NEW YORK (AP) — A former cargo ship captain pleaded guilty on Wednesday to drugging and raping a 21-year-old U.S. Merchant Marine Academy cadet who was working on the vessel as part of the academy’s Sea Year training program.
John Merrone, 53, pleaded guilty just as his trial was about to start in Brooklyn federal court. He admitted that he had sexual intercourse with the cadet without her consent “on the ship, in the middle of the ocean” after knocking her out with an intoxicant in 2019.
A jury had been picked and the woman, identified only as Jane Doe, was in the courthouse waiting to testify. Prosecutors were also planning to call as witnesses several other women who have accused Merrone of sexual assaults over the last three decades.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted, unless they agree to be identified.
Merrone was previously convicted of false imprisonment and battery after a Florida Keys waitress accused him of having sex with her against her will, but an appeals court overturned the verdict and prosecutors didn't retry the case.
The former cadet, who still works in the maritime industry, watched through tears from the courtroom gallery as Merrone impassively said “guilty” to each of five charges, including aggravated sexual abuse and abusive sexual contact.
Her lawyer, Ryan Melogy, said she turned to him afterward and said, “It's over.”
“Sex crimes are notoriously difficult to prosecute in general,” Melogy said. “When they occur in the middle of the ocean aboard a ship, the level of difficulty involved in prosecuting them probably increases exponentially.”
Merrone faces up to life in prison, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Kayla Bensing said federal sentencing guidelines call for about 15 to 19 years behind bars. Merrone's lawyers said they think that estimate is too high. The guidelines are advisory, and the judge, Ramon E. Reyes Jr., could sentence him to more or less time.
Merrone will remain free on bail until sentencing, which is scheduled for Dec. 22. He and his lawyers, Bruce Barket and Nicole Aloise, declined to comment as they left court.
“It is my hope that today’s guilty plea will give the survivor of this attack some measure of closure knowing that the defendant has been held accountable for his despicable conduct,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. said.
In a statement, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy said it “remains committed to providing a safe, professional, and respectful learning environment for all midshipmen, both on campus and at sea.”
According to prosecutors, Merrone began sending the cadet and another student Facebook messages a few weeks before they boarded his ship, the 623-foot-long (190-meter-long) Liberty Glory, for a voyage from Bahrain to Corpus Christi, Texas.
On Sept. 9, 2019, after more than a month onboard and with a little more than a week left in the journey, prosecutors said Merrone messaged the cadet and her friend asking that they come to his room for a “soda.”
“Captain you know I stay away from soda !” the cadet wrote.
“U may like my soda!?!?” Merrone replied.
The women acquiesced, prosecutors said, and the captain poured them each a drink from an already open bottle of alcohol, then opened a new bottle and poured a drink for himself.
Soon after having some of the drinks, the women “lost recollection of the remainder of the evening,” prosecutors said.
The cadet awoke the next morning in her bed wearing only a shirt and bra but not pants or underwear, feeling nauseous; she had a headache and felt vaginal discomfort, prosecutors said. Her friend awoke with stomach cramping and a debilitating headache, prosecutors said. She did not accuse Merrone of sexual assault.
Merrone called the cadet to his room and told her he had “fun last night,” that “one thing led to another” and asked her to do it again, prosecutors said. After the cadet told him she didn't remember what happened and that the encounter was not consensual, Merrone offered her money, which she declined, prosecutors said.
Merrone later sent the cadet a photograph of herself holding money on what she believed to be from the night of the assault, along with a message: “lol. That how u make a woman happy!!!!” She didn't recall the photo being taken, prosecutors said.
After that, prosecutors said, the captain went to the cadet's room and pulled from his pocket the underwear she had been wearing the night of the assault.
The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, in Kings Point, New York, trains students to work in the commercial shipping industry. It has an enrollment of about 1,000 students. It is one of five military service academies, and the only one under the U.S. Department of Transportation.
