French violinist and TikTok star Esther Abrami has been denied boarding on a Ryanair flight with her violin.

Planning to fly from Marseille to Berlin to record her third album with Sony Classical, Abrami says she was “spoken to like a piece of garbage” and told she would be barred from boarding the aircraft unless she either checked her 200-year-old Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume instrument or left it behind at the airport.

Esther Abrami. Photo courtesy Esther Abrami/Instagram

Abrami, who has garnered a TikTok audience of over 425,000, reported that her instrument was 1cm over the 55cm allowance for baggage, but fitted diagonally in the baggage space.

Her offers to buy an extra seat, to check the case and carry her violin by hand, or to pay for extra room were all denied by airline staff. Abrami said she was told to “get out of the way” if she was not going to check her instrument, and that she was left “completely humiliated” by the situation.

“This is the first time I have experienced such rudeness and public humiliation,” she wrote in an Instagram post.

Abrami also wrote that this is the first time she’d encountered...