Who Gets Protected, Who Gets Exposed
A federal jury in North Carolina found Uber liable for the behavior of a driver who grabbed the inner thigh of a passenger as she was leaving the front seat of his car and asked if he could "keep her" with him. The federal jury in Charlotte awarded the plaintiff $5,000 in damages, according to Ellyn Hurd, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers. For a company that sells itself as a transportation platform, the verdict cuts through the usual corporate fog: the ride happened under Uber’s system, and the jury said Uber could be held responsible.
The case is part of a broader group of sexual assault lawsuits filed against Uber in multiple jurisdictions around the country and is the third to go to trial. In February, a federal jury in Arizona ordered Uber to pay $8.5 million to a woman who said one of its drivers raped her during a trip using the platform. Last year, a California jury found Uber not liable for the alleged assault of a rider. The company’s legal exposure is not a one-off inconvenience; it is a recurring consequence of a business model that has spent years trying to separate control from responsibility.
The Platform’s Favorite Excuse
Uber said in an emailed statement that the jury found that battery had occurred and not sexual assault, and said, "The jury’s award here should further bring these cases back to reality, as it represents a tiny fraction of previous demands." Uber said it has strong grounds for appeal because it believes the jury was incorrectly instructed on the question of liability. The company’s response is the familiar corporate ritual: minimize the harm, attack the verdict, and hope the paperwork does the rest.
The lawsuits follow years of criticism of Uber’s safety record, including thousands of incidents of sexual assault reported by both passengers and drivers. Because Uber drivers are categorized as gig workers, working as contractors rather than company employees, the platform has long maintained it’s not liable for their misconduct. That classification is the trick at the center of the whole arrangement: Uber keeps the control, the branding, and the profit, while trying to shed the consequences onto the workers it routes through its app.
U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer ruled that Uber was a "common carrier" under North Carolina law and was thus liable for the driver’s action. Breyer said Uber holds itself out to the public as a transportation provider through its advertising and the control it exerts over Uber rides and the safety of its passengers. In other words, the platform cannot market itself as the thing moving people around and then pretend it is just a bystander when something goes wrong.
Who Decides What Counts as Responsibility
North Carolina could have explicitly exempted Uber and other rideshare providers from its common carrier liability, as Florida and Texas have, but did not, he said. That legal detail matters because it shows how the rules are written and rewritten around corporate power, with states deciding whether to shield the platform from the fallout.
Hurd said that means the North Carolina jury only had to decide whether the attack happened. Hurd said, "This was a case that they thought going in that they were going to win. They picked all the criteria — this is the case that they picked, that they wanted to try. And the jury believed the plaintiff and they lost." Uber, not the plaintiffs, selected the North Carolina case as a test case for the broader group of pending lawsuits, Hurd said. The company chose the battlefield and still lost.
The driver denied touching the plaintiff, Uber said. The company said the plaintiff never reported the incident to law enforcement and it only learned of it when the lawsuit was filed three years later. Hurd said just because the plaintiff didn’t report it to law enforcement doesn’t mean it’s not true. That exchange lays out the usual hierarchy of credibility: corporate denial on one side, police reporting on the other, and the person who was allegedly assaulted forced to fight for recognition in court.
During the trial, which started Wednesday and wrapped up Monday, the jury heard testimony from the driver, the plaintiff and friends of the plaintiff who corroborated her story, Hurd said. The federal jury in Charlotte awarded $5,000 in damages, a figure that sits inside a much larger fight over whether the platform can keep outsourcing danger while keeping the power.
Breyer, who is based in San Francisco in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is due to hear two more sexual assault test case trials against Uber. The next is scheduled for mid-September in San Francisco. The legal machine keeps grinding, but the underlying setup remains the same: a ride-hailing giant, a contractor shield, and passengers left to absorb the risk.