He was a 19-year-old deck cadet, a week into his first trip to sea, when Chief Mate Mark Stinziano came aboard the M/V Maersk Idaho and introduced himself as his new boss. Over the next four months, according to findings later issued by a federal Administrative Law Judge, Stinziano sexually assaulted the cadet on multiple occasions, repeatedly humiliated him sexually in front of the crew, threatened him with sexual violence, and required him to work hours that violated federal limits. By the time the cadet signed off the ship, he had given up on a career at sea.
The cadet was a student at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy (USMMA) completing Sea Year, the year of shipboard training that all USMMA students must finish before they can sit for their Coast Guard merchant mariner licenses. The Academy assigned him to the Idaho, a U.S.-flagged container ship operated by Maersk Line, Limited.
Federal Administrative Law Judge George J. Jordan would later find that Stinziano's conduct left the cadet feeling “demeaned, like less of a person, worn out, and depressed.” Sitting on the witness stand a few feet from Stinziano, the cadet described what Stinziano had done to him. Stinziano touched his buttocks on multiple occasions through his clothing. During a lifeboat drill — one of the more dangerous evolutions on a commercial vessel — Stinziano approached the cadet from behind, wrapped his arms around him, and simulated a sex act on him in front of the crew. He pressed his groin against the cadet's buttocks and simulated sex acts on other occasions. He threatened to punch the cadet in the genitals. He drew a penis on the cadet's hardhat with a Sharpie and required the cadet to wear it in front of the crew. He inserted a pen into his own buttocks on the bridge of the vessel, made the cadet smell the pen, then returned the pen to the container where the bridge crew kept theirs. He required the cadet to address him as “daddy” over the ship's radio, while Stinziano called the cadet “buttercake” in front of the crew. He required the cadet to work shifts longer than 24 hours. On one occasion, after fifteen hours of continuous work, Stinziano allowed the cadet a ten-minute break to eat.
The cadet was nineteen. He could not leave the ship. Judge Jordan would find that the structural power Stinziano held over his career placed him at “the complete mercy of the Respondent.”
“It didn't make me feel very great about myself,” the cadet testified.
“It made me feel like I wasn't strong enough, I guess, for the industry…I believe I just compressed my feelings and went throughout the day without thinking much of it, just trying to get through the vessel.”
The cadet also testified that Stinziano forced him to come to his stateroom some evenings after Stinziano’s bridge watch ended to watch movies. Some of those movies were pornographic. One of the movies was A Serbian Film, a 2010 horror film banned in Spain, Norway, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, and Malaysia for its depiction of the rape of a newborn infant.
“It wasn't introduced as a film of that nature,” the cadet testified.
He was alone with his boss in Stinziano's quarters when it started. He testified that the film seemed to begin normally before turning to a graphic scene in which a pregnant woman is cut open and her newborn baby raped.
A second USMMA cadet, assigned to the Maersk Idaho on a separate voyage eight months later, also testified under oath that Stinziano showed him A Serbian Film in his stateroom, along with other pornographic films and nude photographs. He testified that Stinziano used the term “kiddie fucker” in his presence. He testified that his time aboard the Maersk Idaho with Stinziano made him seriously contemplate not pursuing a seagoing career.
A third former cadet who served under Stinziano also testified at the hearing that Stinziano showed him A Serbian Film and said Stinziano would tell “dead baby jokes” aboard the Maersk Idaho.
The federal record also documented Stinziano's treatment of a fourth USMMA cadet on an earlier voyage. On a performance evaluation form that the cadet was required to submit to the Academy, Stinziano had written: “Why do my tax dollars go toward his education — complete waste of time — crew enjoyed cadet often — possible homosexual — often heard crying himself to sleep at 2100.”
At the hearing, Stinziano testified that “crew enjoyed cadet often” referred to sending the cadet to the engine room to help out. The Administrative Law Judge did not find that explanation credible.
The Maersk Investigation
Stinziano initially became the subject of an internal investigation by Maersk regarding his treatment of the deck cadet after the ship’s Second Mate delivered an explosive written report to the ship’s master before signing off the vessel in Genoa, Italy at the end of his hitch. The Second Mate was himself a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, class of 2004.
