Uber Technologies Inc. (Uber) is being sued by more than 500 sexual assault survivors alleging the company failed to put adequate protections in place and endangered them on rides, People reports.
According to the report, Uber Technologies in court documents it is alleged that passengers in multiple states were “kidnapped, sexually assaulted, sexually battered, raped, falsely imprisoned, stalked, harassed, and/or otherwise attacked by an Uber driver with whom they had been paired with through the Uber Application.”
The complaint, which was filed Wednesday in San Francisco County Superior Court by attorneys at Slater Slater Schulman LLP, a law firm focused on representing survivors of catastrophic and traumatic events, also alleges that the transportation company Uber Technologies became aware that “Uber drivers were sexually assaulting and raping female passengers” as “early as 2014.”
The filing states that while the company has acknowledged the “sexual assault crisis” in recent years, it has “failed to implement basic safety measures necessary to prevent these serious sexual assaults, which continue to occur to this day.”
Additionally, the civil action suit mentions Uber’s 2014 implementation of a Safe Rides Fee, in which it began charging riders an extra dollar per trip “to ensure the safest possible platform for Uber riders and drivers.”
Uber drivers and Uber split the fare Uber charges riders for the riders’ trips; however, the suit states that drivers did not split the Safe Rides Fee with the company, resulting in “pure revenue for Uber.”
“Uber’s whole business model is based on giving people a safe ride home, but rider safety was never their concern – growth was, at the expense of their passengers’ safety,” Adam Slater, Founding Partner of Slater Slater Schulman LLP, told People in a statement.
“There is so much more that the company 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,” adds Slater. “But [Uber] refuse[s] to, and that’s why my firm has 550 clients with claims against Uber and we’re investigating at least 150 more.”
A spokesperson for Uber Technologies said in a statement to that “sexual assault is a horrific crime and we take every single report seriously,” People reports.
“There is nothing more important than safety, which is why Uber has built new safety features, established survivor-centric policies, and been more transparent about serious incidents,” the statement continued.
“While we can’t comment on pending litigation, we will continue to keep safety at the heart of our work.”
Last month, Uber released its second safety report, which showed it received over 3,800 reports of the five most severe categories of sexual assault in 2019 and 2020, ranging from “non-consensual kissing of a non-sexual body part” to “non-consensual sexual penetration,” or rape.
Data from the report showed that the rate of sexual assault reported had decreased by 38% from the 2017-2018 report, which had just under 6,000 reports of sexual assault.
In 2020, Uber announced it would “expand sexual misconduct and assault education to all US drivers,” partnering with RAINN, the nation’s largest sexual violence organization, “to design this program.”