Ian Patrick, FISM News
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Uber is facing a lawsuit from about 550 of its users who allege that drivers hired by the ride share company sexually assaulted them.
A complaint filed in San Francisco County Superior Court on July 13 says that women “in multiple states were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, sexually battered, raped, falsely imprisoned, stalked, harassed, or otherwise attacked by Uber drivers with whom they had been paired through the Uber application.”
The complaint asserts that Uber has been prioritizing its growth as a company over the safety of its passengers. It states that Uber became aware of drivers sexually assaulting and raping female passengers in 2014, and yet “sexual predators driving for Uber have continued to attack passengers.”
The ride share company has been sharing various data it has received in their U.S. Safety Reports. The second report they released in June of this year accounts for the years 2019 and 2020, and shows that Uber “received 3,824 reports across the five most severe categories of sexual assault and misconduct.”
These categories range from “non-consensual kissing of a non-sexual body part” to “non-consensual sexual penetration.”
Adam Slater, Founding Partner of Slater Slater Schulman LLP which is representing the alleged victims in the case, said “Uber’s whole business model is predicated on giving people a safe ride home, but rider safety was never their concern – growth was, at the expense of their passengers’ safety.”
“While the company has acknowledged this crisis of sexual assault in recent years, its actual response has been slow and inadequate, with horrific consequences,” Slater added.
The complaint says that Uber prioritized hiring drivers so much so that it “eschewed traditional background check standards” like fingerprinting. The complaint also says that Uber has a policy of not reporting “any criminal activity – even assaults and rape – to law-enforcement authorities.”
Adam Slater says that Uber has recognized the issue of sexual assault in its business, but has not taken certain actions to prevent this horror from continuing.
There is so much more that Uber can be doing to protect riders: adding cameras to deter assaults, performing more robust background checks on drivers, creating a warning system when drivers don’t stay on a path to a destination. But the company refuses to, and that’s why my firm has 550 clients with claims against Uber and we’re investigating at least 150 more. Acknowledging the problem through safety reports is not enough. It is well past time for Uber to take concrete actions to protect its customers.