Hundreds of Thousands of Uber Sexual Assaults Went Unreported for Years, NYT

According to New York Times’ investigators, Uber employees say sexual assaults are still underreported.

A New York Times investigation reveals that Uber vastly undercounted sexual assaults and misconduct happening in its vehicles for years, with nearly half a million reports logged between 2017 and 2022.

Investigators say sealed court records indicate Uber received 400,181 reports of sexual assault over that five-year period, equating to one incident every eight minutes. However, Uber only publicly reported 12,522 sexual misconduct incidents over that period.

The flood of reports came long after Uber realized it had a problem. The rideshare service originally implemented “Safe Ride Fees” in 2014 to address the issue. However, the company currently faces more than 3,000 Uber driver sexual assault lawsuits, each alleging that the company failed to use that money to make rides safer for passengers.

The lawsuits claim the company only provided cursory background checks for drivers, failed to provide surveillance cameras inside of cars, did not allow passengers to make requests regarding the driver’s gender, and failed to train drivers on issues of sexual assault and harassment.

The New York Times report notes that Uber has not released data on driver sexual assaults since 2022, but court records suggest the number of assaults has only increased since then.

Company representatives told investigators that most of the 400,000 reports were less serious than actual assaults, such as commenting on how passengers are dressed or other inappropriate statements. Even if true, that still leaves about 100,000 serious reports.

According to this latest report, Uber employees say sexual assault and misconduct are still likely underreported, despite Uber officials saying that they expect the number of serious offenses to decrease, and that the increases seen in recent years have been the result of the number of drivers and customers expanding.

Victims of Uber sexual assaults are usually women, whether they are passengers or drivers, and the vast majority of attackers are men. In addition, most attacks occur late at night and often happen near bars and frequently involve intoxicated passengers.

The report notes that Uber has tested several options and technologies for dealing with the problem, but many have never been implemented, such as placing cameras in cars. The company has put a machine-learning tool in place called Safety Risk Assessed Dispatch which tries to predict which pairings of drivers and passengers may increase the risk of a sexual assault, but company officials admit it is far from perfect.

Uber Driver Sexual Assault Lawsuits

Although some Uber driver sexual assault lawsuits are awaiting resolution in state courts, most have been filed in federal courts nationwide. Given common issues of fact and law raised in the claims, an Uber driver sexual assault MDL (multidistrict litigation) was established in the Northern District of California in 2023, centralizing the litigation under U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer for coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings.

In May, Judge Breyer selected six Uber driver sex assault lawsuits to serve as a first wave of bellwether trials, which are designed to help gauge how juries may respond to certain evidence and testimony that would be repeated throughout the litigation. The first bellwether trial is scheduled to go before a jury on December 8, 2025.

While the outcomes of these bellwether trials will not have any binding effect on other claims in the MDL, they will be closely watched by parties involved in the litigation and the average lawsuit payouts awarded by juries may have a substantial impact on any Uber sexual assault settlement negotiations, which will be necessary to avoid hundreds of individual cases being remanded back to U.S. District Courts nationwide for future trial dates.

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