His written report was given to Captain Paul Willers, a 1976 graduate of the Academy, who had re-joined the vessel less than a week earlier. Willers subsequently forwarded the report to Maersk. In the report, the Second Mate wrote that he had “never seen or heard of a cadet being treated as unacceptably and abusively as the deck cadet has been treated aboard the Maersk Idaho.”
The report described what the Second Mate alleged he had personally witnessed. His report alleged he had seen Stinziano approach the deck cadet from behind on the bridge of the ship at sea and “simulate 'humping' or anal sex on the cadet's backside.” He had seen Stinziano, on numerous occasions, pull back his fist as if about to punch the deck cadet in the genitals, while the cadet stood “recoiling, unsure if his boss is joking or not.” He had heard Stinziano, “on an almost daily basis,” talk about “raping the cadet.” He had heard Stinziano make threats to punch a hole through one of the cadet’s bodies at the location of his genitals and listened as Stinziano explained how afterwards he would be able to see all the way through the cadet’s body. He had heard Stinziano say, repeatedly, that “cadets are not people.” He wrote that he believed this represented Stinziano’s “actual philosophy on how he treats cadets that serve under him.”
The report also described conduct toward the engine cadet on the same voyage. The Second Mate alleged he had seen Stinziano, during a fire drill with the ship’s crew mustered in the cargo control room, draw a "sperm" on the front of the engine cadet's hardhat with a Sharpie, then announce that the engine cadet would thereafter be known as "Cadet Hot Load" before explaining to the assembled crew that a "hot load" was “fresh ejaculation…still warm.”
According to his report, the Second Mate had seen Stinziano reach under the dinner table in the officer's saloon and place his hand on the engine cadet's thigh. The engine cadet said, "Don't touch me." Stinziano smiled and replied, "I'm not touching you," while keeping his hand there. The engine cadet then backed away from the table and left the room.
The engine cadet from that voyage did not testify at the federal hearing held six years later, and the allegations in the Second Mate's report concerning the engine cadet were never adjudicated.
The Second Mate’s report called for Maersk to interview past cadets who had served under Stinziano. “I think he is a dangerous person,” the Second Mate wrote.
The report the Second Mate left behind was forwarded to Maersk Line Limited's headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, where the company's attorneys began directing the investigation. Captain Willers was told to wait for instructions on how to interview the two cadets aboard the vessel. While the investigation was being conducted, Stinziano remained aboard — the alleged perpetrator and the cadet he was alleged to have abused, in the same small workplace, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
The cadet testified that the interview was conducted by Captain Willers with the Chief Engineer also present. He was told that an attorney from Maersk would be listening to the interview. Before the formal interview began, he was warned to be careful in his answers.
“We were told there could be some consequences for our statements, and we should be careful about what we say,” the cadet testified.
The interview Captain Willers conducted was structured by Maersk's legal department as a yes/no readback of each of the Second Mate's specific allegations. Maersk's in-house counsel listened in by satellite phone from the company's Virginia headquarters.
Willers recorded the cadet's denials on a form. When Coast Guard counsel produced the form during the federal hearing, the cadet did not recognize it as his own statement. “This must have been what was recorded during our conversation,” he testified, but said he had never seen the document.
Asked six years later by Coast Guard prosecutor Jennifer Mehaffey why he had denied the conduct in that interview, the cadet testified: “I just wanted to keep everything as easy as possible for the rest of my time on the vessel. I didn't want to stir up anything. I figured it'd be easiest just to say nothing happened and make it go away than make any noise about it.”
Asked why his testimony at the hearing differed from his denials as a 19-year-old, he said: “I'm not on the vessel anymore going to the Middle East. I'm here, so it's a safer environment, I would say.”
Pressed on what he had meant, he testified: “I was nineteen years old and I had never even left the states without my parents, and I was just pretty nervous about going there on a vessel with a bunch of people I didn't know. So I figured it would be best to just make everything as cohesive as possible and be as agreeable as possible.”
