Stalking in Aviation: Pilot Stalks FA, United Airlines Does Nothing Shocker
PLUS: Chapter Four: My stalking ordeal continues
Read the first three chapters in the Stalker Series here.
I hope you’re doing well. Or well-ish. As good as can be expected.
I thought 2024 with the cancer scare and surgery (it was precancer) and stalking and lawyers was going to be one of the worst years in recent memory. I thought 2025 would be about recovering and resetting.
Nope. This year came in and said to 2024, Hold my beer, and I’m reeling.
So, Chapter Four in the stalking series is in your inbox because it’s been awhile since you’ve heard from me, so I figured you could handle another installment, and maybe you’re looking for something to distract you from the headlines.
As we chug toward the big reveal, I have some some fresh stories about women in aviation coming up, including that of Captain Michelle Huntington, who’s faced challenges at work similar to those of the women I write about. Her book, Lady MacGyver: Unbelievable Stories With Altitude, drops this summer. Watch this space!
“While the entire [stalking] experience was traumatic, the most disconcerting aspect of the ordeal was knowing there is a person out there, fixated on you, for such an extraordinary amount of time, and with such negative intensity.” —Nicole Madigan, author, journalist and stalking victim-survivor
Chapter Four
It’s 2023, and I’m thinking, The cyberstalking has to stop at some point.
Doesn’t it?
She takes a brief break that spring, and I’m able to thrive online, safely and comfortably enough, for a couple of months, to connect with friends, fellow authors and journalists. I have to be there to engage with readers so they know me and buy my books. This is how I earn a living.
My peace doesn’t last long.
She returns with a vengeance as summer 2023 bears down. Her first reappearance is with a burner account calling itself “Mr. Smith.” She inserts herself into a discussion on my Twitter page about Delta Captain Andrea Ratfield’s case, and apropos of nothing, she tosses in the name Sten Molin, the American Airlines pilot whose “aggressive” and “unneccesary” use of the rudder brought down Flight 587 in 2001 per the NTSB.
“Mr. Smith” writes that “Sten Molin has a child with a beautiful young lady (a friend of mine)…”
On this very rare occasion, I take the bait, if only, I tell myself, to go on record one final time to tell her to leave me alone and stop contacting me.
When I give her what she wants, when she has my attention, she can’t contain herself. She drops all pretense and writes in the first person about her “love” as a young teen with 34-year-old Molin; it won’t be the first or last time she impersonates a man to harass me.
Keep in mind this was two years ago. I didn’t yet have a handle on how extreme the fixation was. I was only beginning to understand she viewed me as a romantic rival for a dead man I met in person once in the late 1990s. It’s like a horror movie where the protagonists think they got rid of the evil presence, but when they move, it follows.
And believe me when I tell you it alarmed me when this person claimed she was a pilot and/or a “propulsion engineer.” I’ve read that she can no longer fly, but I don’t know.
It is also not the last time she will focus on appearance, both hers and mine. She breaks into other people’s social media conversations to call herself “beautiful,” “much more beautiful and much younger” than I am, and posts comments using flame emojis to describe herself as “hot,” all while putting me down and comparing me to dogs (which I LOVE) and Ron Jeremy (a porn star indicted on over 30 counts of rape and sexual assault).
Around this time, there were many Twitter accounts constantly harassing me with the same talking points and insults, with the same obsessive habits, most using a form of her name/initials or Molin’s. Some included sexually graphic images and text. At no time did I see anyone emerge to protest and say they were being impersonated.
Some of those CZL/Iris/Molin/Zoe/Claire/Leonard accounts followed one another. The person stalking me, whoever they are, often mentions Twitter accounts from years ago and shares screenshots on her two YouTube channels. If she were being impersonated back then, a time when she admits she was in the mix, there were no reports to me or to Twitter, no private messages to let me know someone was posing as her to threaten me.
It doesn’t matter, anyway. If we take only what she admits to and what I can prove, she is breaking the law in multiple countries.
People who have been stalked, including the Australian journalist and author Nicole Madigan, will tell you the sheer volume of hate is shocking, overwhelming and disconcerting—to say the least.
It’s not only the content of the messages that makes stalking a crime or an offense. The scope of the unwanted behavior is a huge part of it.
Further, researchers recognize there is an important difference between internet trolls and cyberstalkers. As Madigan, who wrote a book about her ordeal (like me, her stalker is also an Australian woman) called Obsession: A Journalist and Victim-Survivor’s Investigation into Stalking, puts it in an article for Mamamia,
When it comes to stalking, ignoring it won't make it go away. And just because you don't know about it, doesn't mean it's not happening. Unlike an internet troll, who feeds off interaction and reactions generally, a stalker's fixation is on a specific person, meaning their psychological needs differ significantly.
In other words, while trolls engage in trolling for the fun of provoking a response, stalkers are more emotionally invested in pursuing a victim.
That means blocking and ignoring a troll may leave them bored, and ultimately move on to troll someone else. Conversely, deleting your accounts or ignoring a stalker who is already heavily invested in their target may have the opposite effect…
Here’s a small sampling of 2023’s barrage of harassment:
If you watch my YouTube video “Secrets of Flight 587: A Pilot’s Double Life,” Around the 17:40 mark, you’ll see a scrolling screen-grab of a few pages of harassing Twitter accounts I had to block on a weekly basis. I’ve since left Twitter/X.
