Stalked Over Pilot Sten Molin: 'I Am Watching Your Every Move, B---'

I revealed sexual assault and coverups related to the pilot of American Airlines Flight 587. I've been cyberstalked ever since: Chapter One

• More on the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 and its pilot Sten Molin

• Read all available chapters and find updates at the Stalker Series tab.

• Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.

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Chapter One

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I won’t rest…

I will make it my mission in life to expose what you have done to a much-loved dead man

I WILL destroy you

Spew your guts til you choke, b—

Your gonna regret this, b—

You are going to feel pain, b—

I reel off a tiny sample of the unwanted messages I’ve received over the past three years, and tell my new connection in a LinkedIn DM, It won’t stop. I’m at my wits’ end.

She’s a stalking victim-survivor who was terrorized by an ex, and she gives me some home truths about the police and FBI reports I’d been making, all of them as effective as yelling up at the sky.

Law enforcement needs the evidence handed to them on a silver platter, she writes. Police aren’t trained for these kinds of offenses. You need to bring in professionals.

She gives me the name of a firm that gathered evidence, locked down her private data, helped stop her stalker from poisoning her life. Gave her some peace.

My new profile photo on my resume? No. A collage put on X under a post promoting my new book. #Flight587

I contact the company via their website in the middle of my virtual conversation with her.

A reply comes in less than five minutes: Our lead investigator, Jack, will be in touch within the hour.

I read through their website again as I wait. This firm is a big deal: Counterintelligence, government clearance, offices in multiple countries in Europe, London and the Asia-Pacific region.

Jack calls right on time. Tell me how we can help, he says.

I tell him, and at the end, he says crisply, This behavior is breaking the law. No doubt.

He reels off the statute:

s 474.17 Criminal Code Using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence. Maximum penalty: three years imprisonment.

There are heavier consequences for aggravating circumstances under the carriage laws, and here, I believe and allege that it’s possible a case could be made for sexually charged harassment, too.

Send me what you have and I’ll put a plan together, Jack says.

I email him a sampling of the harassing messages I’ve received.

The document contains over two dozen pages.

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“How do You Prove a Negative?”

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That was in November of 2024. I had been cyberstalked for nearly three years by then. The first unwanted contact was an abusive email from a woman I didn’t know in February of 2022. The most recent was this Monday, when someone I believe to be that same woman posted a barrage of abusive messages, chaotic screenshots with blotches on them, and collages made on Canva, all under a LinkedIn post about women in the military. I have asked and demanded multiple times over the years that she stop contacting me.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be serializing the story of my experience as a victim of cyberstalking. I’ll post chapters one at a time here and on Medium. Follow my quest to gather evidence and stop online attacks that find me anywhere I am, including my personal email, Medium.com, Twitter, X, Goodreads, Reddit, Instagram, Bluesky, Substack, and LinkedIn, where thousands of professional contacts see ugly and false claims about me.

From catfishing attempts to death threats, from peaks to valleys, and with the help of experts from Australia to New York to D.C. to France, I’ll reveal what I’ve done over these past few years to eject this presence from my life.

In the final chapters, I’ll reveal the a-ha moment when I uncovered a shocking blunder that provided the digital evidence I needed to prove some of these allegations. Other behaviors don’t require cybersleuthing; they are self-evident, as she proudly takes ownership of certain social media accounts, posts her picture on them, and uses them to abuse and defame me. I don’t know where she finds the time.

Indeed, it’s not hard for victims to identify who’s coming for us, because stalkers generally want you to know it’s them. Otherwise, it’s not as satisfying. Otherwise, what’s the point? As another cyberstalking survivor told me, Ignoring them doesn't stop them, they will do what they're doing anyway and, bizarrely, also find ways to make sure you know they are stalking you.

The rage and obsession directed at me appears to have been triggered by the articles I’ve written in support of the sexual assault victims and survivors of American Airlines First Officer Sten Molin, who was blamed by the NTSB for crashing Flight 587 into Queens, killing over 260 people. My YouTube documentary will get you up to speed on the events from 1997 through August 2024.

My transparency about this experience represents a 180-degree flip from my previous strategy. Until this week, I generally did not engage. I’d ignore, record, block and report, which I’d often have to do several times in one morning as she’d create new accounts until she exhausted herself, and I’d brace for the next time. I estimate there have been hundreds of accounts and thousands of messages directed at me over 39 months.

