Lawsuit: Lyft fails to protect women from rape, sexual assault
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For Gladys Arce, what was supposed to be a 15-minute ride to her mother’s house turned into five hours of terror, she said, when her Lyft driver wouldn’t let her leave.
The Fresno resident was visiting family in Los Angeles and had just left a Halloween party at her sister’s house, she told this news organization Wednesday, when her driver locked the doors, told her he loved her and then forcibly took her to a beach, where he raped her. Arce is one of 14 women who joined a “mass-action” lawsuit against the ride-sharing giant, alleging the tech company hasn’t done enough to protect women against sexual predators before they attack or to adequately investigate complaints after alleged sexual assaults.
“Knowing the police will automatically be called could have gone a long way in stopping these crimes,” Arce said. “What happened to me should never happen to anyone.”
Representatives from Lyft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suit, filed Wednesday in San Francisco Superior Court, describes a pattern of failures by the company to investigate complaints and report the incidents to police or even cooperate with law enforcement, said Steve Estey of the law firm Estey & Bomberger, one of the lead attorneys on the case. There were at least 100 complaints against Lyft filed in California alone during its first 18 months of operation, according to information he obtained as part of the lawsuit, he said. The source of the information is sealed under a protective order, he said.
“We know rape and sexual assault is one of the most under-reported crimes there is,” Estey said. “Lyft knew from the outset that sexual assault was going to be a problem, especially because they had multiple passengers who had been drinking.”
Instead of warning passengers about the possibility of sexual assault, the company marketed itself as a platform that would keep them safe, he said.
Lyft could require drivers to install cameras in their vehicles or activate the cameras on their phones during rides, Estey said, to hold both passengers and drivers accountable. In Arce’s case, although police were able to match her alleged assailant’s DNA to swabs taken after she reported the incident, the district attorney declined to prosecute the case because prosecutors couldn’t prove the sex wasn’t consensual, he said.
“It was a ‘he-said, she-said’ deal,” Estey said.
In another case, two women were on their way home from San Francisco to Palo Alto when both fell asleep in the backseat, according to the suit. One of the two women woke to find the driver with his hand between her legs, fingering her vagina. The woman screamed, waking her friend.
The woman’s friend immediately started recording the incident with her phone, catching the driver’s apology, an admission that resulted in a conviction for sexual battery and a one-year jail sentence, coupled with three years of sex offender supervised probation, according to the suit.
“Drivers who know they are being watched aren’t going to be assaulting people,” said Mark Bomberger with Estey & Bomberger, the other lead attorney on the case.
Lyft could also install a “panic” button that would send a signal to the company or police if passengers feel they are in danger, Estey said. The company could design the app to send an alert if the ride takes too long or veers off course, he said. And they could be required, as in other mandatory reporting, to report any complaints of alleged rapes, sexual assaults or sexual harassment to police.
“They have not implemented these safety measures because they are interested in scaling the company bigger,” Estey said. “And what they’ve done is put profits over the safety of people.”
See a live stream of the San Francisco press conference here.