FAQ: AA Flight 587 & The Landing's Origin Story
New here? Some FAQs for those struggling to make sense of the case (no, Sten Molin didn't secretly serve in the military)
Trigger warning: Discussion of sexual assault and ephebophilia
EDIT 4/17/24: After this article was posted, I learned something that would change everything. Find the relevant post here.
Today we’re going to clear up some misinformation about The Landing’s origin story with facts, sourcing, and screenshots. Scroll down to Part II for answers to frequently asked questions.
I’m doing this once. Drama, intimidation tactics and ugliness brought by people who are angry and uncomfortable about women speaking out about sexual abuse have no place here. I don’t visit Reddit, I don’t read your Tweets, I’m not responding to every email from nameless pilots who inexplicably spend their time caping for a dead pilot instead of listening to his live victims.
None of this is relevant to what we’re doing at The Landing. I block and ignore. Forthwith, the Cult of Sten Molin can duke it out amongst themselves.
Part I: Before we get to the FAQ, a look at the latest news.
In last week’s post announcing the book I’m working on about predators in the skies, how airlines protect them, and how it all relates to safety in the air, I wrote this about American Airlines Flight 587 First Officer Sten Molin:
“I’ll talk to reasonable friends of his, as well. If you’re questioning the news of his double life in good faith, I understand, because I’ve been there.”
I didn’t hear from any of those, but I have received some bad-faith emails from men from the olden days, retired American Airlines pilots who, for some reason, are hugely invested in the reputation of a man who died in 2001.
They are 3 years/23 years late to the unraveling of Molin’s double/triple life. My best advice to the pilots emailing me (without using their real names due to fear of the “woke mob”) telling me they’re going to “set me straight” and asking me to send them “a detailed timeline of these alleged assaults so that I can investigate” (this is actually funny) is to ask American Airlines. They have all the information you’re looking for. Who reported and when. Who they paid off and when. You can also ask them if there’s been a pilot in recent years forced to retire due to credible complaints.
Molin’s predation is well-covered ground, it’s old news, and I don’t have time to educate you if you’re just catching up now. There’s a ton of testimony on Medium and here. Further details of my reporting will be in the book, and sexual assault victims will be protected despite your threats that you’ll “find out who” is reporting their assaults. Newsflash: American Airlines already knows. See also: Threatening to doxx rape victims is conduct unbecoming an officer.
For those saying the women coming forward are looking to make a “quick buck,” you’re getting tangled in your own web. Which is it? There are legit victims American Airlines is paying off? Or I’m making the whole thing up? Don’t pretend American hands out cash to anyone who strolls up reporting harassment or rape. You know better than anyone that’s not true. Just ask Kimberly Goesling.
The good news is, hearing from the American Airlines pilots from back then has given me valuable first-person perspective and evidence to back up what flight attendants (FAs) have been telling me for years.
These men speak to me, a woman, in aggressive, condescending and patronizing ways that must have been terribly intimidating for young FAs over 20 years ago when they were harassed, stalked and/or assaulted by first officer Molin or other pilots, and were ignored or retailiated against when they reported. Others didn’t report because they knew they’d be treated just as I am right now—the difference being these men can’t bully me the way they did with FAs afraid of losing their jobs in an industry where seniority is everything.
If these men think they can intimidate and make demands on me, imagine what effect they’d have on a 21-year-old FA the airline views as a walking Coke machine, and whose career is in the hands of these captains who can shut you down in a hot second. We’ve had 23 years of positive press about Sten Molin. He had a yacht dedicated in his name. His living victims get to speak, too, and they have, and I reported on it. It’s that simple.
You can stop bothering me now. The same way a true crime journalist doesn’t need to hear from the billions of people BBC predator Jimmy Saville didn’t sexually abuse, I don’t need to hear from anyone else who Sten Molin didn’t rape. Really. I’m good.
PART II: FAQ about Flight 587 F.O. Sten Molin & Origin of The Landing
***UPDATE 4/17/24: I learned on April 16 that much of the reaction toward me, my articles and subsequent communications with Molin’s victims and survivors were through the lens of receiving faked screenshots falsely presented as my writing. Everyone up in arms starting in September 2021, when I posted my original aritcles, were riled up because a bad actor wrote fake pornographic descriptions of things that never happened between me and Sten Molin. Visit this story for what really happened—which was nothing physical.***
Q: I’ve seen anonymous claims on the internet that you have a “vendetta” against dead American Airlines First Officer Sten Molin, the pilot blamed for the crash of Flight 587.
A: False. I was a friend of Sten Molin from 1997 to 1999-ish. I thought he was a good guy. He was nice to me. He didn’t sexually assault me (that I know of). I grieved when he died so horrifically, and in 2021 I wrote two in-depth articles defending him as a person and a pilot. I contacted people he’d known most of his life to to make sure I wasn’t stepping on any toes or stirring up any hornets nests. When I got the go-ahead, I posted two glowing stories on Medium and shared them on LinkedIn.
