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Rideshare giant Uber is liable for the behavior of a driver who grabbed the inner thigh of a passenger as she was leaving the front seat of his car and asked if he could “keep her” with him, a jury in North Carolina found Monday.
The federal jury in Charlotte awarded the plaintiff $5,000 in damages, said Ellyn Hurd, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers.
The so-called bellwether case is part of a broader group of sexual assault lawsuits filed against Uber in multiple jurisdictions around the country and is the third to go to trial. In February, a federal jury in Arizona ordered Uber to pay $8.5 million to a woman who said one of its drivers raped her during a trip using the platform. Last year, a California jury found Uber not liable for the alleged assault of a rider.
Uber, in an emailed statement, took note of the relatively small financial judgment in the North Carolina case and of the jury finding that battery had occurred and not sexual assault.
“The jury’s award here should further bring these cases back to reality, as it represents a tiny fraction of previous demands,” the Uber statement said, adding that the company has strong grounds for appeal because it believes the jury was incorrectly instructed on the question of liability.
The Associated Press doesn’t typically name people who have said they were sexually abused unless they have given consent through their attorneys or come forward publicly.
Hurd said the verdict bodes well for other plaintiffs, noting that Uber, not the plaintiffs, selected the North Carolina case as a test case for the broader group of pending lawsuits.
“This was a case that they thought going in that they were going to win,” Hurd said. “They picked all the criteria – this is the case that they picked, that they wanted to try. And the jury believed the plaintiff and they lost.”
The lawsuits follow years of criticism of Uber’s safety record, including thousands of incidents of sexual assault reported by both passengers and drivers. Because Uber drivers are categorized as gig workers – working as contractors, rather than company employees – the platform has long maintained it’s not liable for their misconduct.
The judge presiding over the group of lawsuits, U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer, ruled that Uber was a “common carrier” under North Carolina law and was thus liable for the driver’s action. Breyer said Uber holds itself out to the public as a transportation provider through its advertising and the control it exerts over Uber rides and the safety of its passengers. North Carolina could have explicitly exempted Uber and other rideshare providers from its common carrier liability, as Florida and Texas have, but did not, he said.
Hurd said that means the North Carolina jury only had to decide whether the attack happened.
The driver denied touching the plaintiff, Uber said. The company said the plaintiff never reported the incident to law enforcement and it only learned of it when the lawsuit was filed three years later.
Hurd said just because the plaintiff didn’t report it to law enforcement doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. During the trial, which started Wednesday and wrapped up Monday, the jury heard testimony from the driver, the plaintiff and friends of the plaintiff who corroborated her story, Hurd said.
Breyer, who is based in San Francisco in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is due to hear two more sexual assault test case trials against Uber. The next is scheduled for mid-September in San Francisco.
