A U.S. District Judge in California filed an order in July 2024 demanding that Uber Technologies, the biggest ride-hailing company in the world, give lawsuit participants access to all its data about sexual assault incidents that occurred in an Uber from 2017 to 2020.
The order is part of an ongoing multidistrict litigation (MDL) to hold Uber responsible for running inadequate background checks on its employed drivers and failing to protect paying customers from harm. As of June, victims have filed over 320 sexual assault lawsuits in the MDL against Uber.
As stated in the order, Uber reviewed over 800,000 individual user reports filed from 2017 to 2020 to collect information for its two U.S. Safety Reports. Uber’s first Safety Report examined incidents from 2017 to 2018, and the second reviewed cases from 2019 to 2020. According to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, the data in these user reports suggests that Uber was aware of how many sexual assaults were occurring, but failed to take significant action to stop future incidents.
Siding with the victims, the judge agreed to grant plaintiffs access to the data in Uber’s individual user reports from 2017-2020. However, Uber will only have to turn in the user reports that directly involved cases of sexual assault, since many of the 800,000 reports were about unrelated incidents.
For now, Uber’s deadline to submit data for its 2017-2020 sexual assault user reports is on July 31, 2024.
What does this mean for the rideshare assault lawsuit?
For months now, Uber has been trying to dismiss cases from the Uber sexual assault MDL, including a recent attempt to eliminate all cases in Texas over a state law dispute. However, despite Uber’s efforts, the rideshare sexual assault lawsuit continues to grow bigger. Depending on what the data from its individual user reports is able to uncover, Uber could soon be heading into major legal trouble.
If you or an immediate family member suffered from sexual assault while in an Uber or Lyft, see if you qualify to join the rideshare lawsuit.
