Uber sued by 550 women and counting on the sexual assaults of the drivers

Uber is being sued by 550 female passengers across the United States who claim they were assaulted by drivers on the platform.

The lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in San Francisco County Superior Court by attorneys for Slater Slater Schulman LLP, alleges that passengers were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, sexually beaten, raped, falsely imprisoned, stalked, harassed or otherwise attacked by Uber drivers, according to a court filing. They are seeking damages and demanding a jury trial for a long list of claims, including negligence in the hiring and supervision of drivers and liability for everything from attacks to product design flaws.

The lawsuit comes just days after the Uber Files, a treasure trove of 124,000 documents including internal emails and text messages between executives and politicians, were leaked by former Uber lobbyist Mark McCann. The files, which reveal Uber's inner workings from 2013 to 2017, detail a history of law breaking, lobbying and exploiting driver safety.

Last month, Uber released its second U.S. safety report, which showed there were 998 incidents of sexual assault, including 141 rapes, in 2020 alone. Between 2019 and 2020 , Uber received 3,824 reports of the five most serious categories of sexual assault. Uber's first safety report, which details incidents from 2017 to 2018, found nearly 6,000 reports of sexual assaults.

The lawsuit against the company claims that Uber intentionally concealed the fact that Uber drivers regularly assaulted women since at least 2014 and "instead represented that Uber was a safe mode of transportation." He also accuses Uber of actively providing sexual predators with a platform to find and assault women, without conducting proper background checks on drivers or providing adequate passenger security measures. Additionally, the complaint accuses Uber of benefiting financially from rides where women were sexually assaulted.

"Uber's entire business model is about getting people home safely, but passenger safety has never been their concern: growth has come at the expense of safety of their passengers,” said Adam Slater, founding partner of Slater Slater Schulman, in a report. "While the company has acknowledged this sexual assault crisis in recent years, its actual response has been slow and inadequate, with horrific consequences."

While 550 women in the United States have come forward to join Slater Slater Schulman's class action lawsuit, the law firm is actively investigating another 150. And that's only in the United States.

One of the chilling details revealed in the Uber files details the company's strategy for dealing with assaults in at least one overseas case. When an Uber driver raped a 25-year-old female passenger in Delhi in 2014, the company decided to "put the blame on faulty Indian background checks".

Wednesday's lawsuit details the claims of at least five women who were victims of sexual predators driving for Uber between 2021 and 2022. The complaint accuses Uber of being obsessed with hiring new drivers as quickly as possible to fuel growth, which has resulted in shoddy background checks.

“For example, former CEO Travis Kalanick intentionally chose to hire drivers without fingerprinting or running their information through FBI databases, and current Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi continued this policy after taking office in August 2017," reads a statement from plaintiff's attorneys.

Lawyers handling the case say Uber has a long-standing policy of not reporting criminal activity to law enforcement. Despite several other lawsuits filed against the company by women alleging sexual assault by drivers — including one in 2018 settled by Uber — the company has firmly asserted that its drivers are contractors, not employees, and that 'she is not responsible for their behavior. Uber did not install in-car video cameras to deter misconduct, and it maintained a “three strikes” policy for drivers that kept predators behind the wheel even after...