United States v. Captain John Merrone: The Six Women the Jury Never Heard

The first woman met John Merrone in 1999, when they were classmates at the State University of New York Maritime Academy. The second dated him for four years. The third met him at the bar where she waitressed in the Florida Keys. The fourth and fifth were student cadets aboard the cargo ship he captained. The sixth was a young mate aboard the same ship, two years later.

By June of 2026, all six women were on the government's witness list for his federal trial in Brooklyn (ECF No. 53). In the court record they are Jane Does #1 through #6, and their places in the case differed: Jane Doe #1 was the victim of the charged crimes, drugged and raped aboard Merrone's ship in 2019; Jane Doe #2 was her classmate, summoned to the captain's stateroom the same evening and, the government said, drugged alongside her; Jane Does #3 through #6 were "other acts" witnesses, cleared by the court to describe assaults reaching from a port call in Italy to a stateroom on the open Atlantic. Behind them stood two of their mothers, a shipmate, doctors, an FBI special agent, and one of the country's most experienced forensic toxicologists.

The government estimated its case would take two weeks to present to the jury, but it never took an hour.

On July 13 and 14, 2026, a jury was selected and sworn in the Eastern District of New York. On the morning of July 15, before opening statements and before a single witness was called, Merrone withdrew his plea of not guilty and pleaded guilty to the entire indictment: aggravated sexual abuse, sexual abuse, and three counts of abusive sexual contact. No counts were dropped. Judge Ramón E. Reyes, Jr. found the plea knowing and voluntary, dismissed the jurors with the court's thanks, and set sentencing for December 22, 2026. On the top count, Merrone, now 54, faces up to life in prison.

None of the six women ever took the stand against Merrone. But the record the government built before trial shows the case prosecutors were prepared, and permitted by the court's pretrial rulings, to present. It runs to hundreds of pages of motions, exhibits, expert reports, and court rulings, and it is worth setting down in full: the Merrone prosecution is a landmark in maritime sexual assault enforcement, and this record is the closest thing to the trial the public will ever get.

The long road to the Brooklyn courthouse ran through the maritime industry's own public reckoning with sexual assault at sea.

In September 2021, a U.S. Merchant Marine Academy midshipman published an anonymous account on Maritime Legal Aid & Advocacy under the name Midshipman-X of being raped by a senior officer aboard a commercial ship during her Sea Year training. Her story forced the Academy to suspend Sea Year, set off congressional scrutiny of sexual violence in the industry, and helped drive passage of the Safer Seas Act. It also opened a door. That fall, according to the government's court filings, Jane Doe #1 reported to the Academy what had happened to her aboard her own Sea Year vessel two years earlier. (ECF No. 33 at 35).

In October 2022, CNN investigative reporters revealed a second cadet case, which was publicly dubbed "Midshipman X2" by gCaptain, and named the accused: Captain John Merrone. The Coast Guard told CNN that it had opened two separate investigations through the Coast Guard Investigative Service, but that they were "not being pursued for prosecution by the Department of Justice and are closed." Merrone's attorney denied the allegations on his behalf.

What followed was administrative, not criminal. That same month, Merrone surrendered his captain's license rather than face a Coast Guard trial, a permanent exit from the U.S. maritime industry. The American Maritime Officers union expelled him, citing multiple credible allegations. But the man himself faced no criminal charges.

But the criminal investigation did not stay closed. In the wake of CNN's reporting and sustained advocacy by maritime attorney Ryan Melogy on the survivors' behalf, the Department of Justice reopened its criminal investigation in late 2022. Two and a half years later, on May 20, 2025, a federal grand jury in Brooklyn returned a sealed five-count indictment. Merrone was arraigned that June, pleaded not guilty, and was released on bond. The case that had been "closed" in 2022 had become United States v. Merrone.

Over the following year, prosecutors Kayla Bensing and Rachel Bennek of the U.S. Attorney's Human Trafficking and Civil Rights Section assembled a strong case involving six women who were prepared to testify against Merrone at trial.

What follows is that account, in the order the pattern unfolded. One point of legal precision matters throughout: Merrone's guilty plea admits the charged conduct, which includes the events of September 9, 2019, aboard the M/V Liberty Glory. The accounts of the other four women were allegations that Judge Reyes ruled admissible at trial; they were never adjudicated, and Merrone never admitted them.