In 2016, the academy temporarily shut down the Sea Year program, which sends cadets to work on container ships, oil tankers, passenger liners and other vessels, amid sexual abuse and bullying concerns. The program resumed in 2017 on vessels operated by three companies that the academy said had implemented new preventive policies.
The Sea Year program was suspended again in 2021 after another cadet said a cargo ship supervisor got her drunk and raped her. It resumed after more safety protocols were put in place.
Congress passed the Safer Seas Act, which strengthened reporting requirements for sexual offenses aboard U.S.-flag commercial vessels. The academy updated its amnesty policy to encourage reporting by sexual assault and harassment victims and witnesses.
It has expanded prevention education and support resources, provides all cadets with satellite phones during Sea Year and conducts confidential interviews with cadets returning from the program.
The academy, in its statement, said it “will continue working with Congress, industry partners, and its federal partners to further strengthen the safety and well-being of every midshipman.”
Former cargo ship captain John Merrone is wheeled out of federal court in the Brooklyn borough of New York by his lawyer, Bruce Barket, Wednesday, July 15, 2026, after pleading guilty to charges he drugged and sexually assaulted a U.S. Merchant Marine Academy cadet in 2019 while she was working on the vessel. (AP Photo/Michael R. Sisak)
EASTERN UKRAINE (AP) — The commander leading Ukraine’s drone war says his country’s recent strikes in Crimea are the first phase of a campaign aimed at rendering the peninsula — illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 — unusable as a staging ground for Russian forces.
Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, one of Ukraine’s most prominent commanders among a new generation of soldiers, said his forces could strike seven times more military targets in Crimea if the money pledged by Western allies came faster.
“Crimea falls within the key conceptual pillars on the path to ending the war,” Brovdi told The Associated Press in an interview.
Despite that shortfall, Ukraine’s summer campaign in Crimea has already inflicted significant damage: striking rail bridges, oil depots and power infrastructure to disrupt supply lines and blind Russian air defenses as drones fly in.
Brovdi said his forces are equipped at just 14% of what they would need to carry out the Crimea campaign at full capacity.
A firm believer in numbers since his past life running an international grain trading business, Brovdi joined Ukraine’s territorial defense as a volunteer in the war’s opening days. He rose quickly, commanding one of the country’s most effective drone brigades before being tapped to lead a force with no precedent before this war — Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces.
“It’s not that the production capacity of Ukrainian manufacturers doesn’t allow us to make the necessary quantities” of drones, Brovdi said. “It’s the banal problem of untimely financing, which our partners do allocate, but which moves significantly slower than our plans.”
A devoted patron of the arts, Brovdi's underground command post resembles a museum, with pieces of Ukrainian art on display, including by renowned painter Maria Prymachenko — each with small placards noting their titles and a QR code linking to more information. “Please don’t touch the sculpture,” reads a sign beneath one piece.
The artwork sits against a backdrop of dozens of screens streaming live footage from the front, along with real-time data that drives decisions on the battlefield. Soldiers can grab good coffee, pick a book, work out or rest in sleeping pods — a culture that feels closer to a Silicon Valley office than a war room.
They work around the clock to try to prevent Crimea from functioning as a staging ground for the Russian military, said Brovdi, whose call sign, Magyar, nods to his ethnic Hungarian roots in Zakarpattia, the western Ukrainian region bordering Hungary.
He pointed to one sign of progress — in four recent large-scale Russian missile barrages from the peninsula, only five missiles were launched in total, a drop he credited to the systematic destruction of Russian air defenses there. The AP couldn’t independently verify the claim.
To open that “window” for drones to strike the peninsula without being shot down en masse, his forces destroyed more than 300 air defense assets over recent months — surface-to-air systems, radar stations, electronic warfare equipment.
The window metaphor sends him into a sidetrack about something personal — he loves sleeping with one open, a pleasure he rarely gets anymore as one of Russia’s most hunted men, who spends most of his time in underground bunkers.
