Uber Understated Thousands of Sexual Assaults, Victims Tell Jury

Uber Technologies Inc. underreported thousands of passenger sexual assaults by drivers over the past decade and declined to implement a host of safety policies that would have helped prevent those incidents, attorneys for the victims told a San Francisco jury on the first day of trial.

“Uber referred to its drivers as supply and its riders as demand,” attorney Natalie Weatherford of Taylor & Ring, who represents one of the victims, said during opening statements. “Anything that slowed down either supply or demand was not implemented by Uber, and the sexual violence reports increased significantly.”

The opening statements Monday at the jury trial in California Superior Court, San Francisco County marks the culmination of four years of litigation involving hundreds of consolidated lawsuits from Uber passengers who allege the ridesharing platform failed to provide the highest duty of care to protect them from sexual assaults by drivers.

The trial, expected to last all month, is the first bellwether case among 600 lawsuits consolidated before Judge Ethan P. Schulman, and the verdict on Uber’s liability and damages will give an indication of how future trials or settlements could play out. The state court proceedings mirror a similar group of consolidated cases in California federal court, with the first of those bellwether trials expected to start in December.

Uber will argue throughout the trial that it leads the ridesharing industry in safety standards and technology, with thorough background checks and live GPS tracking. Assaults make up less than 1% of all Uber rides, it says.

Weatherford said during opening statements that Uber’s 2019 transparency report identifying instances of sexual violence and sexual misconduct by drivers massively under counted the total number of incidents. The report said there were almost 6,000 incidents over 2017 and 2018, but Weatherford said that was based on Uber’s selection of only five categories of sexual violence.

The report left out 16 other categories of sexual violence, including masturbation and verbal threats of sexual assault, Weatherford said. “Uber decided that these did not need to be released to the public,” she said.

Counting all categories, Uber received around 71,000 sexual violence reports in 2017 and around 95,000 reports in 2018, the attorney told the jurors.

First Bellwether Case

The bellwether trial involves a 2016 incident of an 18-year-old woman, proceeding in the litigation as Jessica C., who said she was forcibly kissed and groped by a driver who was giving her a ride to the San Jose, Calif., airport.

Jessica, a first-year student at the University of California Santa Cruz at the time, was traveling back home to San Diego on a Friday evening after her final exams. After drinking some alcohol in her dorm, she took a bus from campus to a San Jose bus terminal where she ordered an Uber to the airport for the very first time.

Jessica will testify that her driver, Farrukh Kazim, at some point during the ride pulled over on a side street, turned off the Uber app, and started to grope and kiss her while she sat in the front passenger seat. He allegedly restrained her by her hair and attempted to take her pants off.

“Jessica thought in that moment she was going to be raped or killed,” Weatherford said.

After her phone started ringing, Jessica said her parents were calling her because they had her GPS location, even though they didn’t, and that she needed to go to the airport. Kazim dropped her at the airport but told Jessica, “I’m going to come find you,” Weatherford said.

Jessica returned to school the next semester and received treatment for PTSD, but she ultimately dropped out.

The same year as Jessica’s assault, Uber was considering pilot programs for audio and video recording of drives as an effort to deter assaults by either drivers or passengers, according to Weatherford. An internal Uber slide deck said equipping vehicles with cameras—which is already required by law in California buses and taxicabs—"will make everyone think twice before causing trouble.”

During Uber’s opening statement, attorney Allison Brown of Kirkland & Ellis LLP told the jury that the plaintiff’s narrative focused on a small number of cherry-picked facts.

Although the reports of tens of thousands of incidents of sexual violence appear concerning, Uber’s transparency report made clear that the excluded reports were unsubstantiated, or based on events as casual a driver looking at a passenger in an odd way or slamming the door too hard, Brown said.

Uber also facilitates over one billion trips per year, so the reported serious safety incidents amounts 0.0002% of all rides, she said. “It’s five times more likely to be struck by lightning than to be sexually assaulted in an Uber,” Brown said.

The law doesn’t say Uber most prevent 100% of all sexual assaults, the attorney said.

Brown also said the company had conducted a thorough background check on Kazim, returning no criminal history, and much of the trauma Jessica experienced was the result of previous instances of non-sexual abuse by her parents. Her recollection of the 2016 incident six days after it occurred is very different from her recitation of the event when she filed the lawsuit in 2021, Brown said.

“We cannot guarantee that nothing bad is going to happen in an Uber, no one can,” Brown said. “We don’t operate our cars in a bubble free from bad people or accidents.”

The case is In Re: Uber Rideshare Cases, Cal. Super. Ct., No. CJC21005188, 9/8/25.