Returning home from a guided food tour in Mexico with her girlfriends, Gretchen Stelter settled into her business-class window seat on American Airlines and began editing a book manuscript for her new job.
The 42-year-old editor, worried about an 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 “dropped” her job and made small talk with the man during their two-hour flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Chicago.
But according to Stelter’s ongoing lawsuit, American Airlines employees failed to protect her from what happened next: Her seatmate, who ordered two double vodka sodas, became ” drunk uncontrollably and sexually harassed her loudly.” He also grabbed her buttocks as she moved to exchange seats with a friendly passenger, according to the complaint.
Stelter’s lawsuit, filed in Cook County in late May, also alleges that American Airlines employees “humiliated and blamed” her in the hours and days following her Oct. 29 ordeal.
A spokesperson for the Fort Worth-based carrier declined to comment Friday, citing the ongoing litigation.
The lawsuit is the latest in a series of recent public relations problems for the airline.
Federal authorities say a former American Airlines flight attendant tried to record a 14-year-old girl last September while she was using the restroom and was in possession of recordings of four others minors. Some of the girls’ families have filed a lawsuit against 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 for discriminatory behavior after they and other black passengers were temporarily removed from a flight in January following a complaint of “offensive body odor.” In a June 18 letter to his employees, American Airlines CEO Robert Isom called the incident “unacceptable” and pledged to take several steps to improve diversity and inclusion. Isom said he also spoke with leaders of the NAACP, who threatened to issue a travel advisory against the carrier.
In an interview with the Tribune, Stelter said she had a long travel day on Oct. 29 after enjoying a nine-day vacation in Mexico with several girlfriends. Traveling alone, she began her journey at 6 a.m. in Oaxaca; her itinerary included stops in Mexico City and Dallas-Fort Worth, where she boarded American Flight 1551 bound for 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 in order to have more space to tackle the manuscript for a romantic fantasy series she was editing for her new job at a publishing house based in Naperville. She said the man right next to her in 3B — the aisle seat — ordered a double vodka soda and struck up a conversation.
“It was immediately clear that he wanted to talk,” she said. “He wouldn’t stop talking.”
Stelter said the conversation began innocuously enough with chatter about their lives, their travels and even the writings of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. His table neighbor spoke coherently at first, Stelter said.
About an hour into the flight, the man ordered a refill of his drink, according to the suit. Stelter, who had finished her soft drink, decided to order an alcoholic drink as well, she said.
“He wasn’t insulting and he didn’t start out being inappropriate,” she said. “It definitely got worse the more alcohol he was served.”
Stelter said she grew increasingly uncomfortable as he complimented her appearance, complained about his girlfriend and said he wished the woman looked more like him. Stelter, who was wearing her wedding ring, said she politely brushed him off, telling the man she was “happily married.”
He called himself “stupid” and told himself to “shut up,” according to the lawsuit, but he persisted anyway.
The complaint alleges that two flight attendants were nearby when the man “made vile, offensive and harassing comments” to Stelter, claiming he was going to perform a sexual act on her, using foul language, and that he would “wear her out” and “f−−−” her.)
Stelter said she constantly told him “no” and asked him to stop talking and stop drinking.
“Honestly, I was trapped,” she told the Tribune. “I was in 3A. He was in 3B. My only way out of that seat was to either have some sort of help or climb on top of him, giving him full access to parts of my body that I didn’t feel like giving him access to.
Other passengers noticed him, including a man seated directly across from Stelter in 2A who summoned a flight attendant after asking if Stelter was OK and she told him no, according to the lawsuit. Her seatmate told the employee he was “having fun” and Stelter said the flight attendant took “no action to protect her.”
“He moved away, allowing the attacker to keep the alcohol (which) had remained in his glass as well as the bottle of vodka, remaining in plain view on his tray table,” the complaint states.
Stelter said the man’s harassing behavior continued throughout the flight. He told her they were “going to party,” touched her hair several times 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 him despite his 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 defuse the situation by responding to the man calmly but firmly, drawing on her training gained working part-time at a rape crisis center.
“I think I was a little shocked that no one helped me,” she said. “I wanted to curl up and be as small as possible because I didn’t want anyone to touch me anymore.”
Shortly before landing, the passenger in 2A offered to swap seats. The lawsuit alleges that Stelter’s “assaulter” grabbed her buttocks as she stepped over him to leave the row, while the two flight attendants stood nearby. She said he continued to verbally harass her through the space between the seats.
Upon landing at O’Hare, the lawsuit says, passengers were asked to remain seated while police removed the man from the plane after determining he was “too intoxicated to move safely.” . Stelter said emergency medical personnel then removed him from the airport on a stretcher.
The lawsuit alleges that the airline’s gate agents “reprimanded and reprimanded” Stelter during a conversation immediately after the flight and suggested that she had not done enough to stop his behavior. She filed a complaint the next day on American’s website. Four days after her flight, she received an “email response form,” the lawsuit states. At her request, a customer service representative called her.
“After explaining that she had alerted the American flight attendants to the attacker’s behavior and that they had taken no action in response, the American customer relations employee yelled at her and placed blame (Stelter ) for the incident, leaving her in tears,” he added. the lawsuit alleges.
A few days later, Stelter said, a member of the airline’s management team called and acknowledged that the former employee had not handled the situation properly and promised that someone from his team would The global survey would contact you. She said that never happened.
Stelter said she had been in contact with the FBI and signed a complaint against the intoxicated passenger. His attorneys, Deanna Pihos and Benjamin Blustein, said they did not know whether he faced criminal charges or a civil penalty. He is not named in the lawsuit.
The Federal Aviation Administration reported a sharp increase in passenger indiscipline in 2021, leading to a zero-tolerance policy that replaced warning letters with fines. There were 5,973 incidents involving unruly passengers 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, of which 106 were linked to alcohol consumption.
Last month, the FAA filed a federal lawsuit to recover a nearly $82,000 fine from a San Antonio woman who tried to open an American Airlines cabin door mid-flight in July 2021 and was ultimately restrained with duct tape.
In January, a passenger on an American Airlines flight from Dallas-Fort Worth was accused of assaulting a flight attendant and then kicking a police officer. And in March, a drunken passenger on an American Airlines flight to Tampa was kicked out when he was accused of threatening to “bring this plane down.”
Once an avid traveler who said she lived in Australia, got engaged in Paris and visited destinations as far afield as London, Fiji, Ireland, New Zealand and Italy, Stelter said the ordeal made her had left mainly anxious, panic attacks and other emotional distress.
She accepted a voluntary demotion in her full-time job and was unable to fill her positions as a part-time on-call advocate for rape survivors, according to her lawsuit.
“It’s one of the hardest things about trauma,” she told the Tribune, “when it takes away something you love.”
Stelter said she is suing for damages, lost revenue 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 step instead of being listened to and supported,” she said. “It was just a complete failure at every moment to do anything to protect myself or validate myself. If someone had at some point said, “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” and then reacted that way, the situation would have been very different.
cmgutowski@chicagotribune.com