She did everything right.
She had a drink with friends, so she didn't drive. It was late, so she didn't walk. She opened the app. She checked the driver's name. She matched the license plate. She shared her location with a friend, the way so many women do without even thinking about why. Then she got in the back seat and finally let herself relax.
She was going home.
Now imagine that the man behind the wheel, the man she was trusting to get her there safely, becomes the danger she was trying to avoid.
We tell women their whole lives how to stay safe. Don't drive drunk. Don't walk alone. Don't take rides from strangers. And then we built a multibillion-dollar industry that asks them to do exactly that, every single night, with a company's promise standing in between.
When that promise breaks, who is responsible?
That is the question at the heart of the largest wave of rideshare sexual assault litigation this country has ever seen. As a trial attorney who represents survivors of sexual assault, I have watched women fight to be believed for my entire career. What troubles me about the Uber cases is how familiar the fight looks. Once again, survivors are being asked to prove not only what happened to them, but why anyone other than the man who hurt them should answer for it.
The courtrooms are starting to answer. And what they are saying matters to every woman who has ever opened a rideshare app.
Five Thousand Cases. One Question.
The federal cases are coordinated in In re Uber Technologies, Inc., Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation, MDL No. 3084, before U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer in the Northern District of California. The proceeding began in 2023. Today it holds roughly 5,000 cases, according to Bloomberg Law, with more pending in California state court.
I want to be clear about what that means. This is not one class action. Every one of those cases is a woman with her own story, her own injuries, and her own evidence. Every one will be judged on its own facts.
But they share a question. Did Uber fail to take reasonable steps to protect passengers from sexual assault and harassment by drivers, when the company had information that should have warned it of the danger?
The driver who commits an assault is responsible for what he did. Nobody disputes that. Civil litigation asks the next question, and it is the one corporations least want to hear: did the company that recruited, screened, connected, and monitored that driver also owe her protection?
Uber denies wrongdoing. It says it has invested heavily in safety, including background screening, ongoing criminal-record checks, emergency assistance, trip tracking, and teams dedicated to responding to sexual assault reports. Those claims deserve to be tested. That is exactly what a courtroom is for.
For survivors, none of this is academic. These distinctions decide whether the justice system will look past the man in the driver's seat to the company that put him there.
Three Federal Cases. Three Lessons.
The first three federal bellwether cases are the closest thing we have to a preview of where this litigation is heading. Here is what I see in each one.
Arizona: a jury believed her. In February 2026, a federal jury in Arizona awarded $8.5 million to Jaylynn Dean, who was 19 years old when, she alleged, an Uber driver raped her in 2023. The jury found Uber responsible on an apparent-agency theory: in the eyes of the law, the driver looked and acted like Uber's agent. Jurors did not find for her on her separate negligence and product-defect claims. That split matters. It tells us that the label "independent contractor" does not end the conversation, and that the legal theory a survivor's lawyer chooses can make all the difference.
North Carolina: the law says a ride is not just a ride. In April 2026, a federal jury in Charlotte found that an Uber driver committed battery against Brianna Mensing, who alleged he put his hand on her thigh while making sexual comments. The jury awarded $5,000. That number is small, and the court had limited her damages to a narrow window around the incident. But do not let the number distract you from the ruling behind it. Before trial, Judge Breyer held that Uber qualifies as a common carrier under North Carolina law, which means it owes passengers a heightened duty to provide a safe ride, a duty it cannot simply hand off to someone else. That ruling could echo far beyond one case.
Texas: Uber chose not to face the jury. In October 2026, Uber settled the third bellwether case less than 48 hours after a jury was selected and before opening statements. The plaintiff alleged that failures in Uber's background check let a dangerous driver onto the platform, and court filings claimed he was driving despite an outstanding criminal charge. That driver was later convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to 11 years in prison. During jury selection, Uber agreed it would not contest that the assault happened. The terms are confidential. Weeks earlier, Judge Breyer had criticized the company's approach to resolving these cases, telling it plainly: "Uber has to change its attitude."
These cases do not decide the thousands that remain. Bellwethers are test cases. They show how evidence and legal theories land with real juries, and they shape what happens at the settlement table.
But they have already proven one thing. Uber's responsibility for what happens in the back seat is no longer a question for press releases. It is being answered with evidence, under oath, in front of juries.
What Did Uber Know, and When Did It Know It?
In any case against an institution, this is the question that matters most. Not just what happened, but what the people in charge knew before it happened.
In August 2025, The New York Times, drawing on internal records and litigation materials, reported that Uber received roughly 400,000 reports of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in the United States between 2017 and 2022.
I want to be precise, because precision is how you win these cases. That figure is not 400,000 verified assaults. The reports cover a wide range of conduct, including nonphysical misconduct, and Uber disputes that the number reflects confirmed assaults. The company says the reports amount to about 0.006% of its 6.3 billion U.S. trips in that period. But percentages do not ride in the back seat. Women do.
And even the narrowest numbers are hard to read. In July 2026, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that no existing data source gives a complete picture of assaults in rideshares and taxis, and that there is no comprehensive federal requirement to collect them across the industry. According to the GAO, Uber disclosed 1,080 incidents in 2021 and 1,637 in 2022 in just the five most serious categories of sexual assault, counting reports involving both riders and drivers.
So here is the question I would put to any jury: what did Uber do with what it learned?
A company is not automatically liable every time someone commits a crime on its platform. But a crime committed by a third party does not automatically let the company off the hook either. If a corporation studies a danger, identifies ways to reduce it, and then decides whether those protections are worth the cost, those decisions belong in front of a jury when a woman gets hurt.