I was ignoring it and, a vast majority of the time, letting her claims about me go unchecked. As the old advice said, if you engage you are in the mud with them, dirty as them, and at their level. I stayed above it.

Yet this advice is outdated. Experts advise that “Ignoring a stalker is rarely effective in ending the behaviour. In fact, stalkers often respond by escalating their attempts to make contact.”

This was certainly the case with me. Worse, the stalker allegedly picks fights with anonymous accounts on social media and when they bite back, she shifts into victim mode and claims repeatedly and publicly that these accounts are Sara Hammel abusing her. So there grew a digital footprint of my name associated with offensive language, racism, general ugliness and sexual harassment. The inciting of anger and violence toward a person not involved in the conversation—who cannot prove a negative—is a dangerous practice that can lead to tragic consequences. People already think I’m in the mud fighting with her, when the reality is a one-way, non-consensual, prolonged assault on my well-being, so there’s no reason for me to to be silent nor a victim anymore.

I am speaking out now because I continue to feel unsafe. My hope is also to give other cyberstalking victims helpful advice and make them feel less alone, as other victim-survivors have done for me. Solidarity doesn’t take away the stress, but it’s one way to find a pocket of comfort.

I’m not alone. There’s a recent case in the UK covered by the BBC’s Panorama, which made the disheartening statement that cyberstalking victims rarely find justice and even when they do, the perpetrators often continue offending, as a woman allegedly did in the case of motivational speaker Brad Burton and his stalker Sam Wall.

There is a chilling similarity between Burton’s case and mine: The false and defamatory claims posted in our names across the internet in an attempt to reverse victim and offender.

I have been called a rapist and a heroin addict who’s looking for drugs, to name two of the worst baseless claims (being both false and damaging to my reputation, this is straight-up defamation). People are not all as smart or forgiving as you are; they will believe this, and the social media platforms will not take the posts down. I am an author whose main income has been decimated by years of upsetting messages flooding my timeline and driving readers away from my social media platforms, forcing me to go private or abandon them altogether.

Someone is stalking me for my coverage of Flight 587 pilot Sten Molin and American Airlines

A Twitter post invoking my name about Flight 587’s Sten Molin and drugs

When I was heartbroken after my dog died in 2022, the stalker mocked me.

When I wrote of my sexual assault in 2024, the stalker mocked me on my own platforms and on others, including YouTube.

According to the BBC, “In hundreds of posts, Wall [the convicted stalker] described [her victim] as manipulative, a psychopath and a sociopathic abuser. Day after day, she accused him of making death threats, breaking her windows and killing her cat—all false allegations.”

“‘She put it on social media across all platforms. She was painting a picture that, somewhere along the way, I had done all these things and I was trying to cover it up," Burton tells BBC Panorama. ‘How do you prove a negative? That I had not poisoned the cat? Social media and the way it works, it's guilty until proven innocent."

Social media companies are a huge part of the problem, as reports of abusive posts fall on ears that are not listening and consciences that are inactive or nonexistent.

“None of the companies have taken down Wall's abusive messages, even though Panorama told them about Wall's conviction two months ago,” the BBC writes.

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To Be Clear

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I have been harassed and threatened all over social media and email since I first wrote about Sten Molin’s sexual assaults and penchant for young girls. Most, if not all, of the women I write about here have been harassed and/or retaliated against because they spoke out.

Under the law, harassment and cyberstalking are two separate offenses.

Not every harassing message is from the person who I allege, based on information and belief, is cyberstalking me. But the evidence I’ll be revealing in the final chapters of this series identified her as someone targeting me under various handles. If we only consider accounts she admits are hers, plus the evidence I’ve gathered, I believe this is enough to reasonably show her actions are, in their totality, allegedly, probably, possibly breaking the law in the countries we’re dealing with.

Every day a stalker wakes up and targets their victim despite requests to stop, they are making a choice.

My main goal, besides stopping the stalking, is to help survivors of sexual assault, abuse, retaliation and rape in the airline industry, and as we all saw this week with the death by suicide of sex trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre, the consequences of trauma and then raising your voice to bring attention to it can be catastrophic.

There is a price we all pay for speaking out, whistleblowing, reporting your assault, or supporting any of the victims and survivors. It doesn’t have to be that way. It shouldn’t be “part of the deal” like so many like to say.

Enough is enough.

Read all available chapters here.

Thanks for reading, and stay safe.

-Sara

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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 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.