A rideshare is supposed to be the safe option after a night out, but for these women, the reality was the opposite.
The stories all start out more or less the same way: “I was trying to be responsible.” “I was trying to take care of myself.” “I thought I would be safe.” And so instead of driving drunk or walking alone or taking public transportation at night, these women hopped into rideshare vehicles. But they weren’t safe at all.
Tarr had been sexually assaulted in college, and her experience with the police had been an ugly one, so she didn’t call law enforcement. She called the Lyft customer-support line. “I was hysterical,” Tarr says. “I told them what had happened, and they said that they would refund me my $12 ride and I would never be partnered with [that driver] again. That was it. They didn’t say if he would be fired. They didn’t say anything.
Incidents of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment have been reported against many rideshare platforms and taxicabs. There are distinctions, according to legal advocates for the plaintiffs we spoke to, between how Lyft and Uber, the two most popular rideshare apps, have responded to complaints.
“In the litigation process, Lyft has accepted zero responsibility,” says Michael Bomberger, the founding partner of Estey & Bomberger, a California-based law firm that handles cases throughout the U.S. and has filed lawsuits against Uber on behalf of four women and against Lyft on behalf of nearly 40. “And the message to survivors and victims [seems to be], ‘We don’t care about you and we aren’t going to do anything for you.
For Jade, a young woman who had just moved to Providence, Rhode Island, her 25th birthday should have meant dinner and drinks out with her boyfriend. Instead, she ended the evening trapped in a Lyft as the driver first asked her invasive personal questions—Where did she live? Who did she live with? Where were her parents?—and then, knowing she was new to town and alone, drove far off course in a city she didn’t know well to an abandoned industrial lot.
Meghan McCormick, an attorney at Levin Simes Abrams LLP who works closely with rideshare assault survivors, says the goal is to see Lyft “owning what has happened to women in the past and owning the behavior of drivers going forward—addressing the problem and doing everything [it] can to make sure it doesn’t happen to other women.
Her police complaint stalled for months and was eventually marked “inactive” without Turkos’s knowledge. After Turkos filed a formal complaint with the NYPD, her case was reopened and reassigned. To help trigger Turkos’s memories of that night, two new detectives asked if she would be up for a reenactment: driving the same route her Lyft had taken the night in question.
London reported the assaults to Lyft the next day. “I didn’t get my money back,” she says. “I didn’t get an apology. [The representative] stated she was going to email me. I never heard back from her.” “We get to my destination, and he’s like, ‘You aren’t going to tell Lyft, are you?’” D says. She said she wouldn’t. A few hours later—once she felt safe and no longer in shock—she called the police. The male officer was dismissive, she says, asking why she didn’t run away or call for help. “I was like, ‘Because I didn’t know if he had a weapon, if he was going to take me and dump my body somewhere,’” D says.
The next morning, ashamed and alone, she tried to shower off the humiliation. “I tried to pretend that it didn’t happen for a few months,” Morgan says. And then, when she was taking another Lyft, she told the female driver her story, initially saying that she had slept with her Lyft driver, then clarifying that she had been drunk and woke up to him having sex with her. “She was like, ‘Honey, that’s like rape,’” Morgan says.
He groped her and asked, “Do you feel good yet?” “I realized he was going to rape me and/or kill me,” Raine says. “I told him I had been recently diagnosed with HIV. He jumped off me and got back into the driver’s seat.” She tried to jump out of the car, but he started the car too quickly. “He took me to my destination, told me to get out and do not call him back again,” Raine says. She remains afraid to ride in Lyft cars.
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