Much of Russia's Soviet-era air defense hardware runs on the power grid, which is one of the reasons Crimea's electrical infrastructure has become a recurring target. Russian soldiers become “blind,” left with just machine guns and rifles, he said. The tactic has also impacted access to power for civilians, and Brovdi said he has twice publicly apologized to Ukrainians living in Crimea for the disruptions.
Wherever Starlink connectivity reaches across Crimea, his forces can now destroy even the most heavily defended target using an average of just three drones, mixing munitions with different characteristics and warheads depending on what’s being hit. He described the strikes as deliberately calibrated — different munitions for a bridge pier than for a fuel truck or a moving train — and said his forces avoid hitting civilian infrastructure.
“Creating conditions that make it impossible for any kind of military capability … to remain there will make Crimea uninteresting ... as a military staging ground,” he said.
Ukraine is also working to dismantle Crimea’s role as a naval base — a blow to Russia’s presence near NATO’s borders, he added.
The campaign’s early results have not been made public, Brovdi said. But roughly two weeks into the offensive that began in late June, he said Ukrainian intelligence indicated Russian authorities had ordered all military commands and security services to relocate off the peninsula, along with a covert order to remove secret archives and artworks. The AP could not independently verify the account.
Meanwhile, Russia is working to counter Ukraine’s edge. It is installing jamming systems at a scale that will, to some degree, degrade Starlink connectivity, Brovdi said.
Russia is also building its own satellite communications system to rival Starlink, he said. “This is a risk for the entire planet,” Brovdi said, “because a dictatorship will gain access to information across the whole globe.”
He also pointed to other threats facing Ukraine. The concentration of jet-powered Shahed drones, which are much harder for Ukraine to shoot down, has increased two and a half times in recent weeks, he said.
Russia's military can currently fire a simultaneous salvo of 77 ballistic missiles, he said, and plans to increase that to 200. That is one of Ukraine’s most vulnerable points, since the country is running short of interceptors for the U.S.-made Patriot — the only system Ukraine has in its arsenal against ballistic missiles — meaning dozens fired by Russia during mass barrages get through and hit their targets.
“Even if they only manage half of that, it will all be flying at us,” Brovdi said. The only way to bring the number down, he said, is by striking every facility involved in producing those missiles — underscoring the importance of Ukraine’s long-range strikes deep inside Russian territory.
Ukraine has increasingly targeted Wildberries, Russia’s largest online marketplace sometimes described as the country’s answer to Amazon, and Brovdi named it as a target.
“Wildberries is, first of all, a supply platform — it’s the war’s quartermaster,” he said, noting the company runs a dedicated section selling goods for Russia’s military.
At the same time, he said, the strikes on the retail chain are meant to make ordinary Russians feel the war directly, in hopes the resulting desire to end it could weigh on Russia’s ability to keep fighting.
Brovdi declined to give a timeline for the Wildberries campaign, saying only that the strikes will continue “until it becomes impossible for it to recover quickly.”
“Ultimately, Wildberries is, forgive the expression, a consumer gambling addiction,” he said, arguing that losing access to it — like restrictions on social media — creates an intrusion on one's personal life that most Russians feel.
“It turned out to be a sensitive sensor of the comfort of Russia’s massive population — people who consider themselves completely untouched by the actions of the aggressor country," he said.
AP reporters Vasilisa Stepanenko in eastern Ukraine and Volodymyr Yurchuk in Kyiv contributed.
A Ukrainian "Chaklun" long-range strike drone takes off from a mobile launcher during an operational launch targeting Russian military installations in Crimea, from an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
A Ukrainian serviceman prepares a "Chaklun" strike drone used for deep-strike operations against Russian positions in Crimea, in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Maj. Robert "Magyar" Brovdi speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Friday, Aug. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Ukrainian servicemen prepare a "Chaklun" strike drone used for deep-strike operations against Russian positions in Crimea, in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Maj. Robert "Magyar" Brovdi stands in the control room during a long-range unmanned aerial vehicle operation targeting Russian positions in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Friday, Aug. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
