A federal jury this week found Uber to be legally responsible in a 2023 case of sexual assault — ordering the rideshare giant to pay $8.5 million to a woman who said one of its drivers raped her during a trip using the platform.
The verdict, reached Thursday in Arizona, follows years of criticism against Uber's safety record, much of which spans from thousands of incidents of sexual assault reported by both passengers and drivers. Because Uber drivers are categorized as gig workers — working as contractors, rather than company employees — the platform has long maintained it's not liable for their misconduct.
“Uber spends billions of dollars to make all riders feel like they’re (riding) with Uber. And that is what the jury found yesterday," Ellyn Hurd, one of the attorneys representing plaintiff Jaylynn Dean, told The Associated Press. The verdict determined the driver is an “apparent agent” of the company, she explained, making Uber liable for the assault.
Hurd added her team was “very proud of our client for facing such a huge, powerful company.” And the jury's decision could carry significant impact for similar cases, she noted.
Uber said it plans to appeal. And beyond apparent agency, the jury didn't find the company to be negligent or have defective safety systems.
The verdict “affirms that Uber acted responsibly and has invested meaningfully in rider safety,” spokesperson Andrew Hasbun said in a statement. He added that the award was “far below” the full amount initially requested from the plaintiff's lawyers.
The lawsuit stems from an November 2023 Uber ride when Dean, who was 19 at the time, was heading to her hotel after celebrating her upcoming graduation from flight attendant training at her boyfriend’s home in Arizona. Partway through the ride, the complaint alleged, the driver stopped the car, entered the back seat and raped her.
The driver was not named or part of this civil suit.
The lawsuit argued Uber had long known its drivers were assaulting passengers, and that it didn’t implement the safety measures needed to stop this from happening. The complaint, filed in December 2023, called the company's response “slow and inadequate” — putting “the lives and well-being of its customers at grave risk.”
Meanwhile, San Francisco-based Uber says it has taken multiple steps in efforts to improve safety on its platform, including teaming up with Lyft in 2021 to create a database of drivers ousted from their ride-hailing services for complaints over sexual assault and other crimes.
The company maintains that sexual assault reports have decreased substantially over the years. According to reports from Uber, 5,981 incidents of sexual assault were reported in U.S. rides between 2017 and 2018 — compared to 2,717 between 2021 and 2022 (the latest years with data available), which the platform says represented 0.0001% of total trips nationwide.
Still, critics stress that ridesharing companies need to develop more guardrails to protect consumers and take clearer responsibility in cases of assault.
Sarah London, another attorney representing Dean, stated that Thursday's verdict validates “survivors who have come forward at great personal risk to demand accountability against Uber.” Still, she said the work is far from over.
While grateful for the outcome on behalf of her client, she noted that thousands of other cases remain and "justice will ultimately be measured by the outcomes of the ongoing litigation and whether meaningful safety reforms are implemented to protect passengers going forward.”
The AP does not typically name people who have said they were sexually abused, unless they have given consent through their attorneys or come forward publicly, as Dean has done through her lawyers.
AP Writer Josh Funk contributed to this report.
FILE - The Uber logo appears above a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Aug. 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
ATLANTA (AP) — The Georgia General Assembly ended its annual session early Friday without a plan for new equipment to overhaul the state's voting system by a July deadline, plunging into doubt the future of elections in the political battleground.
The lawmakers' failure to offer a solution after months of debate raises uncertainty about how Georgians will vote in November and leaves confusion that could end in the courts or a special legislative session.
“They’ve abdicated their responsibility,” Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper said of inaction by Republicans who control the legislature.
Currently, voters make their choices on Dominion Voting machines, which then print ballots with a QR code that scanners read to tally votes. Those machines have been repeatedly targeted by President Donald Trump following his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s Georgia supporters responded by enacting a law in 2024 that bans using barcodes to count votes.
But state law still requires counties to use the machines. No money has been allocated to reprogram them, and lawmakers failed to agree on a replacement.
“We’ll have an unresolvable statutory conflict come July 1,” said House Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Victor Anderson, a Cornelia Republican who backed a proposal to keep using the machines in 2026 that Senate Republicans declined to consider.
House Republicans and Democrats backed Anderson's plan, which would have required that Georgia choose a voting process that didn't use QR codes by 2028. Election officials preferred that solution.
“The Senate has shown that they’re not responsible actors,” Draper said. She added that Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Trump-endorsed Republican running for governor, seemed more interested in keeping Trump's backing than “doing right by Georgia voters.”
A spokesperson for Jones didn't immediately respond to a request for comment early Friday.
Joseph Kirk, Bartow County election supervisor and president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, said he’ll look to the secretary of state for guidance and assumes a judge will rule to instruct election officials how to proceed.
“This is uncharted territory,” he said.
Robert Sinners, a spokesperson for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is also running for governor, said officials are “ready to follow the law and follow the Constitution.”
Republican House Speaker Jon Burns told reporters that his chamber was seeking to minimize changes this year.
“You can’t change horses in the middle of the stream,” Burns said.
Burns said he would meet with Gov. Brian Kemp and “take his temperature" on the possibility of a special session. A spokesperson for Kemp didn't answer questions about what the outgoing Republican governor would do.
Anderson said without action, the state could be required to use hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots in November.
Election officials say switching to a new system within just a few months, as advocated by some Republicans, would be nearly impossible.
“They made no way for this to happen except putting a deadline on it," Cherokee County elections director Anne Dover said of the switch away from barcodes. Dover said one problem under some plans is that a very large number of ballots would have to be printed.
Lawmakers seemed more concerned about scoring political points than making practical plans, Paulding County Election Supervisor Deidre Holden said.
“If anyone is resilient and can get the job done, it’s all of us election officials, but the legislators need to work with us, and they need to understand what we do before they go making laws that are basically unachievable for us,” Holden said.
Supporters of hand-marked paper ballots say voters are more likely to trust in an accurate count if they can see what gets read by the scanner.
Right-wing election activists lobbied lawmakers for an immediate switch to hand-marked paper ballots, but the House turned away from a Senate proposal to do so.
Anderson said he wasn’t sure if a special session could escape those political crosswinds, but said Georgia lawmakers must fix the problem.
“This is a legislative problem,” Anderson said. “It’s a legislative solution that has to happen.”
FILE - Voting machines are seen at the Bartow County Election office, Jan. 25, 2024, in Cartersville, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)