Judge Jordan would later find that the cadet had been “intimidated from complaining about Respondent's conduct at the time.” The cadet's denial in Genoa was exactly the kind of silence the power dynamic was designed to produce.
Maersk Makes Him Captain
The legal proceedings arising from the Second Mate's 2015 report would stretch across more than eleven years.
The Second Mate delivered his report to Maersk on February 3, 2015. Neither Maersk nor Captain Willers ever notified the Coast Guard of the allegations of criminal sexual abuse it contained. In 2018, Maersk Line, Limited promoted Mark Stinziano to Captain. He began commanding ships for Maersk.
In early 2019, after learning of the promotion, the Second Mate sent the Coast Guard a copy of the report he had given Maersk four years earlier. Coast Guard Investigative Service agents opened an investigation and uncovered evidence corroborating the 2015 allegations, including evidence that Stinziano had “initiated unwanted sexual contact with two individuals aboard the Maersk Idaho and engaged in other conduct in violation of company policy.”
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York declined to pursue criminal charges. In August 2020, more than five years after the Second Mate had given his report to Maersk, the Coast Guard filed administrative charges against Captain Stinziano and sought the permanent revocation of his Merchant Mariner Credential.
The Coast Guard also began investigating Maersk's failure to report the 2015 allegations. In November 2020, the Coast Guard fined the company $10,000 for violating 46 U.S.C. § 10104. It was the first time, in the thirty-one-year history of the federal shipboard sexual assault reporting law, that the Coast Guard had ever fined a company for failing to report shipboard sexual abuse allegations.
The decision to fine Maersk and the decision to seek revocation of Stinziano's credential were both significant departures from prior Coast Guard practice. Before the Stinziano case, no high-profile merchant mariner sexual abuse case had been publicly adjudicated in the agency's administrative law system. Stinziano was the first.
The Lesser Offense of Assault and Battery
The first Administrative Law Judge to hear the case was Michael J. Devine, a 1975 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Judge Devine held a three-day hearing in June 2021 in Baltimore. The cadet testified for hours. Stinziano sat a few feet away.
Judge Devine found that every incident the cadet had testified to had occurred. He found Stinziano's denials not credible.
But Judge Devine declined to find that the conduct constituted abusive sexual contact under 18 U.S.C. § 2244(b), the federal sexual abuse statute. He characterized it instead as the lesser offense of assault and battery without injury, slotting the conduct into the regulatory sanction category for non-sexual violent acts. He found the non-contact sexual harassment allegations time-barred, including the allegation that Stinziano had forced cadets to watch pornography and A Serbian Film.
In his sanction analysis, Judge Devine cited the absence of physical injury as a mitigating factor. He did not weigh the cadet's testimony that Stinziano's conduct had made him feel “demeaned,” “like less of a person,” “worn out, and depressed.” He did not weigh the cadet's testimony that he had considered dropping out of the Academy, or that he had abandoned his intended career at sea. The next federal judge to hear the case would make those facts central aggravating factors. Judge Devine made none of them part of his sanction.
Judge Devine rejected the prosecution's request that Stinziano be permanently stripped of his credential and instead imposed a four-month suspension.
In August 2022 — seven years after the Second Mate reported Stinziano to Maersk, and days before Stinziano's four-month suspension was set to expire — Maersk fired him. The company later stated that “Maersk Line Limited has no further business with Stinziano and he will not return to work at Maersk Line, Limited under any circumstances.”
But Stinziano had no trouble returning to sea. Despite the federal findings against him, he remained a senior member in good standing of the International Organization of Masters, Mates & Pilots, the maritime officers' union, which maintains a rotational hiring hall system through which its members are placed aboard U.S.-flagged commercial vessels.
Within months, Stinziano obtained a position as Chief Mate aboard the M/V Green Lake, operated by SEACOR Holdings. The vessel participated in the U.S. Maritime Administration's Maritime Security Program, received more than $5 million per year in federal subsidies, and was certified under the Maritime Administration's Every Mariner Builds a Respectful Culture program (EMBARC) — the federal program established in 2021 in response to the Midshipman-X disclosure to certify vessels as safe for USMMA cadets on Sea Year training.
