Man sued after costing airline $21,000,000 emailed daughter with heartbreaking explanation for booking over 2,000 empty seats

The daughter of a man who was sued after costing an airline $21,000,000 explained the sad reason why he booked 2,000 empty seats.

American Airlines offered up free first-class tickets for life to anyone willing to cough up $250,000 on the spot in 1981.

The airline had wanted to make up for lost profit after being hit by financial struggles.

Some 66 people bought the lifetime pass, dubbed the AAirpass - including Steven Rothstein.

Between 1987 and 2008, he alone cost American Airlines more than $21 million dollars in profits due to the volume of flights he took.

Steven Rothstein revealed the heartbreaking reason behind his empty seat bookings (Caroline Rothstein)

In those 21 years of traveling, Steven, a stockbroker, racked up 30 million miles across 10,000 flights with the company - all covered by the $250k he'd first put down.

But it took decades for the company to realise that Steven was costing them millions of dollars.

In 2008, they revoked the use of his pass and went on to sue him, though not for his personal overuse of the AAirpass.

Suing him instead for fraud, accusing him of booking seats for non-existent passengers under names such as 'Bag Rothstein' and 'Steven Rothstein Jr', and also booking tickets for flights he was never planning to board.

Rothstein also admitted to offering up his ticket to those in need on numerous occasions throughout the 20+ years he had the unlimited flights.

Caroline Rothstein (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival)

Why did Steven Rothstein book so many American Airlines tickets?

In 2019, Steven's daughter Caroline Rothstein explained the sad reasoning behind her dad booking some 2,000 'empty' flight seats over the years.

In a piece for Narratively, published in the Guardian, Caroline explained how she read through some 80 court documents about the case in full, discovering that, according to a senior analyst at American Airlines, 'of the 3,009 flight segments Dad booked for himself from May 2005 to December 2008, he either canceled or was a “no-show” for 84% of those reservations.'

Asking her father why he did this, Steven revealed it was a way of coping with the death of his teenage son - Caroline's brother - in 2002. Josh, 15, had died after being hit by a car while walking down the street.

Steven explained: “When everyone was asleep in the house, and I had nobody to talk to, and I was lonely about Josh’s death, I would telephone American Airlines reservations and speak to the agents about who knows what for an hour and then at the end, they’d ask me, oh, what reservation was I calling about to make, and I would say, ‘Oh yeah, I need to go to San Francisco next week'.

Steven with young Josh in the early 1990s (Caroline Rothstein)

"I really didn’t need to go to San Francisco. I was just very confused and very lonely and I was calling American Airlines because they were logical people for me to speak to. They knew me. I knew them. I knew their names. I knew their lives.”

In an email to his daughter, he said explained why he wanted to keep the plane seat next to him empty. Steven wrote: "I was incoherent, crying several times daily, drinking liquor which I never did before and if I got in a seat I didn’t want to explain why I was crying to anyone."

Despite American Airlines' initial legal action, they and Rothstein eventually settled outside of court.