Stalked Over Pilot Sten Molin: 'We're Coming for You and we Won't Play Nice'
Chapter Two: The investigation into years of threats and cyberstalking related to American Airlines Flight 587 begins
Read Chapter One and watch the documentary of The Landing’s origin story
Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy
Chapter Two
November 2024
It’s dinnertime on the east coast and I’m on the phone with Jack, an investigator from the counterintelligence firm I hope will help stop the cyberstalking I’ve endured for nearly three years.
The ceaseless unwanted messages are breaking the law, Jack says. It’s menacing. It’s illegal.
Here’s how we tackle it. We start with the emails.
The emails. Ugly, accusatory, strange, from a stranger. The first came in February 2022, the opening salvo in what would become a one-sided war. They were delivered to my personal email address in “her” name and various nicknames—including “Iris” or “Eyeris”—she would use across the internet for years to come, though I didn’t know it then.
Send me the earliest ones, Jack says. The absolute first contact. No matter how long ago it was.
I find that interesting, and ask why he’s focusing on those particular missives.
The beginning is when their guard is most likely to be down in terms of masking their location and identity, he replies.
On those first angry, white-hot approaches, Jack explains, there’s no grand plan. No one sets out to be a stalker.
The average person doesn’t sit wild eyed in their swivel chair and say to themselves, Here we go—I’m going to be a stalker!
It’s a process. At some point, the person realizes they’re waking up every day focused on one person, spraying bile around the internet, and it’s time to hide so they can continue with impunity. In comes the VPN, maybe a burner phone or two, and anything else they desire in their stalking kit. Somewhere in the midst of engaging in drama around their victim, something clicks. They keep going. Maybe they obsess.
They get away with it. They are emboldened.
Maybe they get off on the attention it brings them from a discombobulated victim.
I’ll send you quotes for some actions we can take for you, Jack says. We need to hand law enforcement the evidence if we want them to investigate. I recommend starting with the emails. You’d send me the headers for the earliest ones, and we’ll trace where they came from, and then we’ll connect you with a lawyer to subpoena the necessary companies.
He’s on the other side of the world, and the line crackles and hums across the miles.
He has a no-nonsense manner, a calming voice with an English accent, and he projects a razor-sharp knowledge of the subject matter. It is a salve.
Until now, few people want to hear about the taunts I wake up to on too many mornings. Ignore it, they say. Stay offline! I am an author with a pen name and some 13-ish books to promote. Books with an offline author sink.
Those well-meaning advice-givers have never endured harassment on every platform they go on day after day, week after week, month after month, all from the same person, like a demon. I put my eggs in Jack’s basket. He is my exorcist.
I sign the contract, pay the firm thousands of dollars, and send the email headers, including the inaugural one. Some of them are upsetting to revisit.
I think that day, as I often do now, if starting up this publication you’re reading was worth it. If it’s helped at least a few of the victim-survivors in the airline industry, that means something, anyway.
I’ve covered shocking, ongoing cases in the airline industry. American Airlines flight attendant Kimberly Goesling. Delta Captains Andrea Ratfield and Karlene Petitt. Southwest Airlines Captain Christine Janning. Alleged victims of American Airlines first officer Sigsbee Nelson. Erica’s story. This depraved Southwest Airlines captain.
These women matter. Their stories matter. The airlines continue to get away with retaliation against whistleblowers and people who report sexual assault. There is much work to be done, and the abuse is meant to silence all of us. It has failed.
The Sten Molin story was off the boil long before I had to hire Jack’s firm.
The person coming at me wouldn’t let it cool down.
After sending the email headers to the firm, I wait.
I think back to how it all began.
September 2021
We are two months away from the twentieth anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587. It remains the second-deadliest plane crash in U.S. history.
I was hit with a gut punch when I learned my friend Sten Molin was at the controls of Flight 587 in November 2001. He was too young. He was a vibrant, dedicated aviator, he told me. The Sten I knew was a bit of a dork, a bit of a goofball, but he seemed to have nice friends who I met on a weekend blind date to a wedding in tony Newport, Rhode Island. In high school Molin wasn’t an accomplished athlete, but he had a knack for technology and computers, which in the nineties was a notable skill.
I remembered him fondly because I had some baaad blind dates, and Molin was one of the good ones.* One guy brought a gun to dinner in Manhattan, something you do not do in that town.
I met another guy out in grizzly country, in a spectacular national park where they train you to avoid bear attacks. I have never fought a grizzly, so was unclear how we’d survive an encounter, as we hiked without bear spray or any other bear repellent. The best the park rangers could offer were some jingle bells and advice to clap our hands a lot as we walked.
By the end of that date, I was fretting less about being eaten by bears and more about how I could get away from the guy.
Sten seemed safe, nice, easy to be around. He talked a lot. By 2021, I hadn’t fully processed the brutal, premature end of a man I thought was an earnest, nice fellow. (The full story and more details about how I knew Sten Molin, from 1997 through 2024, is told through The Landing’s first documentary).
I wondered why there wasn’t much recent biological information or tributes about him online. I had two primary concerns in writing a piece about my time with him:
Was there a love interest around the time of his death who would not appreciate my public memories of trying oysters and drinking top-shelf champagne at a fancy wedding at Jacqueline Kennedy’s childhood home by the sea, Hammersmith Farm?
Was there a legal issue, perhaps one with the settlement, the public was not privy to, and maybe I should let it lie?
I contacted his friends and family from Greenwich, Connecticut, people who’d known him since he was a child. Surely they could guide me as to whether I’d be opening a can of worms that I had no business setting free.
I was given the green light. My concerns, as far as the people who got back to me knew, were unfounded. I think it would be a nice tribute, said one.