In the summer of 1999, Jane Doe #3 was a student at the State University of New York Maritime Academy, sailing as a cadet aboard the training ship with Merrone, who was her classmate, then about 27 years old. He had asked her to date him; she had declined, and they remained friends. (ECF No. 25 at 4).

Aboard the ship, the government alleged, Merrone invited Jane Doe #3 and two friends to his room to watch a movie and, during the movie, groped her and pinned her to the floor with his full body while she yelled at him to get off. He acted as though it was funny.

Later that voyage, the group went ashore during a port call the government's filings place in Pompeii, Italy. Jane Doe #3 had never had a drink of alcohol in her life. Merrone picked the bar, ordered the drinks, and brought them to her to taste. When the two friends left to go sightseeing, she was alone with him. At some point her head was down on the table. She heard Merrone tell the waitstaff she needed a bathroom to throw up. He brought her there himself and then raped her while she was incapacitated and unable to consent. She never knew whether it was the alcohol alone or whether he had put something in her drink. (ECF No. 25 at 4–5; ECF No. 35 at 3).

Afterward, he apologized and begged her forgiveness. She would later enter a relationship with him that, in the government's words, "involved other instances of violence and sexual assault."

Jane Doe #6 dated Merrone for roughly four years, beginning in 2006, while he worked in the cargo ship industry. Over the course of the relationship, prosecutors wrote, he grew "increasingly sexually demanding," particularly when he drank. On several occasions she woke from sleep to find him having sex with her; she pretended to remain asleep, and he continued. (ECF No. 29 at 1).

Twice, she said, he used force. In August 2008, after she refused sex, he hit her in the stomach and then had sex with her; the couple went to counseling. In October 2010, after he had moved to Key West, he came home from a bar, found her asleep on the couch, got on top of her when she said no, put his forearm across her neck, and raped her. The next morning she told him he had raped her and that they were done. His answer, she recalled, was that it was just a "game." She told him they did not play games like that, and the relationship ended. (ECF No. 29 at 2).

Jane Doe #6 was also prepared to testify about something else: at least twice, she said, Merrone tried to drug her by crushing a substance into her food on one occasion and her coffee on another. She once watched him crush a pill in their bathroom, leaving what she believed was pill powder. She believed the attempts stemmed from her increasing refusal to meet his sexual demands. Prosecutors called this "critical evidence of the defendant's knowledge of and access to drugs." (ECF No. 29 at 2–3; ECF No. 33 at 38).

She had told much of this to Florida investigators once before, around 2011, when the state prosecuted Merrone for what happened to the next woman on the list.

In March 2011, Jane Doe #4 was a 38-year-old waitress at a bar in the Florida Keys. Merrone, then 39, was a customer. After her shift they talked and drank for about half an hour, and when she mentioned she was looking for an apartment, he told her he had a room for rent next door. She went to see it. (ECF No. 25 at 5–6).

When she told him she wasn't interested, the government alleged, he would not let her leave. He forced himself on her; at some point she passed out or lost time and came to on his bed with Merrone on top of her. She pretended she was going to be sick to get him off of her; he stood by while she forced herself to vomit in the bathroom, then forced her to have sex again. Dragging her back to the bed at one point, he pulled her by the foot hard enough to break her toe. He photographed her nude while she was passed out. She finally fought him off, punching and kicking him, and escaped. Two days later, an emergency room documented injuries to her eye and bruising on her neck, arm, and knee, and she identified Merrone to police. (ECF No. 25 at 6).

Florida charged him with sexual battery, aggravated battery, and false imprisonment. At trial, Merrone claimed the sex and the photographs were consensual, called an expert to say the broken toe was merely stubbed, and called his roommate (a man to whom, ten days to two weeks before his testimony, Merrone had paid $2,100) as an "earwitness." The jury convicted Merrone of false imprisonment and a lesser-included battery. Merrone spent two years in a Florida state prison. An appeals court later set aside the verdict on an evidentiary point involving the roommate's prior statement, and the state never retried the case. (ECF No. 25 at 6–7).

