The Algorithm Knew – Uber Sexual Assualt Court Cases
Inside the trial that could redefine what ride-hailing companies owe their passengers—and what they’ve known all along.
On a January morning in Phoenix, in a federal courtroom where the air-conditioning hummed with bureaucratic indifference, a video deposition began to play. The man on the screen was Hassan Turay, a former Uber driver, and he was being asked about the night in November, 2023, when he picked up a young woman named Jaylynn Dean in Tempe, Arizona. The facts of that evening—at least the ones both sides agree upon—are spare: Dean ordered an Uber. Turay arrived. At some point, he switched off the app’s GPS tracking, pulled off the road, and moved to the back seat. Sexual contact occurred.
What happened next, in the courtroom, was the sort of moment that trial lawyers live for. Turay, who had maintained throughout his testimony that the encounter was consensual, began to waver. “Honestly, I didn’t do too much to make sure that she could consent,” he admitted. Then: “I had a responsibility to make sure she was in a right state of mind, and I did not do that.” Asked directly whether he believed he had raped Dean, Turay offered something less than a denial: “I don’t feel like I did, but she feels like I did, and I also have to consider how she feels.”
The Dean case is the first of more than three thousand consolidated federal lawsuits against Uber to go to trial—a sprawling multidistrict litigation that legal observers have called one of the largest sexual-assault proceedings in American history. The plaintiffs are overwhelmingly women who say they were assaulted by Uber drivers; the defendant is one of the most valuable technology companies in the world. What Reuters has characterized as a test of Uber’s “safety record” may prove to be something more elemental: a reckoning with what the company knew, when it knew it, and what it chose to do with that knowledge.
“Kill Stories When Possible”
The internal communications that emerged during the Phoenix trial read like dispatches from a parallel universe—one in which the primary threat posed by sexual assault was reputational damage. Andrew Hasbun, Uber’s director of global safety communications, was a prolific user of Slack, the workplace-messaging platform, and his messages from 2018 were played for the jury.
“In many cases, we can and should squash stories,” Hasbun wrote to colleagues. “Kill stories when possible and mitigate the impact on our reputation.”
Referring to a USA Today investigation that revealed Uber had shared victims’ personal information with third-party claims adjusters without their knowledge, Hasbun was blunter still: “I trashed rape victims to USA Today.” In another exchange, he offered a kind of confession: “I used to look after my soul, but I don’t know where it is anymore.”
Under questioning, Hasbun characterized these remarks as “a poor choice of words.” The phrase “kill stories,” he explained, was merely industry jargon for correcting factual errors and providing context to reporters. “I do believe the company does the right thing,” he testified. “In the end, I think the company ends in the right spot.”
Whether the jury will agree remains to be seen. But the messages gesture toward a corporate culture in which, the plaintiffs argue, growth trumped safety and image management took precedence over accountability.
The Risk Score You Never See
Perhaps the most striking revelation of the trial concerns a piece of technology that most Uber passengers have never heard of: an artificial-intelligence system called S-RAD, or Safety Risk Assessed Dispatch.
Every time the Uber app matches a rider with a driver, S-RAD assigns the potential trip a risk score between zero and one. The algorithm considers location, time of day, and certain driver behaviors—including, according to testimony, a driver’s tendency to accept late-night and weekend requests. Drivers who seek out such fares are flagged as higher-risk, the logic being that they may be “looking for easy victims.”
Dean’s ride with Turay received a score of 0.81—higher than the average for late-night trips in Phoenix, a city that Uber’s own data identifies as having the highest rate of sexual assault of any American market it serves.
The jury learned that S-RAD does not factor in a driver’s gender or history of complaints. It also learned that Uber never informs passengers of their trip’s risk assessment. An expert witness for the plaintiff testified that if Uber had simply blocked trips in the top ten per cent of S-RAD scores, the company could have prevented roughly half of all reported serious sexual assaults.
The implication is damning: Uber built a tool capable of predicting danger, then declined to use it to protect the people in danger.
