More Victims of American Airlines Flight 587 Pilot and Rapist Sten Molin Share Testimony About Their
EDITOR’S NOTE 9/16/23: This is why we can’t have nice things. Comments are shut off again temporarily due to abusive comments and stalking. Check back soon for when they’re reopened. Remember, shutting down comments also temporarily hides all previous ones, but they’ll pop back up when I open up again.
Trigger and content warning: mentions of suicide and rape of adults and children
Note about comments: Due to stalking and abuse, I often shut off commenting for several days. That action hides all past comments temporarily. If you come here to speak in support of victims, check back every few days to see when I open up again at times I’m able to moderate comments as they come in.
For those brand-new to this ongoing story: American Airlines First Officer Sten Molin was partly to blame for flight 587 crashing in Queens in November 2001, killing himself and 264 innocent people, according to the NTSB.
Yet even before that unspeakable loss, he’d already cut a trail of destruction through the world in his 34 years, causing endless trauma for his living victims.
I’ve heard for months about a Larry Nassar-style basement at Sten Molin’s Greenwich-area condo where he assaulted girls under the guise of a “computer tutoring business.” (I am aware there was more than one property, but for now I’m talking about this one).
In the past several weeks, more and more of these underage victims—children, under the law—are coming forward. (Stay tuned for more on this in the coming weeks).
Sten Molin raped, assaulted, stalked, harassed and abused dozens of women and underage girls/children. His adult victims say he attacked by force, aggression and overpowering. Underage girls and children report unwanted attacks by force and extreme power imbalance, but also by quieter, boilerplate grooming techniques.
The youngest victim I’ve heard from was 13 when he raped her.
As we know, there is no consent when you’re legally a child. It’s always rape.
Always.
While I continue to gather fresh reporting for a bigger upcoming story, I wanted to introduce myself to the many subscribers who are new to this horrific nightmare and post a basic primer on The Landing’s origins.
I am not a victim of Sten Molin.
I’m a journalist and author who began my career at the newspaper at my university where, as a member of the tennis team, I was motivated to investigate massive disparities in funding between men’s and women’s sports.
After graduation, I took a job as a crime and human interest reporter for a daily newspaper, where I broke news about a pedophile moving next door to an elementary school and won journalism awards for writing about a groundbreaking U.S. Army study of women’s strength (which I also covered in this feminist anthology and my book The Strong Ones).
From there I worked for a national news magazine in Washington, D.C. and then in New York in the late 1990s.
That’s when I met Sten Molin.
I cried—freaked out, mourned, grieved—when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in November 2001 with Molin at the controls.
The cataclysm of that event stayed with me, and for the 20th anniversary of the crash in 2021, I wrote a longform piece remembering our fun times together on a weekend blind date in Newport. In Part II, published separately, I wrote a defense of his flying capabilities based on everything I’d read and included a bibilography with dozens of sources. This story received tens of thousands of views. Due to requests by his victims, that series will never be republished.
Here is the follow-up story I did to my original ode to a man who led double or even triple lives.
Here is where you’ll find the short biography I put up to start dismantling some of his compulsive lying. You’ll see I named him, but not in the context of sexual assaults, stalking and rape. I was still investigating then. But I did know for sure he told whoppers tailored to whomever he was trying to impress at the time. For example, he’d lie and say he earned a scholarship to Yale Medical School to a woman whose brother was a doctor, or to a man who attended Annapolis, he’d claim to have been a secret Navy pilot who lost a good freind in a training accident, which I’ve dubbed The Top Gun Story.
This same story on Medium also contains a treasure trove of comments and testimonials. As we know, the Internet is forever, so if a certain company tries to get people who’ve signed NDAs to delete their comments, I’ve got ‘em safely screenshotted.
Click here to find out how that first wave of harrowing accounts of Sten Molin raping, assaulting, harassing and otherwise abusing women got to me and flipped me from friend and defender to champion for his many victims (tip: believe victims). Also note the comments at the bottom of this story.
This post has more about the process by which I reported out the Molin story until I was comfortable naming him. There is also a bit about the flight attendants who have reportedly settled with American Airlines and signed nondisclosure agreements. (American has never responded to my requests for comment or to confirm or deny).
This is a story where more women shared their stories of rape, assault and stalking, bullying and harassment at work in the COMMENTS section. You will see I still hadn’t named Molin at this point, but was happy to provide a platform for his victims to do so.
By October of 2022, a reputable production company contacted me about a documentary they’re working on about the dark side of working as a flight attendant; they are very interested in including Sten Molin’s victims’ testimony. The docuseries remains in development for the time being, but I am regularly in touch with producers.
And this one reveals the way Molin’s victims speaking out led me to write about other victims and be a sounding board and/or a voice for so many women who write to me now sharing their experiences and looking to connect with fellow victims in aviation/the airline industry, and/or want to speak with someone who believes them.
There’s more, but this is a good start to get a sense of how this all came to be unraveled.
A new and bigger story is coming next week in which we will address the vital questions that remain after Sten Molin’s death.
Who knew what Molin was doing, and when did they know it? Should he have been caught and stopped before he was in the cockpit that fateful day in November 2001, when 264 innocent people lost their lives due to pilot error? We are going to uncover who knew. Who was with him. Who enabled him, who witnessed his proclivities or even some of his acts, who might have participated.
I want to close out by revealing that one of the most heartbreaking consequences of his sexual attacks was a teen rape victim’s family member saying they’re trying to find out who took the photo they found of Sten Molin and the girl in his basement. They found the cursed image among her things after she killed herself a few years after he raped her.
I’m sorry for every one of his victims.
More soon.
xoSara
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