Uber Rider Asks Jury for $144 Million in Driver Assault Case

Uber Technologies Inc. could be on the hook for $144 million in damages as a jury decides the ride sharing giant’s liability in a case where a woman claims she was raped by her driver during a late-night ride from a bar.

A nine-person jury in Arizona federal court heard closing statements Tuesday in the case of Jaylynn Dean, who said her driver Hassan Turay raped her in November 2023 when she was 19-years-old. It caps off a three week trial where the jury will decide whether Uber acted negligently and designed a defective product that lacked safety features for women that was a cause of Dean’s assault.

Dean’s attorney Deborah Chang of Chang and Klein LLP told the jury at closings that it should award $24 million to compensate Dean for her past and future mental health harms, and around $120 million in punitive damages to punish Uber for its lax safety standards.

Dean’s case is first bellwether trial out of nearly 3,000 consolidated federal lawsuits filed around the country, but Uber last September won its first state court trial in a similar consolidated proceeding in San Francisco.

The thousands of federal assault cases have been consolidated before Judge Charles Breyer in the San Francisco-based US District Court for the Northern District of California. Breyer transferred Dean’s case to federal court in Arizona, where it was first filed, for trial.

Defective Design

Dean said in her lawsuit that she took an Uber ride late at night from a bar back to her hotel in Tempe, Ariz., after she started feeling unwell because her anxiety medication was reacting with her consumption of alcohol.

Her driver ended the ride early and entered the back seat where she was laying down and raped her, Dean claimed. She called the police after the incident and later notified Uber. Turay told police they had consensual sex.

Her attorneys argued throughout trial said that Uber’s app was defectively designed because it failed to have features allowing women passengers to request women drivers, and it failed to implement automatic video recording to discourage driver misbehavior. It failed to effectively deploy its algorithmic safety scores for driver-rider pairings, known as S-RAD, to prevent more assaults, Dean’s attorneys argued.

Uber countered that the company conducted an extensive background check on Turay, including criminal records, sex offender lists, driving incidents, and civil complaints, which he passed. Turay didn’t have any credible sexual misconduct complaints until 2023, Uber said.

The company also argued that the alleged design defects weren’t a cause of Dean’s assault, pointing to testimony from Turay who said he would have turned off any camera if it had been mandated by Uber because he had ended the trip.

The jury deliberated about an hour on Tuesday and will return Wednesday morning.

Kirkland & Ellis LLP, O’Melveny & Myers LLP, and Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP represent Uber. Girard Sharp LLP, Anapol Weiss, Chaffin Luhana LLP, Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise, and Simmons Hanly Conroy LLP also represent Dean.

The case is Dean v. Uber Technologies Inc., D. Ariz., No. 2:25-cv-04276, 2/3/26.