But while stalker typologies and motivations vary, there is one thing all stalkers have in common: obsession and entitlement. —Nicole Madigan in The Guardian newspaper
It’s irksome to have to spend time on this person, but it comes with the territory. She often fights with people/accounts who are clearly not me, and this, too, is not uncommon. Writes Nicole Madigan,
As part of my research, I spoke with a former homicide detective who had also experienced online stalking by a female who was unknown to him. He told me he actively kept across her movements, including reading the barrage of emails, for his own safety, as well as his family. Knowledge is power, he said.
They get Away With it: This is What Happens When You Speak Out about Stalking at the Airlines
Here are some stalking cases from United Airlines, Delta, and American Airlines:
Andrew Hill, 36, a pilot for United Airlines, was charged with two counts of distribution of pornography, a third-degree felony; stalking, online impersonation, distribution of an intimate image, and more, after detectives investigated reports from a former flight attendant with whom Hill had a brief relationship in 2013. They found that Hill messaged other men pretending to be her, telling them the FA "has fantasies of being raped," and prompting strangers to solicit her for sex.
Hill "demonstrated a cavalier attitude," and "mockingly laughed at the victim when confronted and indicated that she could not touch him." This will ring terrifyingly true to a lot of flight attendants out there. Andrew Hill was convicted and sentenced to prison in 2024.
United Airlines outdid itself in protecting convicted stalker/predator pilot Mark Uhlenbrock. This article explains it all and should INFURIATE you. In 2015, Uhlenbrock was arrested by the FBI for continuing to post nude images of an FA he was stalking. He pleaded guilty to stalking and was sentenced to 41 months in prison. The captain was allegedly allowed to retire with full benefits in 2016, according to an EEOC complaint. The EEOC said the airline failed to prevent and correct the pilot's behavior, even after the flight attendant made numerous complaints. Caught red-handed, United’s response was that the airline "will vigorously defend against this case."
Spoiler alert: UNITED LOST. Uhlenbrock was convicted multiple times and went to federal lockup. He lost his appeal this year.
A former Delta pilot was reportedly stalking a woman headed to pilot training in Atlanta. They were traveling on board Delta flight 2835, and she was concerned enough for her safety that the flight’s captain reported this to dispatch during the trip, and was requesting assistance and an escort for the woman who was going to stay on board initially during deplaning. (View from the Wing).
American Airlines First Officer Sten Molin sent reams of “unpleasantly intimate,” unwanted emails to FAs who say they reported him to American and told Molin to leave them alone; they said no repeatedly to his requests or demands for sex from them. One night, saying he was “under the influence,” he wrote to one FA, “Baby I want you to come sit on my face.”
Molin also wrote to another FA that one of his girlfriends in the early 2000s was “pretty enough” but that he wanted, deserved (and was stalking) “a stunner.”
“Stalking refers to a constellation of behaviors involving repeated and persistent attempts to impose on another person unwanted communication and/or contact.” —American Journal of Psychiatry
As Rosemary Purcell, a pioneer of stalking research and professor of mental health at the University of Melbourne, puts it:
"You don't need to have a finger laid upon you to have your life ruined by a stalker."
As I was writing this chapter, I dug deeper into Madigan’s case, and the similarities blew me away. Some of her writing about her ordeal is almost word-for-word what I’ve written previously, and perfectly describes what I’ve experienced, such as this passage:
Sometimes, the contact was daily and intense; other times, weeks of silence would pass. She would attack my appearance, my work, my family; make threats, spread rumours, and mimic my actions. And she would watch.
And, as Madigan wrote in The Guardian newspaper,
Society’s collective lack of understanding about what stalking is, and its overwhelmingly dismissive attitude towards it, undermine the intense mental upheaval that victim-survivors experience.
An often all-encompassing trauma that can unleash suddenly, or creep up slowly (as it did for me). Like a dripping tap—annoying at first, but before long each drip seems louder, the frequency higher. Soon, you begin to hear it even when it’s not in the room, it keeps you awake at night, and eventually, starts to drive you mad.
Cyberstalking is illegal, it is damaging, and it is serious.
Next I’ll dive into 2024, the year things began to change.
How I found the evidence.
How I took action.*
Stay safe.
-Sara
*I still need a location and full name for my lawyers to send a cease and desist letter, which is necessary to open a case.
OfSten is still at it!!? Oh my Lord!
She’s insane. Imagine being so pathetic you defend someone like Molin. Yes Sara, she considers you a love rival for Molin (as if someone like you would be interested in a fugly creep like Molin). She’s also covering up the fact that she was in a relationship with him when she was underage. I am now certain of this. Molin was one of God’s ugliest creations since the goblin shark. Dude was downright sinister, an intense, slimy and aloof character. His presence even before uttering a single word was intimidating. And that photo of him, he has nothing behind his eyes and that crazed psychotic look, that’s terrifying. He brainwashed and groomed everyone around him including her. Well birds of a feather, two malignant psychopaths(CZL and Molin) found love with one another.
On a somewhat lighter note I look forward to reading Michelle’s book. I am heartened to see women forging a path for themselves in the male dominated world of aviation.