Within weeks, dozens of people wrote to me and posted on social media to say I was wrong about Sten Molin. He was no “gentleman,” they said. I heard from men and women, pilots and FAs, engineers, airport personnel, people who said they’d been molested during “computer lessons” when they were 13 and 14 years old, witnesses who’d seen him dragging incapacitated FAs into his hotel room on layovers, you name it.
To say I was in utter shock is an understatement. Here’s the first response I ever gave to any of them:
They did, and I listened. Dozens of people told me Molin was perpetrating rapes on layovers, in homes after giving someone a ride, sexual assaults in hotel hallways, molesting girls in his Crawford Terrace basement during “computer lessons.” Then there was extensive compulsive lying that took a while to untangle. They showed me reams of florid, sexually explicit, unwanted letters and graphic drawings of nude women he sent them.
Turned out he had a fetish for smothering women with his body weight. Several women he attacked described the panic and fear of him crushing them until they couldn’t breathe. Eventually, they said, savvy FAs tried to warn others with code name “Captain Molester” or “Hands-on Moleman.”
Like I said, this is very simple. I believe the victims who described everything about their assaults. His rancid smell. The clutter in his basement. The music he played while he assaulted him. The taste of the alcoholic brew he coerced them to drink on layovers (FAs who said no to him didn’t do well). The descriptions of not being able to breathe.
I never made an assault allegation against Sten Molin. But I’m the only one talking about his victims’ stories while using my real name, which makes me a target.
I’m here to help his victims and give them a platform if they want one. This isn’t about me. It’s about them.
Q: But someone online is saying you—
A: There a lot of strange, nonsensical lies out there. Sten and I ended on great terms. I thought he was a swell guy, but at the end of our weekend blind date it was clear there was no major spark, and I wasn’t attracted to him. We were only ever going to be just friends. The truth is immortalized in the original supportive articles I wrote, which I took down at the request of his living rape victims but which still circulate in screenshots,* (which we now know to be faked) like this one that covers the moment I realized I wasn’t into him and didn’t want to go with him on a Caribbean jaunt:
The last time I spoke to him (as opposed to email communications), he called to ask me to go on a trip to the Caribbean with him using his American Airlines travel passes. I didn’t want to waste precious vacation time on, or be stuck in a hotel room with, a guy I intended to be just friends with going forward, so I didn’t go. That was the end of it. It was 1997.
Any claim to the contrary is fabricated out of whole cloth. It’s made up. I was generous to Molin in print because he was dead, and I wrote that when he was in his tux, he looked “handsome” and “dashing,” kind of like the way you might say to your grandfather, Grandad, you look dashing! They’re going to love you at the Senior Center dance. It’s all in the original stories. These are facts.
Because it’s the internet, there are anonymous trolls trying to silence his victims and me. My work with sexual assault survivors in the airline industry makes people very uncomfortable—so they try to smear me, send death threats, harass and stalk me. I ignore and block them. One day I will probably take legal action against the worst of them.
Q: I was an American Airlines captain/boss/manager back then. You’re claiming he did all this on MY watch. How am I supposed to react to that?
That’s not my concern. I will say I’ve spoken to or heard from a couple of people in this position. They were as horrified as you can expect. One said, “God forgive me, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry to his victims.” Another, a captain, spent time DMing with me trying to unravel what we were learning. He wanted to see if there was anything he could do to make it right. He was disgusted—not with the survivors, but with Molin and everyone who covered up for him.
These are fine people who Molin showed only his good side to. These are people with nothing to hide.
If you find yourself aggressively going after sexual assault survivors and journalists who report on this story, it’s not the best look. If you didn’t know, you didn’t know. No one has, or will to my knowledge, blame you. It was a long time ago.
Q: Why are you still writing about this case? Why not just let it lie?
A: I hope to set it aside in the near future and move on, once the book is finished. But we should be mindful that the families of those who died on flight 587, as well as Molin’s living sexual assault/harassment/stalking victims, have to live with the thought of him every day, forever. You might be over what he did, but most or all of them never will be.
Q: How dare you! I KNEW HIM. He never raped me! He was a great guy who cooked for me and let me stay at his condo. I never saw him hurt anyone, therefore he never did!
A: I’m happy for you. You’re lucky. You are not alone—he didn’t assault me, either. Can you imagine if he did assault every single person he ever met? That’s not how predators operate. They pick on the vulnerable ones. This old chestnut comes out quite frequently, so I’ll explain it again so it’s easy to understand.
These men compartmentalize. They wear social masks. If they weren’t really, really good at it, they’d never be in a position of power over their victims in the first place. They count on people like you who won’t believe victims, even though historically, this method of denial has been a terrible idea and usually ends up being proved wrong.
The trick to coming to terms Molin’s other life is to engage your critical thinking skills, believe victims, and understand that your experience is just that—yours.
No one thought so many venerated priests in the Catholic Church would turn out to be serial molesters. Does it get any more admirable and untouchable than a priest within an institution like that? And then…
The FBI ignored Larry Nassar’s victims for years, and people doubted he had a molesting basement. And then…
The BTK killer was a president of his church council and a Cub Scout leader. No one at his church ever saw him torture anyone…does that mean he didn’t do it?
