Returning home from a guided food tour in Mexico with her friends, Gretchen Stelter settled into her American Airlines business class window seat and began editing a book manuscript for her new job.
The 42-year-old editor, worried about a fast-approaching deadline, said she hoped her open laptop and AirPods in her ears would discourage the chatty passenger next to her. When her plan failed, Stelter said, she “gave up” on work and chatted a little with the man during the two-hour flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Chicago.
But according to Stelter’s pending lawsuit, American Airlines employees failed to protect her from what happened next: Her seatmate, who ordered two double vodka sodas, became “uncontrollably drunk and sexually harassed her in a loud voice.” high”. He also grabbed her buttocks as she moved to change seats with a supportive passenger, the complaint alleges.
Stelter’s lawsuit, filed in Cook County in late May, also alleges that American Airlines employees “shamed and victim-blamed” her in the hours and days following her Oct. 29 ordeal.
A spokesperson for the Fort Worth-based airline declined to comment Friday, citing pending litigation.
The lawsuit is the latest in a series of recent public relations headaches for the airline.
Federal authorities said a former American Airlines flight attendant tried to record a 14-year-old girl last September while she was using the bathroom and that he was in possession of recordings of four other minors. Some of the girls’ families sued the airline. The man pleaded not guilty last month to attempted sexual exploitation of children and possession of child pornography.
Also last month, three black men sued the carrier alleging discriminatory behavior after they and other black passengers were temporarily removed from a January flight due to a complaint of “offensive body odor.” In a June 18 letter to his employees, American Airlines CEO Robert Isom called the incident “unacceptable” and promised several actions to improve diversity and inclusion. Isom said he also spoke with NAACP leaders, who threatened to issue a travel warning against the carrier.
In an interview with the Tribune, Stelter said she had a long travel day on Oct. 29 after spending nine days on vacation in Mexico with several friends. Traveling alone, she began her journey at 6am in Oaxaca; Her itinerary included stops in Mexico City and Dallas-Fort Worth, where she boarded American Flight 1551 to O’Hare.
She planned to drive from Chicago to the home she shares with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin.
Stelter said she “splurged” on a business class seat to have more room to handle the manuscript for a romantic fantasy series she was editing for her new job at a Naperville-based publishing company. She said the man next to her in 3B — the aisle seat — ordered a double vodka soda and struck up a conversation.
“It was pretty clear right away that he wanted to talk,” she said. “He just kept talking.”
Stelter said the conversation began innocuously enough with chats about their lives, their travels and even the writings of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Her seatmate was speaking coherently at first, Stelter said.
About an hour into the flight, the man asked for another shot of his drink, according to the lawsuit. Stelter, who had finished her soda, decided to order an alcoholic drink as well, she said.
“He wasn’t mean-spirited and he didn’t start out being inappropriate,” she said. “He definitely got worse as he was served more alcohol.”
Stelter said she became increasingly uncomfortable when he complimented her appearance, complained about her girlfriend and said he wished the woman was more like her. Stelter, who was wearing her wedding ring, said she politely rejected him, telling the man she was “happily married.”
He called himself “stupid” and told himself to “shut up,” the suit said, but he still persisted.
The complaint alleges that two flight attendants were nearby when the man “made vile, offensive and harassing comments” to Stelter, saying he was going to perform a sexual act on her, using coarse language, and that he would “wear her down” and “fuck” her.)
Stelter said she always told him “no” and asked him to stop talking and drinking.
“Honestly, I was stuck,” she told the Tribune. “I was in 3A. He was in 3B. My only way to get out of that seat was to have some kind of help or to climb over him, giving him full access to parts of my body that I didn’t feel like giving him access to.”
Other passengers noticed, including a man sitting directly across from Stelter in 2A who summoned a flight attendant after asking if Stelter was OK and she said no, according to the lawsuit. His seatmate told the employee he was just “having fun,” and Stelter said the flight attendant “took no action to protect her.”
“He walked away, allowing the attacker to store the remaining alcohol in his glass, as well as the bottle of vodka that remained in view on his tray,” the complaint said.
