travelling alone when he fell in with a crowd of younger men and despite being on medication with doctors warning him not to, “he stupidly took drink”.

“He is deeply embarrassed and remorseful and ashamed of his behaviour,” said the barrister, who revealed that “unsurprisingly,” EasyJet had hit him with a 10-year travel ban.

“This was a young woman who was simply carrying out her job and the way you approached her and behaved was totally unacceptable and would have been extremely distressing for her,” said District Judge Mullan.

In addition to the suspended sentence, MacCullough will have to sign the police sex offenders register for five years.

Cabin crew are often subjected to abuse while carrying out their jobs and sexual abuse against employees of airlines is not uncommon.

A recent study of 3,500 flight attendants in the US found that 68 per cent of them experienced sexual harassment during their flying careers while 35 per cent experienced verbal sexual harassment from passengers in the last year.