That is why discovery matters so much in these cases. Internal emails. Screening procedures. Complaint histories. Safety research. Every decision about which protections to build and which to leave on the shelf. That is where the truth usually lives.
Why Did You Get in the Car?
There is another part of this litigation that keeps me up at night. It is what happens to a survivor after she decides to fight back.
In August 2026, The New York Times reported on Uber's defense tactics, including the questioning of a woman whose driver had already pleaded guilty to raping her while she was unconscious. Already pleaded guilty. And she still had to defend herself.
I believe in a fair trial. Defendants have every right to challenge allegations, investigate damages, and test credibility. That is how our system works, and not every hard question is an improper one.
But I have sat with survivors before depositions. I know what it costs them to walk into that room. By the time a woman files a civil lawsuit, she may have already sat through a police interview, a forensic exam, painful conversations with her family, and months of deciding whether she could bear to tell her story one more time. Then the lawsuit asks her to tell it again, in more detail than ever, to the lawyers for the company she is suing.
And too often, the questions sound like this:
Why did you get in the car? Why were you alone? How much did you drink? Why didn't you call the police right away? Why didn't you fight back?
I have heard every version of those questions in my career. They have discouraged women from coming forward for generations. They reveal how uncomfortable we still are with the reality of sexual violence, especially when a woman did not behave the way someone imagines a "real" victim would.
Trauma does not follow a script. Some women report immediately. Some stay silent for years. Some remember every detail. Some remember only pieces. None of that, on its own, tells you whether she is telling the truth.
Rigor and dignity are not opposites. A woman should not have to be humiliated to prove that her safety mattered.
"He's Not Our Employee" Is Not an Answer
Uber's business model rests on a label. The company classifies its drivers as independent contractors, not employees, and that label carries real legal weight when it comes to traditional employer liability.
But a label in a contract is not the end of the analysis. The Arizona verdict proved that.
Depending on the state and the facts, survivors may bring claims for negligent hiring, screening, retention, or supervision, or for failing to put reasonable safety measures in place. Agency principles can apply. In some states, as North Carolina showed, common-carrier duties may apply too. Every one of those claims has to be proven: duty, breach, causation, damages, or the elements of whatever theory the law recognizes.
The law does not make a business responsible for every crime committed by someone connected to it. Nor should it. But the law has always recognized that when a business's own choices create a foreseeable risk, or ignore one, the business can be responsible for what follows.
Think about who controls what happens in an Uber. The company runs the platform. It sets the screening requirements. It decides how complaints are handled. It designs the safety features. It decides when a driver loses access. How much control that adds up to, and what duties follow, is still being fought over in court. But those choices are Uber's, not the passenger's.
When a woman opens that app, she cannot run a background check on her driver. She cannot read the complaint file. She cannot see the internal safety research. She is relying on the system the company built. That reliance is the whole business model.
If the evidence shows that the company's own failures helped make an assault foreseeable, the answer to "who is responsible" should come from the evidence, not from the fine print.
A Safety Button Is Not a Safety Plan
Uber has added a long list of safety tools: trip sharing, emergency assistance, PIN verification, audio recording, and complaint investigations. Some of them may genuinely help. Technology can reduce risk and preserve evidence, and these features deserve a fair evaluation.
But listen to the safety advice we give women today:
Share your location. Check the plate. Record the ride. Stay alert. Text a friend if something feels wrong.
Every one of those instructions is aimed at her. Not at the driver. Not at the company.
So what happens when she does all of it, and she is assaulted anyway? At what point do we stop asking what she should have done differently and start asking what the company knew and what it did about it?
No one is asking Uber to guarantee that no crime will ever happen in one of its cars. That is not how negligence law works, and it would not be fair. What the law asks is whether a company's precautions were reasonable in light of the risks it could foresee, the information it had, and its ability to act.
Her safety should not depend on her ability to read a stranger's mind.
This Is Bigger Than Uber
The Uber cases matter far beyond rideshare. Survivors bring claims every day against schools, hospitals, hotels, employers, and religious institutions. The facts change. The legal duties change. But the core question is always the same: what does an institution owe the people who trust it, when it knows, or should know, that they face a real danger?
I have approached that question through two roles: as a trial attorney representing survivors and as a legislator working to strengthen the laws meant to protect them. What I have learned is this: accountability means looking at the person who caused the harm and at the institution that was in a position to stop it.
That does not mean every claim against a company has merit. It means we refuse to treat an assault as an isolated act without asking whether the system around it made it possible.
That is what civil litigation does. It forces documents into the open. It puts corporate decisions under oath. It lets a jury of ordinary people decide whether a company's choices helped put a woman in harm's way. Compensation matters, because survivors face real medical bills, lost income, therapy, and years of consequences. But accountability also tells the public something it would otherwise never learn.
She Just Wanted to Get Home
I keep coming back to that first moment.
A woman needed a ride home. Maybe she was leaving work. Maybe she was coming back from the airport or a friend's birthday. She opened an app that millions of us use without a second thought. She expected a ride. Not danger.
When an assault happens in that back seat, it does not end when the car door opens. A survivor may never again get into a stranger's car without her heart racing. She may stop going out at night. She may stop trusting the ordinary routines that used to require no thought at all.
No verdict can give her that back. Not $8.5 million. Not any number.
But the justice system can do what it is built to do. It can ask whether the harm was foreseeable, whether reasonable precautions were taken, and whether the people responsible for her safety did what the law required.
As these cases move forward, I hope we never let them become a scoreboard of filings, verdicts, and settlements. Behind every number is a woman who trusted a promise.
When a company asks the public to trust it with their safety, that trust comes with responsibility.
She should not have to wonder whether the man behind the wheel will respect her body. And when that trust is broken, our first question should never be what she did wrong.
It should be what they did wrong.