But the Florida case left behind one document federal prosecutors considered devastating. At his sentencing, before the verdict was vacated, Merrone addressed the court. The two-page excerpt later filed by federal prosecutors records his statement as follows:

Good afternoon, Your Honor. Thank you for allowing me to say a few words today.

We're here because I have been involved in one of the most irrevocable situations. I've had five months of hard time every day reflecting upon my role in this incident, and I regret above all the terrible lapse in judgment that I displayed. Most importantly for my lapse of judgment sitting in a bar and drinking alcohol from 5 p.m. to midnight and in addition permitting and encouraging [Jane Doe #4] to drink so much alcohol, as we were both very intoxicated.

My judgment after the consumption of alcohol was most definitely clouded. Although I do not offer this as an excuse, it is just a fact of what happened that night. I owe many people apologies. First I have to apologize to [Jane Doe #4] for a severe breakdown in communication that evening.

I apologize for any suffering or injury, both emotional and physical, that she may have suffered that evening. I did not force myself on her in any way and I most certainly did not intend to keep her somewhere she did not want to be.

I apologize to the respected members of the court for having to endure such a graphic trial. I apologize to my family for the burden I've become and what I have put them through, and I especially apologize to my father who put his retirement in jeopardy to save his son.

The consequences of my action of my poor judgment have been personally devastating. I have learned some very harsh lessons from this ordeal. I will never let alcohol cloud my judgment again and I will never drink again and I will seek a program to ensure that I never do.

The consequences of my actions have affected so many lives. The personal consequences have been the loss of my business, the loss of my life savings, the loss of my personal lifestyle. The sea has been my life. I have worked all of my adult life to be on the sea and I crave the ocean. All of my dreams may now be dashed. My career and significant achievements are soon to be lost. My license will soon be revoked as well as my union membership will be lost and any hopes of resuming my life at sea is fading.

This has been a harsh education of our justice system and I have learned many things, the hardest is—

The federal exhibit ends there, in the middle of Merrone's sentence. (ECF No. 27-1).

Eight years later, he was pouring drinks for two cadets on a dry ship in the middle of the Atlantic from a bottle he had spiked with a date rape drug.

The accounts of Jane Does #1 and #2 concern the charged conduct, which Merrone has now admitted under oath.

In the summer of 2019, Jane Doe #1, a 21-year-old cadet-midshipman at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, was assigned to the M/V Liberty Glory for her Sea Year, the Academy program that places students aboard working commercial vessels. Merrone, 47, was the ship's captain: the highest authority aboard, on a vessel sailing from Bahrain to Corpus Christi, Texas.

Federal law gives a ship's master extraordinary power over his crew; as the government pointedly noted, a captain may lawfully confine a seaman at sea for willful disobedience. (ECF No. 27 at 10, citing 46 U.S.C. § 11501(4)). The shipping company's rules prohibited alcohol aboard. As captain, Merrone also held the only key to the safe in his own stateroom where the vessel's controlled substances were stored. (ECF No. 33 at 37).

Merrone began messaging Jane Doe #1 on Facebook before she ever boarded, and did the same with her classmate and shipmate, Jane Doe #2. On September 9, 2019, with about a week left in the voyage, he messaged each of them separately, inviting them to his stateroom for a "soda":

(ECF No. 25 at 2).

What the jury would have seen next is one of the most striking exhibits in the file: the two cadets' own messages to each other, sent at 6:48 p.m., in real time. (ECF No. 33-1).

Two cadets who understood exactly what "soda" meant, did not feel they could simply refuse the captain, and went together because neither would go alone.

In the stateroom, Merrone poured each of them a drink from an already-open bottle, mixed with soda, and opened a new bottle for himself. He began asking them personal questions, including questions of a sexual nature. Shortly after drinking what he had poured, both women lost all memory of the rest of the evening. (ECF No. 25 at 2–3).

Jane Doe #2's phone kept a record her memory could not. Beginning around 7:20 p.m. and continuing for four hours, she messaged her boyfriend: she was "feeling it"; she was "still in captain room"; she was "drunk. More than drunk"; she "need[ed] help." At 11:19 p.m. they spoke by phone. He would have testified that she was incoherent, slurring, speaking loudly, and vomited on the call. He told her to lock her bedroom door. At 5:50 the next morning she was apologizing and asking him what she had said. She had "blacked out," she wrote. She did "not remember last night." (ECF No. 33 at 23–25).