The Numbers Uber Published—and the Ones It Didn’t
In December, 2019, Uber released its first U.S. Safety Report, a document that the company framed as an exercise in transparency. The numbers were staggering: 5,981 reports of sexual assault in 2017 and 2018, including 464 rapes. Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer, acknowledged that the figures were “jarring and hard to digest.”
A second report, covering 2019 and 2020, followed in July, 2022. It documented 3,824 reports of “serious sexual assault” and a hundred and forty-one rapes in 2020 alone. Uber emphasized the percentage decline, though critics have noted that ride volume dropped by as much as seventy-five per cent during the pandemic, making year-over-year comparisons misleading.
According to both reports, roughly ninety-one per cent of rape victims were passengers, and about eighty-one per cent of all sexual-assault survivors were women.
Uber has not released safety data for 2021 or 2022. Plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that the omission is deliberate. Court documents cited by Bloomberg Law suggest that between 2017 and 2022 Uber logged approximately four hundred thousand reports of sexual misconduct—a figure that dwarfs the twelve thousand five hundred “serious” incidents the company has publicly acknowledged. Uber disputes this characterization.
Ten Ways to Hold a Platform Accountable
The lawsuit filed on Dean’s behalf by the firm Peiffer Wolf advances ten distinct legal theories, a scattershot approach designed to find at least one that sticks.
The most consequential may be the argument that Uber is a “common carrier” under California Civil Code Section 2168—a legal designation traditionally applied to buses, trains, and taxis. If the court accepts this framing, Uber would be held to a heightened duty of care: the “utmost diligence” that could be expected of a “very cautious” company. Crucially, that duty cannot be delegated. Uber would not be able to shield itself by pointing to its drivers’ status as independent contractors—a defense the company has relied upon in countless labor disputes.
The plaintiffs also allege negligent hiring and supervision. In Turay’s case, Uber did not request a résumé, references, or proof of prior employment. It conducted no social-media screening. Other passengers had filed complaints against Turay before he picked up Dean; according to trial testimony, those complaints did not result in his removal from the platform.
A more novel claim frames the Uber app itself as a defective product. The theory is untested in the ride-hailing context, but plaintiffs argue that the app’s design is unreasonably dangerous: it lacks automatic alerts when a driver deviates significantly from a route, offers no emergency notifications to authorities in suspicious circumstances, and provides no option for passengers to request a driver of the same gender.
The case also alleges intentional and negligent misrepresentation. For years, Uber marketed itself as a safe alternative to taxis and drunk driving, partnering with Mothers Against Drunk Driving to promote “safe rides.” Given what the company knew about the prevalence of assault on its platform, the plaintiffs argue, those assurances were false.
Uber’s Defense
Uber, represented by the powerhouse firm Kirkland & Ellis, has mounted a vigorous defense.
The company argues that sexual assaults are unforeseeable criminal acts committed by independent third parties—people over whom Uber has limited control and for whom it cannot reasonably be held liable. It points to the safety features it has implemented over the years: driver background checks that have led to the removal of more than a hundred and eighty-five thousand people from the platform, an in-app emergency button, the ability to share trip details with contacts, real-time driver-identity verification via selfie, and an option to connect with an ADT agent during a ride.
In the Dean case specifically, Uber maintains that the sexual encounter was consensual—that Dean initiated it. During her opening statement, defense attorney Kim Bueno made an argument that startled courtroom observers: because Turay performed oral sex on Dean, an act from which he could not have derived direct physical gratification, Dean must have requested and enjoyed it.
The plaintiffs called Veronique Valliere, a clinical psychologist who specializes in sexual-assault cases, to rebut this claim. Valliere testified that the defense’s logic was a “common myth used by offenders to justify their actions and confuse their victims.” An assailant might perform oral sex before penetration simply to provide lubrication, she explained. “We talk about sexual assault like ‘he said, she said,’ ” Valliere told the jury, “but almost always, we only believe what he said.”
Dean’s attorneys are seeking a hundred and forty-four million dollars in damages: twenty-four million in compensatory damages and a hundred and twenty million in punitive damages.