The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy resumed sending cadets to ships where Stinziano was serving as Chief Mate. The first known assignment was aboard the M/V Green Lake.
In December 2021, in response to a letter from Senator Maria Cantwell asking whether the Academy assigned midshipmen to vessels where crew members were the subject of sexual assault or harassment allegations, the Maritime Administration had written: “USMMA does not assign midshipmen to vessels when it is aware that a crewmember has been the subject of a sexual assault or sexual harassment allegation, unless that crewmember has been cleared by an investigation.”
The Coast Guard prosecutors appealed Judge Devine's ruling to the Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard. The agency argued that Judge Devine had misapplied the federal sexual abuse statute — that he had conflated “sexual act” with “sexual contact,” and that the conduct he had found proved fit the statute's definition of abusive sexual contact rather than the lesser offense he had assigned to it. In April 2023, the Vice Commandant agreed. He reversed Judge Devine's legal analysis. He set aside the four-month sanction. He remanded the case for new findings under the correct federal statute.
By then, Captain Stinziano had already served the original suspension, been fired by Maersk, joined a new ship through his union's hiring hall, and resumed supervising Academy cadets at sea.
Midshipman-X and the Safer Seas Act
Judge Devine took nearly a year to issue his ruling. When his order was published, on April 20, 2022, it arrived in the middle of a Congressional debate that would, eight months later, produce the most significant federal maritime safety legislation in a generation. In September 2021, a USMMA cadet had published a pseudonymous account on the website of Maritime Legal Aid & Advocacy. Writing under the name “Midshipman-X,” she described being raped aboard a U.S.-flagged commercial vessel operated by Maersk Line, Limited during her own Sea Year. The disclosure prompted Senator Maria Cantwell to demand answers about how the Maritime Administration and USMMA were placing cadets on vessels where they were being assaulted. In February 2022, Representative Peter DeFazio introduced the Safer Seas Act in the House. Senator Cantwell led the legislation in the Senate.
Devine's ruling both angered and informed Congress. The opinion was, in effect, a federal judicial demonstration of the problem Congress was examining: a senior officer had committed sustained sexual abuse against a federal cadet, and a federal judge had ruled that the conduct constituted neither a federal sex offense nor sexual harassment.
Among the provisions of the Safer Seas Act was 46 U.S.C. § 7704a, “Sexual harassment or sexual assault as grounds for suspension or revocation,” which authorized the Coast Guard to revoke the credential of any mariner who, within the preceding ten years, had been the subject of an “official finding” of sexual assault. The Act incorporated the federal sexual abuse chapter of Title 18 into its definition of sexual assault. The statute was backward-looking: it applied to findings already in existence, cases already adjudicated, by judges who had already ruled. It was a tool Congress had built, in part, with the Stinziano case in mind. The Safer Seas Act became law on December 23, 2022. The Coast Guard's appeal of Judge Devine's ruling was still pending.
Abusive Sexual Contact
On February 24, 2025, Administrative Law Judge George J. Jordan issued his decision on remand. Jordan reviewed the same record Judge Devine had reviewed. He read the same testimony, considered the same evidence, and accepted the same underlying findings of fact. Where Judge Devine had found no sexual assault and no sexual harassment, Jordan found that Mark Stinziano had committed abusive sexual contact against the cadet, with intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, and degrade. Jordan also found that Stinziano had violated Maersk's anti-sexual-harassment policy—the same policy under which Maersk's 2015 internal investigation had cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Jordan made specific findings about what Stinziano's conduct had done to the cadet. He found that the cadet had been left feeling “demeaned, like less of a person, worn out, and depressed.” He found that Stinziano's conduct had caused the cadet to want to drop out of the Academy and to abandon his intended career at sea — and that this outcome had been foreseeable. A reasonably prudent person, Jordan wrote, would have foreseen that Stinziano's treatment of the cadet “would result in the Deck Cadet not matriculating in the merchant marine industry.”