Jane Doe #1 woke that morning in her own bed wearing only a shirt and bra — no pants, no underwear — nauseated, with a headache and vaginal pain indicative of penetration. Jane Doe #2 woke with cramping and a headache so severe she could not work. (ECF No. 25 at 3).

The next day, Merrone called Jane Doe #1 to his stateroom and told her he'd had "fun last night," asking her to do it again. When she said she remembered nothing, he told her "one thing led to another." When she told him it was not consensual, he offered her money. She declined. Days later he sent her a photograph of herself holding handfuls of cash. It was a photo she did not remember being taken, and the Captain included the message:

Before the voyage ended, he came to her room, pulled the underwear she had been wearing that night from his pocket, and handed it back to her. (ECF No. 25 at 3).

When the ship reached the United States, the two cadets sat through a crew-change dinner with Merrone and the incoming captain and chief mate and quietly asked the newcomers whether it was normal for a captain to have cadets clean his room, bake him cookies, pack his bags, or message them in the middle of the night. (ECF No. 33 at 29). Jane Doe #1 told her mother and a friend what had happened shortly after arriving home and sought medical care within days, telling an urgent-care provider on September 19, 2019 about her symptoms and about medication the captain had given her aboard, in violation of the vessel's policies. (ECF No. 33 at 30).

Two years after September 9, 2019, when Merrone drugged the two cadets in his stateroom, Merrone was still working aboard the same ship as captain. The government alleged that he did it again, aboard the same vessel.

Between June and September 2021, Jane Doe #5, a female merchant mariner in her late twenties, served on a ship Merrone captained. As with the cadets, he found her on Facebook before she boarded: her boyfriend probably wasn't "good enough" for her, he wrote, and he'd "better see bathing suit pictures." (ECF No. 25 at 7).

In late June 2021, he invited Jane Doe #5 and a male shipmate to his stateroom for a movie and a drink. He asked her if she trusted him, then poured her Jameson and Coca-Cola on a dry ship. After the movie the shipmate left. Alone with her, Merrone began asking about her sexual preferences. She said she had a boyfriend and tried to get up off the couch. That is the last thing she remembers of the night. (ECF No. 25 at 7–8).

She woke the next morning in the captain's bed, alone, disoriented, sore, feeling, she said, like she had been "hit by a truck." She later learned Merrone had photographed her nude while she was unconscious, just as he had photographed Jane Doe #4. Her own messages afterward said what her memory could not: "I honestly can barely remember the first night we did anything." "I don't recall the first night anything happened." "And I don't remember the first time at all." (ECF No. 25 at 8; ECF No. 33 at 32 n.14).

After she left the vessel, his repeated, unwanted contact and threats to her and her family led her to report his harassment to local law enforcement. (ECF No. 25 at 8–9, 14).

Merrone was charged only for September 9, 2019. The question that dominated the pretrial fight was whether the jury would hear from the other four women at all.

Federal Rule of Evidence 413 embodies a deliberate congressional judgment: in a sexual assault prosecution, a court may admit evidence that the defendant committed other sexual assaults, which is the kind of “propensity” evidence the law excludes in nearly every other type of criminal case. Congress reasoned that such knowledge is "critical in assessing the relative plausibility of [sexual assault] claims and accurately deciding cases that would otherwise become unresolvable swearing matches." But Rule 413 does not admit anything by itself. The evidence must still be relevant, and it must survive Rule 403's balancing of probative value against unfair prejudice, which meant the decision belonged to Judge Reyes.

The defense fought hard against it. They argued that Jane Doe #3 was making a 27-year-old allegation between classmates, not captain and cadet. Jane Doe #4's case had already gone to a Florida jury that convicted on less than the top counts, was reversed, and was never retried; admitting it would create a "trial within a trial." Jane Doe #5's account was, by turns, too generic and too complicated. The defense argued that she had, after all, remained in contact with Merrone, exchanging hundreds of pages of correspondence. Admitting all of it, the defense wrote, would turn the trial into "an improper character referendum." (ECF No. 26).

