US flight attendant sentenced to prison: Estes Carter Thompson filmed underage girls in aircraft lavatory, taped phone under toilet seat

An American Airlines flight attendant was sentenced to 18 1/2 years in prison on Wednesday for filming girls inside the airplane's toilet.

Estes Carter Thompson, 37, had confessed in March to taping his phone to the airplane’s toilet lid, according to the New York Post. He filmed about five underage girls as young as seven years over nine months and had amassed a trove of child pornography. Thompson apologised at his sentencing, saying his actions were "selfish, perverse and wrong.

During the sentencing, Boston US district court judge Julia Kobick called Thompson's act "appalling" and said that "kids' innocence had been lost" because of him.

Federal prosecutors said Thomson had been “recording videos of the children’s bodies in one of their most private moments, and then storing, editing, and revisiting those videos, all for his own sexual gratification,” reported Boston.com. They further said that Thompson “robbed five young girls of their innocence and belief in the goodness of the world and the people they would encounter in it, instead leaving them with fear, mistrust, insecurity, and sadness."

Thompson was arrested in September 2023 during a Boston-bound flight when he escorted a 14-year-old passenger to the lavatory, but told her to wash his hands, mentioning that the toilet seat was not working. The girl found an iPhone under the maintenance sticker, which said "seat broken" on the underside of the toilet seat. The girl took a picture of it and showed it to her parents. When confronted by the parents, Thompson hid inside the bathroom for the rest of the flight and deleted all the data from his phone. He was fired from his job immediately after the incident.

Further investigations revealed that Thomson had a lot of maintenance stickers in his suitcase. His iCloud account was searched, which had recordings of four other underage girls and photos of a 9-year-old asleep in her seat, along with multiple AI-generated sexual images of children.