A federal jury in Phoenix on Thursday ordered Uber to pay $8.5 million to a passenger who said one of its drivers raped her, setting the stage for thousands of similar cases around the country.
The ride-hailing giant has long maintained that it is not responsible for wrongdoing by drivers on its platform, whom it classifies as independent contractors, not employees. But the jury rejected that defense, providing a roadmap for more than 3,000 pending sexual assault and sexual misconduct lawsuits accusing the company of systemic security failures.
The lawsuit was filed by Jaylynn Dean, who said her Uber driver raped her in November 2023 during a ride to her hotel from her boyfriend’s apartment in Tempe, Ariz.
“I want to make sure this doesn’t happen to other women,” Dean said on the witness stand. “I’m doing this for other women who thought the same as I did, that they made the safe and smart choice – but that you know there’s a risk of being assaulted.”
Uber fended off other allegations in the suit, including that it was negligent in its safety practices and that its app was faulty.
Jury’s prize fell well below the $144 million that Ms. Dean’s lawyers had asked for damages. The jury did not hand down stiffer penalties, in part because it did not find that the company’s actions were “outrageous, oppressive or intolerable” or that they created substantial risk or substantial harm.
“This verdict confirms that Uber acted responsibly and has invested meaningfully in rider safety,” Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman, said in a statement. “We will continue to put safety at the heart of everything we do.”
Mr. Kallman said Uber planned to appeal the verdict, saying the company believes the court gave erroneous instructions to the jury.
Uber has long maintained that the vast majority of its trips in the U.S. — 99.9 percent — happen without an incident of any kind, and that it’s one of the safest ways to get around.
Uber is facing increasing scrutiny across the country as lawmakers, investors and others move to hold the company accountable for a pervasive pattern of sexual violence during rides.
Mrs. Dean’s case is a watershed moment in federal litigation that has consolidated the thousands of sexual assault cases against Uber, allowing certain procedural issues to be presented to the same judge while each case is handled individually. The verdict is not binding on the other cases, but it offered a “real-world test” of the arguments before a jury, said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a professor at Stanford Law School.
“Bellwethers give both sides — and the public — a chance to see if the lawsuit really has legs,” she said.
Over three weeks, jurors weighed the harrowing personal account of Ms. Dean, as well as testimony from Uber executives and thousands of pages of internal company documents, including some that showed Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk of a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with one executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
Lawyers for Ms. Dean introduced documents that suggest Uber resisted introducing safety features such as in-car cameras because they believed those measures would slow the companies’ growth.
Mrs. Dean spent hours giving emotional testimony about the incident in 2023. When she was 19, she had recently moved to Arizona to study to be a flight attendant. She passed her test one day in November, and after celebrating, she said, she was drunk and ordered an Uber ride from her boyfriend’s apartment back to her hotel.
During the trip, Ms. Dean said, the driver pulled into a dark parking lot, climbed into the back seat and raped her. She described “dozing in and out of consciousness” and being unable to stop the driver.
She reported the incident to the police and to Uber, who blocked him. The driver was not charged with a crime and was not named in the case.
After the incident, Ms. Dean, she gave up a career as a flight attendant because she said the work environment was difficult. She moved back home and now works as a dispatcher for emergency medical services and attends nursing school. She fears the dark, she said, because it takes her back to the car seat in the dark parking lot where the rape took place. She sleeps with the light on, sometimes in her parents’ bed, she said.
Uber’s lawyers said the driver had no criminal history, had received top ratings from passengers, had completed training and had acknowledged that he was aware of Uber’s rule prohibiting sex between drivers and passengers. They said the company was an industry leader in security, developing a machine learning tool to assess the risk of potential trips as well as other security features and releasing public reports documenting assaults and other security incidents on the platform.
Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer, pushed back against claims that the company was “dragging its feet” on safety features like dashcams. But “I’ll be the first to say we haven’t done enough,” he said. “There’s a lot more we need to do.”