Jordan identified three aggravating factors. First, Stinziano's “complete lack of remorse.” Stinziano had testified that the cadet was “a great kid, with a great attitude, who was a hard worker.” He continued to deny that he had ever harmed him. Second, Stinziano's senior position. As Chief Mate at the time of the conduct, and as Master in the years since, his rank itself warranted a heightened sanction. Third, the severity of the loss: Stinziano's treatment of the cadet had ended the cadet's intended career at sea, defeating the purpose of the federal education the United States had paid for.
Even in identifying the cadet's destroyed career as an aggravating factor, Jordan framed the loss as harm to the federal investment in USMMA — “the purpose of USMMA is to graduate cadets into a career in the merchant marine,” he wrote — rather than as harm to the young man whose life was reshaped by what Stinziano had done to him.
Throughout the remand proceedings, the Coast Guard prosecutors continued to argue that Stinziano's credential should be permanently revoked. They argued that his conduct fell within the new framework Congress had created in the Safer Seas Act — § 7704a, which authorized revocation based on an official finding of sexual assault — and that anything less than revocation was an inadequate response.
Jordan declined to apply the Safer Seas Act framework. He held that § 7704a could not be applied against Stinziano in this proceeding because the Coast Guard had never amended its complaint to charge a § 7704a violation. He analyzed the case under the pre-Safer Seas Act framework that had existed when the Coast Guard filed its 2020 complaint — a framework that authorized suspension but did not require revocation for findings of abusive sexual contact. Within that framework, Jordan declined to revoke Stinziano's credential.
Instead, Jordan imposed a sanction of twelve months' outright suspension. He noted that the twelve-month suspension exceeded the maximum allowed by the Coast Guard's own regulatory sanction table. He was departing upward from the maximum because the case required it. Stinziano had already served four months under Devine's original order. Jordan's ruling required him to serve eight more.
Jordan noted, however, that his ruling “does not bar the Coast Guard from amending the Complaint to include” § 7704a. The agency had had “ample opportunity,” he wrote, to amend the complaint during the more than two years § 7704a had been in effect during the case. Jordan was telling the Coast Guard, in his own decision, that the door to § 7704a revocation remained open.
The Decision Not to Act
Despite Jordan's refusal to revoke Stinziano's credential, the Coast Guard now had what the Safer Seas Act's § 7704a required to permanently revoke it.
The agency had an official finding of sexual assault. The Safer Seas Act had incorporated the federal sexual abuse chapter of Title 18 into its definition of “sexual assault,” including the abusive sexual contact statute Jordan had now applied. By operation of the statute Congress had passed in December 2022, Stinziano was a mariner who, within the preceding ten years, had been the subject of an official finding of sexual assault.
The Coast Guard had the predicate. The Coast Guard had the statute. The Coast Guard had spent five years arguing that revocation was the only adequate response to Stinziano's conduct.
But the Coast Guard did not file a § 7704a complaint against Stinziano.
The agency did not amend its pleading to add the new statute during the remand, despite Jordan's invitation. It did not appeal Judge Jordan's February 2025 sanction as inadequate. It did not file a new complaint under § 7704a using Jordan's findings as the predicate. A senior Coast Guard attorney handling the Stinziano matter has acknowledged that the agency believes it has the legal authority to seek revocation. However, the agency took no action.
In April 2026, at the end of Stinziano's eight-month suspension, the Coast Guard returned his Merchant Mariner Credential to him.
The credential authorizes him to serve as master of the largest commercial vessels operating in the world — unlimited tonnage, in any waters, and enables him to command ships carrying USMMA cadets on their Sea Year assignments. By returning the credential, the Coast Guard declared Captain Stinziano fit to hold the highest level of authority a civilian deck officer can be granted by the United States government.
The agency that made that declaration is the same agency that argued for five years that Captain Stinziano was unfit to serve aboard a vessel in any capacity and pursued the permanent revocation of his merchant mariner credential.
The Coast Guard has not publicly explained what prompted its shift. Congress had given the Coast Guard a tool to revoke that license. The Coast Guard gave it back to him instead.