A Corporate Culture on Trial
The Dean complaint includes an extended section on Uber’s corporate history—a narrative drawn partly from court filings and partly from journalistic accounts, including Mike Isaac’s book “Super Pumped.” The portrait that emerges is of a company that, under co-founder and C.E.O. Travis Kalanick, prized expansion above all else.
The most troubling episode concerns a 2014 incident in New Delhi, in which an Uber driver raped a passenger. According to news reports and the complaint, Kalanick and other executives obtained the victim’s medical records—allegedly through improper means—and entertained a conspiracy theory that the assault had been staged by a rival company, Ola. The driver had confessed to police.
The lawsuit also cites the 2017 blog post by Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer, who described systemic sexual harassment within the company and a human-resources department that declined to act.
Uber disputes this characterization of its culture, arguing that the company has undergone a fundamental transformation under current C.E.O. Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over in 2017.
The Consolidation
In October, 2023, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ordered the consolidation of federal Uber sexual-assault cases in the Northern District of California. The panel found that the lawsuits “involve common questions of fact” regarding Uber’s knowledge of assault prevalence, the adequacy of its driver screening, its training protocols, its safety measures, and its response to complaints.
Uber had argued that differences in state law and the individual circumstances of each case made consolidation inappropriate. The panel was unmoved. “Almost all injury litigation involves questions of causation that are case- and plaintiff-specific,” it wrote. “Such differences have not been an impediment to centralization in the past.”
The case was assigned to Judge Charles R. Breyer, whom the panel described as having “unparalleled experience as a transferee judge.”
The Paradox of Protection
There is a strange irony at the heart of Uber’s legal troubles. At the very moment the company faces thousands of lawsuits alleging that it failed to protect women, it is also being sued for attempting to do so.
In November, 2025, male drivers filed class-action lawsuits against both Uber and Lyft, challenging programs that allow female passengers to request drivers of the same gender. Lyft’s “Women+ Connect” launched in 2023; Uber’s “Women Preferences” began pilot testing in July, 2025.
The male plaintiffs argue that these programs violate California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act and “reinforce the gender stereotype that men are more dangerous than women.”
Both companies emphasize that the programs establish a preference, not a guarantee—a female passenger may still be matched with a male driver.
What Comes Next
The Dean trial was expected to conclude by the end of January, 2026. Its outcome, though technically binding only in this single case, will cast a long shadow. Judge Breyer has ordered the selection of twenty bellwether cases, the results of which will serve as templates for resolving—or settling—the remaining three thousand.
It is worth noting that Uber has already survived one bellwether trial. In September, 2025, a San Francisco jury in a state-court case found that the company had been negligent but ruled that the negligence was not a “substantial factor” in causing the plaintiff’s harm. Uber paid nothing.
Phoenix may be different. The internal communications, the algorithmic risk scores, the admission from Turay himself—all of it amounts to a weight of evidence that the earlier case lacked. The ride-hailing industry is watching. So, presumably, is Uber’s board.
For the more than three thousand women whose cases remain pending, the outcome will determine not just compensation but something harder to quantify: whether a company that built an empire on the promise of safe, convenient transportation can be held accountable when that promise proves hollow.
The algorithm, after all, knew the risk. The question is whether anyone was listening.
This article is based on publicly available court documents and reporting from Reuters, Bloomberg Law, AZ Central, Courthouse News Service, and NPR. The claims of the parties have not been adjudicated, and Uber denies liability.
Founder and Managing Partner of Skarbiec Law Firm, recognized by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna as one of the best tax advisory firms in Poland (2023, 2024). Legal advisor with 19 years of experience, serving Forbes-listed entrepreneurs and innovative start-ups. One of the most frequently quoted experts on commercial and tax law in the Polish media, regularly publishing in Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Author of the publication “AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto. Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator” and co-author of the award-winning book “Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy” (Security of a Modern Company). LinkedIn profile: 18 500 followers, 4 million views per year. Awards: 4-time winner of the European Medal, Golden Statuette of the Polish Business Leader, title of “International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.” He specializes in strategic legal consulting, tax planning, and crisis management for business.