Stelter said the man’s harassing behavior continued throughout the flight. He told her they were “going to a party,” repeatedly touched her hair and tried to hold her hand and kiss her, according to the lawsuit, and began spitting on the floor.
Stelter’s complaint alleges that two flight attendants in the business class section of the plane witnessed much of the man’s behavior and failed to help her, despite her complaints that he was harassing and touching her and that he was going to get sick. The lawsuit acknowledges that they warned the man to stop touching other passengers; Stelter also mentioned in an interview that they gave him water and offered to help him go to the bathroom.
Feeling trapped, Stelter said she tried to calm the situation by responding to the man calmly but firmly, drawing on her training gained from working part-time at a rape crisis center.
“I think I was a little shocked because no one was helping me,” she said. “I wanted to curl up into a ball and be as small as possible because I didn’t want to be touched anymore.”
Just before landing, the male passenger in 2A offered to change seats. The lawsuit alleges that Stelter’s “attacker” grabbed her buttocks as she stepped over him to get out of line while the two flight attendants were nearby. She said he continued to verbally harass her through the space between the seats.
Upon landing at O’Hare, the lawsuit said, passengers were asked to remain seated while police removed the man from the plane after determining he was “too drunk to move safely.” Stelter said emergency medical personnel later removed him from the airport on a stretcher.
The suit alleges that airline gate agents “chastised and blamed” Stelter during a conversation immediately after the flight and suggested that she had not done enough to stop his behavior. She filed a complaint on American’s website the next day. Four days after her flight, she received a “form email response,” the lawsuit said. At her request, a customer relations officer called her.
“After explaining that she had alerted the American flight attendants to the attacker’s behavior and they had taken no action in response, the American customer relations officer screamed and blamed (Stelter) for the incident, leaving her in tears ”, the court allegation.
A few days later, Stelter said, a member of the airline’s executive team called and acknowledged that the previous employee had not handled the situation appropriately and promised that someone from the global investigations team would get in touch. She said that never happened.
Stelter said he contacted the FBI and signed a report against the drunk passenger. His lawyers, Deanna Pihos and Benjamin Blustein, said they do not know whether he faces criminal charges or a civil penalty. He is not named in the lawsuit.
The Federal Aviation Administration reported a sharp increase in passenger unruliness in 2021, leading to a zero-tolerance policy that replaced warning letters with monetary fines. There were 5,973 unruly passenger incidents that year, according to the FAA. The number of incidents fell to 2,455 in 2022, 2,075 in 2023 and 915 cases in 2024 as of June 9, with 106 of these incidents related to alcohol consumption.
Last month, the FAA filed a federal lawsuit to collect a fine of nearly $82,000 from a San Antonio woman who tried to open an American Airlines cabin door mid-flight in July 2021 and ended up being restrained with Scotch tape.
In January, a passenger on an American Airlines flight out of Dallas-Fort Worth was accused of assaulting a flight attendant and then kicking a police officer. And in March, an intoxicated passenger on an American Airlines flight to Tampa was removed when he was accused of threatening to “shoot down this plane.”
Once an avid traveler who said she lived in Australia, got engaged in Paris and visited far-flung destinations like London, Fiji, Ireland, New Zealand and Italy, Stelter said the ordeal left her mostly trapped by anxiety, panic attacks and other emotional distress. .
She accepted a voluntary demotion from her full-time job and has been unable to fill her shifts as a part-time on-call advocate for rape survivors, according to her lawsuit.
“That’s one of the hardest things about trauma,” she told the Tribune, “when it takes away something you love.”
Stelter said he is suing for damages, lost profits and to send a message to American Airlines to improve its employee training to better handle in-flight incidents and passenger complaints.
“I was retraumatized at every turn instead of being heard and supported,” she said. “It was a complete failure to do anything to protect myself or to validate myself. If someone at some point had said, ‘I’m sorry this happened to you,’ and they had handled it that way from then on, it would be a very different situation.”
cmgutowski@chicagotribune.com
