Oprah Winfrey sued in sex scandal

A former flight attendant on Oprah Winfrey’s private jet filed a lawsuit Friday claiming she was wrongfully fired because of false allegations that she had sex with the plane’s married pilot as the talk-show host snoozed.

The lawsuit filed by Corrine Gehrls, 39, alleges that flight attendant Myron Gooch and Kirby Bumpus (who is the daughter of Winfrey’s friend Gayle King and is Winfrey’s goddaughter) made the false and defamatory accusations to cause her to be fired.

Gehrls and chief pilot Terry Pansing, 57, one of four pilots employed by Winfrey, were fired a short time later for “inappropriate intimate behavior,” the suit said.

A spokesman for Harpo Inc., Winfrey’s production company, declined to comment. Pansing, who lives in Sugar Grove, declined to comment. Attorneys in the case and Gehrls did not return calls seeking comment.

The lawsuit claims Gooch made the allegations after Pansing and Gehrls complained that he refused to work as scheduled, sometimes required that his hours be shifted so he could fly back to Chicago to “attend to his cats,” and insisted on staying in better hotels than the rest of the flight crew.

Gehrls and Pansing passed polygraph tests after the accusation but were not reinstated, the suit said.

According to the lawsuit, the jet was on the ground to refuel and take on a new crew at the time of the alleged encounter. Winfrey, Bumpus and other passengers were asleep “throughout the flight following their ingestion of sleeping pills,” the lawsuit claimed. The lawsuit seeks more than $75,000 in damages from Gooch, Bumpus and Harpo.