In Historic Crackdown, Coast Guard Charges 47 Mariners with Sexual Misconduct in 2024
New York, NY
April 10, 2024
By: MLAA
In a historic series of long-overdue enforcement actions driven by passage of the Safer Seas Act, the U.S. Coast Guard charged at least 47 Coast Guard-credentialed mariners with sexual misconduct in 2024—marking the largest crackdown on shipboard abuse in American maritime history. Basic details about the 47 Suspension & Revocation cases are listed on the website of the Coast Guard’s long-troubled Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) court, which has for decades operated with little transparency and faced persistent allegations of bias, corruption, and inaction.
Under sustained pressure from Congress—and following a 2022 federal lawsuit brought by Maritime Legal Aid & Advocacy (MLAA) against the Coast Guard—the ALJ court recently began publishing its docket for the first time in its history. The involuntary move to open its docket to the public has exposed, in stark detail, the government’s belated effort to confront a crisis of sexual violence in the U.S. maritime industry, and the Coast Guard’s accelerated use of Suspension & Revocation actions against mariners credibly accused of sexual misconduct.
The sudden burst of enforcement marks a dramatic departure from the agency’s prior approach. Documents obtained through MLAA’s 2022 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation against the Coast Guard revealed that over the previous decade, the Coast Guard had opened just five sexual assault investigations across the entire U.S. maritime workforce. That statistic was confirmed publicly by then–Commandant Admiral Karl Schultz during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on October 19, 2021, just weeks after MLAA published the bombshell Midshipman-X disclosures that forever changed the maritime industry. Under questioning from Senator Maria Cantwell, Schultz acknowledged that only five reports of shipboard sexual assault had reached the Coast Guard in ten years—a figure that shocked lawmakers and helped expose the extent of the system’s failure.
Days before that hearing, Senator Cantwell had copied Admiral Schultz on a blistering letter to the U.S. Maritime Administration demanding accountability in response to “allegations of rape, rampant unchecked sexual violence, and oversight and policy failures posted on the MLAA website.” That pressure helped build the political will for what followed: survivor-led reforms, independent investigations, and eventually, the Safer Seas Act.
Helping to accelerate that transformation was a deeply reported 2023 CNN investigation titled “Failed Oversight, Lax Punishments: How the Coast Guard Has Allowed Sexual Assault at Sea to Go Unchecked.” With cooperation from Hope Hicks (Midshipman X) and MLAA’s founder Ryan Melogy (who provided documents from MLAA’s lawsuit to the reporters), CNN journalists Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken uncovered and exposed decades of inaction, neglect, and coverup by the Coast Guard:
…hundreds of pages of the Coast Guard’s own records, as well as interviews with shipping company and union officials, current and former government employees and dozens of mariners, show that the Coast Guard has failed to use its power to prevent and punish sexual assault and misconduct for decades — despite growing evidence that this kind of behavior is a longstanding problem at sea.
The Safer Seas Act of 2022 responded directly to these failures. Among its mandates: criminal background checks, new vessel safety requirements (like CCTV and controlled master keys), mandatory reporting of all harassment and assault complaints, and expanded authority for the Coast Guard to deny, suspend, or revoke credentials. Critically, Congressional pressure and demands for accountability surrounding passage of the law also forced the Coast Guard to publish the results of credentialing actions—finally shining sunlight on an opaque administrative system that had quietly protected predators for years.
The 47 cases brought in 2024 span a wide range of roles, ranks, and vessel types—from deep-sea officers and engineers to unlicensed crew on smaller ships. ALJ case files show mariners charged with “Sexual Assault,” “Sexual Harassment,” or both—sometimes alongside other misconduct. In many instances, the Coast Guard sought the ultimate sanction: revocation of the mariner’s credential, permanently barring them from working at sea. However, because the ALJ Docketing Center refuses to release records on the cases to the public in violation of federal law, MLAA has been unable to learn more about the cases beyond what the Coast Gaurd has published online.
Ryan Melogy, the attorney who founded MLAA, represented both Midshipman X and Y in the civil suits against Maersk, and helped drive the creation and passage of the Safer Seas Act called the wave of license revocations a “historic turning point” in addressing sexual misconduct at sea. “The Coast Guard is finally doing what survivors and advocates have asked for all along—investigating crimes and taking allegations seriously. But this is just the beginning.”
Removing offenders from ships makes the environment immediately safer and sends a deterrent message, Melogy said. At the same time, he and others argue that true justice requires prosecutions. “We’ve never had a criminal prosecution,” said Melogy. “We’ve never even seen the Coast Guard’s ALJ Court revoke a mariner’s credential for shipboard sexual misconduct. The Coast Guard and the entire industry have a long, long way to go.”
Still, for many victims, the Coast Guard’s actions in 2024 represent something long denied: recognition, validation, and professional consequences for their abusers. For the first time in modern maritime history, sexual misconduct at sea is being addressed not as an internal Human Resources problem within a shipping company, but as a public safety issue—and one the government is finally beginning to treat with the seriousness it deserves.