On April 10, 2026, Judge Reyes rejected every defense argument to exclude the testimony. Weighing the evidence under Rule 403, he found the factual differences among the incidents "immaterial": "At its core, the situations described... are instances where Merrone is alleged to have sexually assaulted women... without their consent — whether by using alcohol, drugs, or force." All four women could testify. Jane Doe #6's account of the crushed pills came in too, under Rule 404(b), as evidence of Merrone's knowledge of and access to drugs. (ECF No. 35 at 7–8).

The pattern the government intended to argue was specific: an older man in a position of power; a younger or isolated woman; alcohol or drugs he supplied or controlled; a private space: a stateroom, an apartment, a bathroom; sex while the woman was incapacitated; and, three times, a nude photograph taken while she was unconscious.

The government did not intend to rely on testimony alone. A search warrant on Merrone's Facebook account produced his own running commentary on life aboard a dry ship.

On September 2, 2019, one week before the assault, he messaged his then-girlfriend that he was "[d]rinking contaminated soda" and "[d]rinking grey water. Damn goose is an ass." The same night, to another woman: "I am sure it was contaminated with a bird that was grey. Maybe a goose." In October 2020, to yet another: the water was "contaminated," but he "survived." Somebody had put "whiskey in it." (ECF No. 33-3; ECF No. 33-4; ECF No. 33-5). Grey Goose vodka. Jameson whiskey, which he repeatedly professed to prefer with Coke, the drink three women aboard his ships described being handed.

The rest of the corroboration was structural. The shipping company's policies banned alcohol outright; a witness aboard in 2021 would have testified to smelling alcohol on Merrone's breath and seeing vodka and Jameson in a box belonging to him. As master, Merrone alone held the key to the ship's narcotics safe, in his own stateroom, and could dispense medication off the books. The company's fraternization, harassment, and medical-reporting policies, and Merrone's training on them, would have shown the jury that none of this was ambiguous to him. Judge Reyes admitted all of it as direct evidence of the charged crimes. (ECF No. 56 at 5–6).

The defense's central attack, previewed in its pretrial motions, was the absence of forensic proof: no toxicology, no medical corroboration of drugging, no contemporaneous police report. For that, the government retained Dr. Marc LeBeau, a forensic toxicologist with 36 years of experience, most of it at the FBI Laboratory, and a leading authority on drug-facilitated sexual assault.

LeBeau examined no one and, by design, was given no facts of the case. He could not and would not have told the jury what was in any particular glass. His role was narrower and, for that reason, harder to attack: to give jurors the scientific frame for evaluating what they heard from the witnesses. Why no toxicology? Because the drugs used in these assaults are effective at low doses and metabolize quickly; a victim who cannot remember the assault cannot report it in time for a lab to find anything, and most labs are not equipped to try. What does one drink do? For a typical 21-year-old woman of Jane Doe #1's height and weight, a single standard drink raises blood alcohol roughly 0.03 g% — while the profound "en-bloc" blackouts the witnesses described are associated in the literature with far higher concentrations, or with lower ones when alcohol is combined with sedating drugs. And why would a victim stay in contact with her assailant, which was the defense's strongest fact about Jane Doe #5? Because, the research shows, that is common: amnesia leaves victims doubting themselves and turning to the one person who knows what happened for answers. (ECF No. 39-2).

What those facts meant for the drinks Merrone poured was an inference the jury, and not the expert, would have been asked to draw. The defense moved to keep LeBeau out. On June 22, Judge Reyes ruled him in. (ECF No. 56 at 9–10).

By the eve of trial, the defense's theory was visible in outline: consent, voluntary intoxication, delayed reporting, the civil settlement, no forensics. Its proposed jury questions objected to asking prospective jurors whether they believed a victim must physically resist for a sex act to be rape, and asked instead about voluntary drinking and "consensual sex" while intoxicated. (ECF No. 52). It noticed two experts of its own.

But consent was always going to be a hard sell in that courtroom. The jury would have been asked to believe that a 21-year-old cadet, a month into her first working voyage, freely chose a sexual encounter with the 47-year-old captain who controlled her evaluations, her berth, and under federal law, her physical liberty at sea; who had summoned her by coded message; and whose response to being told the encounter was not consensual was to offer her money.