My research bore that out. The NTSB report mentioned one woman Molin dated a few years before his death, an American Airlines flight attendant who had recently died. She and Molin were long broken up at the time of his death.
There was a Los Angeles Times article about the NTSB hearings that flat-out stated: Molin was not married and had no children.
In late September, I published two long-form articles about Molin on Medium. One recounted my pleasant time with him, concluding that there was no romantic connection, which was evident a few weeks or months later when he called to ask me to accompany him on a trip to the Caribbean using his travel passes. I declined.
The Onslaught Begins
As readers of this newsletter know, within weeks of publishing the articles, I received a stream of social media missives and emails from women who’d flown with Sten Molin. Most had been sexually assaulted, harassed, bullied or raped by him.
Most of the women—dozens of them—thought they knew Molin. Problem was, they all saw him differently. Some said he was a decorated Navy fighter pilot. Others said he was Air Force. Still others said he was a Yale-trained doctor or an MIT-wunderkind who’d trained to be an astronaut.
I knew for a fact he was none of those things, because his time after high school is well accounted for. I received so many emails, had so many back-and-forths, that I couldn’t keep up anymore.
On January 14, 2022, I published my first article addressing the Sten Molin controversy.
It was dry, short, factual, and made no mention of sexual assault. There was nothing negative in it; it simply rattled off facts and ended with links to my sources. Title: A Brief Biography of American Airlines First Officer Sten Molin.
February 2022: The Angry Emails
It starts rather obnoxiously with an email from someone calling herself Iris.
Subject: Stop your lies about Sten
Sten was a well respected and admired Navy pilot and everyone who flew with him knows this…Sten was a respected Navy man at AA. All pilots including captains looked up to him. I am sorry for you that for some reason you want to tear him down.
I write back, not knowing anything about this person, and explain his work history is well documented. Molin never served in any capacity. A couple emails back and forth. And then, on February 14, Valentine’s Day, Iris seems to give up:
You have a serious case of the green-eyed monster. Poor you.
Bye.
On February 15, I wake up to an email from Nameless Wench.
Subject: Nice try you evil fucking bitch
You pathological evil bitch going after a dead man because he didn’t want you. Note Sten Molin only went for class A women. And whether he has kids is none of your fucking business. How does it feel lying about a dead man? Sten’s military record is well established and you can rot.
I block that account, and the next day, February 16, Claire Molin writes a lovely note to me.
Subject: Take down your lies about Sten
You need to take down your evil lies about Sten Molin. If you don’t I can assure you we are coming for you and we won’t play nice.
Bye bitch
Totally normal, right?
At this stage, I’m utterly confused. My first article about Molin was glowing. My second was brief and factual, with no emotion, no accusations, no nothing.
But this person, whoever she is, is pissed. I block her again.
Next, Untamed Wench (perhaps a cousin of Nameless Wench?) makes an appearance in my inbox on February 18, 2022.
Subject: You are pathetic
You need to back off Sten Molin.
Sten was MY MAN and you don’t know shit. You don’t even have a clue what you are talking about. You don’t know about secret military service. Or what that requires. Or top secret missions. Or what those men endured or the men they lost and couldn’t talk about. Or what Stan Molin could talk about. All you have are basic articles you googled. Hahahah pathetic. Sten Molin was a top naval aviator who flew top secret missions, that you’ll never know about because you are sad and pathetic and you want to tear down a great man. You must lead a miserable life.
Keep in mind I’m doing nothing at this stage. I’m going about my life promoting my military history/memoir The Strong Ones, finishing my next novel, trying to make a living. I’m not writing about or talking about aviation, airlines, or sexual assault.
To say this was bizarre and unsettling time is putting it mildly. I’d become a target when all I wanted to do was write a nice, positive story about a pilot I’d known. Yet the abuse kept coming.
On February 23, C Zoe Leonard sent me a delightful email.
Subject: Despicable.
You believe you can destroy a man’s reputation and just walk off like nothing has happened? Just get away with it and probably keep doing it to other people? Reveal private information that you have absolutely no fucking business revealing. How dare you. What you are doing is violating journalistic integrity. How many children Sten had and with whom is no one’s business and certainly not yours and not something a decent journalist would even write about. To even speculate about this is beyond moral and ethical boundaries as a journalist.
The first explicit death threat came in early March from Hightwaytohell.
Subject: Slut
Take down your lies about sten or I have a penetrating captive bolt pistol which might meet your head
I won’t subject you to more, but I’ll tell you the rage and threat factor ratchets up over time. The sender appears to be heavily invested in what is written about late American Airlines First Officer Sten Molin, and at that point, I have no idea who that could be.
If it had stopped there, you would not be reading anything about it.
If this person’s early fixation had not blossomed into a full-blown obsession, I would not have given this another thought.
But in February of 2022, I was spinning, I was investigating, I was asking around, I was thinking of how I could stop this. Fast forward to November 2024, and Jack was on the case tracking these emails.
Who was this person? How would we prove they were all her? It begins with recording and analyzing everything that comes at me. There are tells, patterns, and digital footprints people can’t help but repeat. There is a backstory I’d eventually learn about, and it would be uglier than I ever imagined.
Chapter Three is coming soon.
Thank you for reading, and be safe out there.
-Sara
*This is a perspective I would be forced revisit in the years to come, when I’d have to consider some uncomfortable possibilities. More in future chapters.
Spoiler alert Molin had kids with underage girls in Australia, Florida and France. Molin also has a small band of rape mates and other creepers from Australia still defending him. Men who don’t want the skeletons in their own closets revealed to the world. They’re all scum. Gutter crawling scum. The aviation industry is a cesspool of creepers and pervs. F@#$k her and F@#$&k them all. I hope Molin is rotting in Hell. I hope Jim Bean and the rest of them all rot in hell as well. Shame on you.