A woman who was subjected to a racist attack on a Ryanair flight has said the incident left her stunned and depressed.

Delsie Gayle, who was the target of a tirade of abuse by a fellow passenger on flight FR015 from Barcelona to London Stansted, said: “I was shocked, nobody ever said those words to me.”

Another passenger, David Lawrence, who filmed the incident on 15 October and posted it online, said he chose to publicise it to show the world what had happened.

The footage shows a man shouting at Gayle, telling her to move seats, while her daughter tries to stand up to him, telling him her mother is disabled. The man can be heard saying: “I don’t care whether she’s fucking disabled or not – if I tell her to get out, she gets out.”

He can be heard in the video calling the woman an “ugly black bastard”. When Gayle remonstrates with him he shouts at her: “Don’t talk to me in a foreign language, you stupid ugly cow.”

Play Video 1:56 Racist incident filmed on Ryanair flight – video

Gayle, 77, moved from her seat, but the man was allowed to remain in his after the incident, which occurred before the flight took off.

Describing her shock, Gayle told ITV News: “I feel very low. He paid a fare to go on holiday, I’ve paid mine, so why does he abuse me for that due to the colour of my skin? He do it with me and he gets away, he’ll do it to somebody else.”

Speaking about the impact the incident has had on her, Gayle added: “I feel really depressed about it. I go to my bed and say, ‘what have I done?’ I haven’t done anything for you to attack me. Because of the colour of my skin I was abused like that?”

Gayle said she believed that if the situation had been reversed and she had attacked the man, the police would have been called. Of other passengers, who did not intervene, she said: “And because I’m black, I’m sad to say that, they didn’t want to get involved with me.”

She added she had had no contact with Ryanair, which has been criticised over its handling of the incident.

Lawrence said it was a difficult decision to film rather than step in to intervene, but he had done so “because of the power of social media today, and the importance of the public knowing that these incidents take place”.

He said he had been criticised as “childish” by one passenger for filming.

Describing himself as a “child of the Windrush generation”, Lawrence said: “For many years a lot of the West Indian community have gone through these types of incidents in Britain, but have never been able to share it with the public or with the world. So I decided that I had the opportunity to film this, as difficult as it was,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

According to the woman’s 53-year-old daughter, the argument started because her mother, who was returning from a holiday designed to cheer her up on the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death, has arthritis and took some time to move out of the way so the man could reach the window seat.

Lawrence said he expected more from Ryanair, and he had previously seen people escorted off planes for less. Criticising the lack of response from cabin crew and other passengers, Lawrence said: “One passenger actually said to me, don’t I think it was quite childish me filming the incident.”

The transport secretary, Chris Grayling, described the incident as “totally unacceptable” and told the Today programme he hoped “police would want to take action in such an extraordinarily unacceptable case”.

However, the shadow transport minister Karl Turner said he understood that Ryanair’s failure to immediately remove the man from the flight and hand him over to the Spanish authorities could result in no charges being brought.

Because Ryanair is registered in Dublin and the plane was on the ground in Spain, UK law did not apply, Turner told BBC Radio 4’s World at One. There was no extradition arrangement for an offence of this nature, he said, so there might be no charges unless the man handed himself over to the Spanish authorities. “I doubt whether he’s going to do that,” Turner said.

Ryanair tweeted on Sunday that it had reported the matter to Essex police. “As this is now a police matter, we cannot comment further.”