And the man asking them to believe this story was not the vigorous ship's master of 2019 but a 54-year-old defendant in a wheelchair who had spent the months before trial seeking medical accommodations for what he claimed was a debilitating back injury—the same alleged injury that had already delayed the trial once. (ECF Nos. 42, 43, 57).

The pretrial rulings left little standing. The pattern witnesses were in. LeBeau was in. The alcohol and drug-access evidence was in. Rape-shield protections barred any inquiry into the victims' other sexual behavior; the victims would testify under pseudonyms; cross-examination on Jane Doe #1's Academy disciplinary record was sharply limited. The government's request to limit the defense experts was granted in part on July 7. (ECF Nos. 56, 61).

The defense won exactly one significant point, but it came with a trap. Judge Reyes precluded any mention of the 2011 Florida case (as distinct from Jane Doe #4's account of the assault itself, which was already admitted) as unfairly prejudicial. Unless, that is, the defense opened the door: if Merrone's lawyers cross-examined Jane Doe #1 about her two-year delay in reporting or her motives for the civil settlement, she would be permitted to speak about the 2011 Florida case. The judge ruled that she would be allowed to testify that what moved her to come forward was learning Merrone had previously been convicted in connection with a sexual assault, and that she pursued the settlement because she believed it was wrong to place young female cadets on an isolated vessel with such a man. (ECF No. 56 at 10; ECF No. 39 at 2). The defense's best cross-examination would have introduced the jury to his prior prosecution.

Six days after that ruling, jury selection began. Two days after that, Merrone pleaded guilty.

The docket entry for July 15, 2026 is spare. Case called. Sidebar. Trial adjourned until 11:00 a.m. Trial resumed. "Defendant John Merrone wishes to plead guilty to Count(s) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of the Indictment." Sworn, informed of his rights, plea accepted as knowing and voluntary. Jurors dismissed with thanks.

The substance is in the Justice Department's announcement that afternoon: at his plea, Merrone admitted that he knowingly gave Jane Doe an intoxicant without her knowledge or consent, that she became incapacitated, and that he then had sex with her without her consent. United States Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. described him as "abusing his authority as a ship captain," and credited the Coast Guard's investigative work, the same agency whose probes had been reported closed four years earlier.

In October 2022, his lawyer denied the allegations to CNN. In July 2026, under oath, he admitted the charged conduct in full. He remains on bond pending sentencing.

Federal prosecutors Kayla Bensing and Rachel Bennek did not have a confession or a lab report, and years had passed since the night of the crime, which had been committed on a ship in the middle of the ocean. But they built the case anyway, assembling twenty witnesses, hundreds of evidence exhibits, and six survivors who were prepared to testify. Every piece of it was fought over, and every fight was won before a juror was seated.

For decades, the assumption in the maritime industry has been that crimes at sea cannot really be prosecuted: too remote, too long ago, too hard to prove. Bensing and Bennek proved otherwise.

The guilty plea spared the six women the witness stand, but it should not cost them their voices: federal law gives crime victims the right to be reasonably heard at sentencing, and each of these women should have the opportunity to stand in that courtroom and tell Judge Reyes what John Merrone did and what it cost. The jury never heard them. The judge still can. Merrone will be sentenced on December 22, 2026.

This account is drawn from the public docket in United States v. Merrone, No. 25-CR-171 (RER) (E.D.N.Y.): the indictment (ECF No. 1); the government's Rule 413/404(b) motion, opposition, reply, and supplemental letter (ECF Nos. 25, 26, 27, 29); the court's orders on the motions in limine (ECF Nos. 35, 56, 61); the government's second motion in limine and exhibits (ECF Nos. 33, 33-1, 33-3, 33-4, 33-5); its response opposing the defense motion in limine with Dr. LeBeau's report (ECF Nos. 39, 39-1, 39-2); the parties' pretrial filings (ECF Nos. 52, 53); the minute entries of July 13–15, 2026; and the July 15, 2026 press release of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York. The 2022 public history is drawn from CNN's October 7, 2022 investigation and contemporaneous reporting by gCaptain and MLAA. Merrone's guilty plea admits the conduct charged in the indictment; the accounts of Jane Does #3, #4, #5, and #6 were allegations ruled admissible at trial and were never adjudicated. All six women are identified here as they are in the court record, consistent with the district court's orders protecting their identities.