Is there anyone more wholesome than a Boy Scout leader? And yet there’s this landmark case blowing it all open…
Two words: Jimmy Saville.
Do you see where this is going? We must learn from the past. No one believed the church victims. The Boy Scouts ignored reports and covered them up for decades. Etc. etc. I could write examples all day. I’m not here to convince you. I am here to stop having to respond to this nonsensical argument. Ask yourself: Are you someone who believes women, or not? Because every time you go online (always anonymously) to say what a great guy he was because he didn’t harm you, you’re doing great harm to those he did attack.
I’m not the one accusing Sten Molin of rape. His victims are. And I believe them. There are far too many graphic, brutal, heartbreaking accounts not to.
Q: Yeah but not Sten. I knew him and you didn’t.
A: We heard you the first time. No one knew him. You’re not so special, and neither am I. If you can’t make the connection, I can’t help you.
Q: These are just rumors. You better watch your back.
A: It took me MORE THAN A YEAR to put his names to these crimes after I heard from that first detractor. I waited, I investigated, I spoke to his victims, I talked to people who knew him. Through it all, at no point were my inboxes flooded with people making cogent arguments for why the victims might be lying (most of the threats and creepy stalking came from one person and those were mostly erratic ramblings, sexually graphic threats and disturbing images of p*ophelia). The most I got were a few half-hearted emails telling me to back off: We know he was awful. Let it go. I contacted American Airlines repeatedly to respond to these claims. They never refuted any of them.
Q: Did Sten Molin attend Yale Medical School on a scholarship?
A: No.
Q: Was Sten Molin related to Abraham Lincoln?
A: Uh…no.
Q: Did Sten Molin attend MIT in pursuit of a career as an astronaut?
A: No.
Q: Did Sten Molin fly Concorde?
A: No.
Q: Was Sten Molin a military hero?
If you’ve dug your heels in on this one, first you have to choose your story: Was he Air Force? Recruited from high school to go to Annapolis? Trained at Pensacola where he lost a good buddy in a training accident (otherwise known as the plot of Top Gun)? Flying secret missions off aircraft carriers? Because I’ve had people tell me he claimed to be all of these, depending on whom he was talking to at the time.
Then, ask yourself why, if his service was so super-squirrel-secret, it’s all over the internet. If Molin was telling everyone at American, it’s not secret. If someone’s uncle’s cousin’s dog walker’s best friend’s roommate is claiming they “bunked” with Molin, his service isn’t secret. If everyone knows, it’s not a secret. And if it’s not secret, then why didn’t it come out in the NTSB report? Why didn’t his father ever brag about it? I would advise those who buy into anonymous online claims to understand that they’re listening to a delusion shared by a person who is not in touch with reality. He never served.
Q: How do you know?
A: Because his time has been accounted for by NTSB investigators, the media, friends, his father, and witnesses who are on the record with their real names.
Molin graduated from Greenwich High School in 1985, enrolled at the Universitiy of Rhode Island, dropped out after a year, trained at Bolivar in Tennessee, flew twin Otters around new England with Holiday Airlines and then Beech 99s around New York state for Mohawk Airlines, and then joined American in 1991.
To believe Sten Molin was some sort of war hero, you have to believe you can dip in and out of elite military training, that it takes almost no time to become a trained officer or soldier, and that you can serve as a fighter pilot “briefly” in the small gaps between flying commuter.
You’d have to believe Captain Ed States got a hero’s callback to his Air Force service but Sten didn’t because…his was so heroic that it’s a secret? And yet we’re here talking about it? It’s a huge insult to those who truly served.
No, this is another of his crimes, this time stolen valor.
Q: Why would he lie?
A: Extreme insecurity? Psychopathy? I don’t think we’ll ever know, but you’d need a psychology degree to begin to unpack the root of his compulsive lying, and life is too short to bother.
*end*
About me
I’m an award-winning journalist and bestselling author with decades of international experience writing for magazines and newspapers including People, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, the Sunday Times Magazine (UK), Glamour, Shape, Epicurious.com, and more.
My 2021 memoir/military history book The Strong Ones: How a Band of Civilian Women Made Their Mark on the Army was an overnight #1 bestseller on Amazon in 2021. Said former U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, “The Strong Ones provides an inspirational message for our times.”
My crime reporting includes the most high-profile cases of the past decades. I’ve been sent to Italy to report on the Amanda Knox case, Portugal to cover Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, London to cover the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, L.A. for the death of Michael Jackson, and Sandy Hook, Conn. to cover the horrific school shooting, to name a few.
I was the first-ever recipient of the Jane Cunningham Croly Award for Excellence in Journalism Covering Issues of Concern to Women from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Winners after me included Marianne Pearl, and judges were legends in journalism like Judy Woodruff. I contributed to the feminist anthology Letters of Intent (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 1999) alongside such icons as Gloria Steinem, Ntozake Shange and Judy Blume, receiving a noted review from the New York Times. I am the author of a total of 13 fiction and nonfiction books, some of them under a pen name.