The approach also has “a deep irony at its core,” because the company has long marketed itself as one of the safest ways to get around — especially after a night out, said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a legal ethics professor at Stanford Law School.

“Uber’s strategy recycles an old and ugly script: If a woman drank, if she rode alone, if it was late, if her memory is imperfect, then maybe she is to blame,” Ms. Engstrom said. “But those are precisely the circumstances when Uber told consumers its service was supposed to protect them.”

Yep.

Uber's lawyer's questioning of the victim show how little they care about their customers.

Lyft lets women choose to ride with other women.

Ms. Silverberg also probed Ms. Doe’s childhood, asking if she had felt abandoned by her father or degraded by her mother.

She pushed Ms. Doe for details about consensual sex and asked whether she had previously been sexually abused or had sex in exchange for money. That is when her lawyer ended the deposition.

It is extremely hard not to feel like ms. Silverberg should get some personal experience on how it is to he raped. Fuck all of this, this woman should be disbarred. This has nothing to do with justice, this is just setting an example: you get raped because of us? Try and hold us responsible for our actions and we will destroy you

Her driver had already pleaded guilty in criminal court to raping her vaginally, anally and orally while she was unconscious during a ride in Tampa one night in 2021. He was in prison, serving a 10-year sentence. The woman, identified as Jane Doe in court documents, was suing Uber in civil court for negligence, arguing that the company should have done more to screen and supervise the driver, a man with prior violent felony convictions.

Publicly, Uber proclaims itself to be a company devoted to handling sexual violence in a “survivor-centric” and “trauma-informed” way, supporting survivors and treating them with dignity. After years of fielding reports of sexual misconduct, the company developed instructional videos for drivers that stated, “Sexual violence is never the survivor’s fault.”

But in court filings, Uber argued that Ms. Doe had “conducted herself in a negligent and careless manner” and “contributed to causing her own injuries.” And it said Ms. Doe’s claims of pain and suffering were “unrelated to the at-issue accident.”

Now, during her deposition, Uber’s lawyer Taylor Silverberg zeroed in on Ms. Doe’s behavior on the night she was raped. Ms. Silverberg asked Ms. Doe exactly how much Tito’s vodka she had drunk, how many milligrams of Adderall she had taken and whether she had “felt regret” about mixing the two. And she asked Ms. Doe what she had been wearing. “Can you describe the dress?” Ms. Silverberg said. “Were you wearing heels or boots or flats?”

Ms. Silverberg also probed Ms. Doe’s childhood, asking if she had felt abandoned by her father or degraded by her mother.

She pushed Ms. Doe for details about consensual sex and asked whether she had previously been sexually abused or had sex in exchange for money. That is when her lawyer ended the deposition.

Uber is using this tactic of victim-blaming because, unfortunately, it works pretty often.

And this is AFTER the driver has plead guilty and is sitting in prison.

Trauma informed by triggering childhood trauma. You can't make this shit up. Btw with cptsd, those triggers take weeks of recovery. That's why they do it, to hurt the women into dropping lawsuits.

There is a terrifying site showing the clothes of assault victims. It was all regular clothes. That 'what were they wearing' "ExCuSe" sucks.

"Yes, Your Honor, I did steal the car. But did you see how slutty its rear bumper looks? I really had no other choice, after all boys will be boys."

Well if you're wearing a sexual assault suit🤷

We spent our childhoods teaching our kids to be careful meeting people on the internet, and not to get into strangers' cars...

Now we have an app that lets you summon a stranger from the internet for the sole purpose of getting into their car...

I've used Uber exactly once in my lifetime.. The guy driving left me feel so weirded out that I've never done it again. That was in 2019, and I'm a grown assed man.

Kind of matches their internal culture, too.