Heading home after a guided food excursion in Mexico with her girlfriends, Gretchen Stelter settled into the window seat in business class on American Airlines and began editing a book manuscript for her new job.
The 42-year-old editor, worried about the fast-approaching deadline, said she hoped her open laptop and AirPods in her ears would discourage the chattering passenger next to her. When her plan failed, Stelter said, she “gave up” and made small talk with the man during their 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 friend, who ordered two double vodka drinks, became “uncontrollably intoxicated and sexually assaulted her.” “. He also grabbed her rear as she moved to swap seats with a sympathetic passenger, the complaint alleges.
Stelter’s lawsuit, filed in Cook County in late May, also alleges that American Airlines employees “shamed and blamed” her in the hours and days following her Oct. 29 ordeal.
A spokesman for the Fort Worth-based carrier declined to comment Friday, citing the pending litigation.
The suit 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 a restroom and that he had the records of four other minors in his possession. Some of the girls’ families have sued the airline. The man pleaded not guilty last month to attempted child sexual exploitation 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 flight in January over 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 has also spoken with NAACP leaders, who had threatened to issue a travel advisory against the carrier.
In an interview with the Tribune, Stelter said he had a long travel day on Oct. 29 after enjoying a nine-day vacation in Mexico with some girlfriends. Traveling alone, she started 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 was “delighted” in a business-class seat so she would have more room to tackle the manuscript from a romance fantasy series she was editing for her new job at a Washington-based publishing house. in Naperville. She said the man directly 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 with talk of their lives, their travels and even the writings of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Her seatmate was initially speaking coherently, Stelter said.
About an hour into the flight, the man ordered a refill of his drink, according to the lawsuit. Stelter, who had finished her soft drink, decided to order another alcoholic drink, she said.
“He wasn’t embarrassing and he didn’t start being inappropriate,” she said. “It obviously escalated the more he was served alcohol.”
Stelter said she became increasingly uncomfortable as he complimented her looks, complained about his girlfriend and said he wished the woman was more like her. Stelter, who was wearing her wedding ring, said she politely countered, telling the man she was “happily married.”
He called himself “stupid” and told himself to “shut up,” the lawsuit said, but continued anyway.
The complaint alleges that two flight attendants were nearby when the man “made disgusting, insulting and harassing comments” to Stelter, saying he was going to perform a sexual act on her, using foul language and that he was going to “clothe her” and “f −−−” her.)
Stelter said she repeatedly told him “no” and asked him to stop talking and stop drinking.
“Honestly, I was blocked,” she told Tribuna. “I was in 3 A. He was in 3B. My only way to get off that seat was to either have some kind of help or hold on to him, giving him full access to parts of my body I didn’t want to give him access to.”
Other passengers noticed, including a man sitting directly in front of Stelter in 2A, who called a flight attendant after he asked if Stelter was OK and she told him she wasn’t, according to the lawsuit. Her seatmate told the employee he was just “having fun,” and Stelter said the flight attendant took “no action to protect him.”
“He walked away, allowing the assailant to keep the alcohol (that) was left in his glass, and the bottle of vodka was then left in plain view on his desk,” the complaint said.
Stelter said the man’s harassing behavior continued throughout the flight. He told her they were “going to the 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 many of the man’s behaviors and failed to help her despite her complaints that he was harassing and touching her and that she was getting sick. The suit admits they warned the man to stop touching other passengers; Stelter also mentioned in an interview that he was given water and offered help in the bathroom.
Feeling trapped, Stelter said she tried to de-escalate the situation by responding to the man calmly but firmly, drawing on her training from her part-time job at a rape crisis center.
“I think I was a little shocked that no one was helping me,” she said. “I wanted to go back 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 trade seats. The lawsuit alleges that Stelter’s “assailant” grabbed her behind as she walked past her to leave the aisle, while two flight attendants stood nearby. She said he continued to verbally harass her through the gap between the seats.
After landing at O’Hare, the suit 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 later removed him from the airport on a stretcher.
The lawsuit alleges that the airline’s gate agents “condemned and blamed” Stelter during a conversation shortly 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 response email,” the lawsuit said. At her request, a customer relations officer called her.
“After explaining that she had alerted the American flight attendants about the attacker’s behavior and they had taken no action in response, the American customer relations employee yelled at her and blamed (Stelter) for the incident, leaving (her) in tears. the lawsuit claims.
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 properly and promised that someone with their global investigations team would be in touch. She said this never happened.
Stelter said she has been in contact with the FBI and signed a complaint against the intoxicated passenger. Her attorneys, Deanna Pihos and Benjamin Blustein, said they don’t know if 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 noncompliance in 2021, leading to a zero-tolerance policy that replaced warning letters with monetary fines. There were 5,973 incidents of 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, with 106 of those incidents linked to drinking alcohol.
Last month, the FAA filed a federal lawsuit to collect 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 eventually stopped with duct tape.
In January, a passenger on an American Airlines flight from Dallas-Fort Worth was accused of assaulting a flight attendant and later 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 “crash this plane.”
Once an avid traveler who said she has lived in Australia, got engaged in Paris and visited such far-flung destinations as London, Fiji, Ireland, New Zealand and Italy, Stelter said the ordeal has left her mostly based on anxiety, panic attacks and other emotional disturbances.
She accepted a voluntary reduction in 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 something away from you that you love.”
Stelter said she is suing for damages, lost earnings 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 just a complete failure at every turn to do anything to protect me or validate me. If someone at one point had said, ‘I’m so sorry this happened to you,’ and then they had handled it that way since then, it would have been a very different situation.”
cmgutowski@chicagotribune.com