Image: © Sundry Photography/Stock.adobe.com
The lawsuit claims that former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick compromised rider safety to prioritise growth.
Uber is being sued by more than 500 women who were allegedly sexually assaulted by drivers working for the ride-hailing company.
The complaint filed in a San Francisco court yesterday (13 July) claims that women passengers in multiple states were “kidnapped, sexually assaulted, sexually battered, raped, falsely imprisoned, stalked, harassed or otherwise attacked by Uber drivers”.
Slater Slater Schulman, a law firm based in New York, said it has approximately 550 clients with claims against Uber. At least 150 more are also being actively investigated.
“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,” said Adam Slater, founding partner at Slater Slater Schulman.
“While the company has acknowledged this crisis of sexual assault in recent years, its actual response has been slow and inadequate, with horrific consequences.”
Uber safety
The lawsuit comes just a few weeks after Uber published its second US safety report. It found that in 2020, the most recent year with available data, there were 998 sexual assault incidents reported – including 141 rape reports.
Uber received 3,824 reports of the five most severe categories of sexual assault in 2019 and 2020, according to the report, ranging from “non-consensual kissing of a non-sexual body part” to “non-consensual sexual penetration”.
Slater Slater Schulman claims that Uber became aware that its drivers were sexually assaulting female passengers as early as 2014.
It also claims that former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who led the company until 2017, intentionally opted to hire drivers without fingerprinting them or running their information through FBI databases.
“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,” Slater said.
“Acknowledging the problem through safety reports is not enough. It is well past time for Uber to take concrete actions to protect its customers.”
The lawsuit comes at a bad time for Uber. A global investigation based on leaked files revealed this week how Uber aggressively lobbied politicians across the world over a five-year period to gain strategic advantages in new markets.
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