was convicted earlier this year<\/a> of two felony counts of sexual penetration of an intoxicated person.<\/p>\nAttia in the summer of 2018 picked a 25-year-old woman up from the Tustin Police Station, hours after she was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence.<\/p>\n
The woman went out drinking with friends after work on July 22, 2018, according to testimony during Attia\u2019s trial. While driving home, the woman struck a center median, disabling her car. She was arrested and released from the police station around 2 a.m., when surveillance footage showed her seemingly falling, staggering and struggling to walk straight.<\/p>\n
The woman later recalled the softness of the car seats compared to hard benches at the police station and the warmth of the car, before waking up hours later at home, sore and feeling like something was wrong. Attia\u2019s DNA was found in saliva on the woman\u2019s left breast, and he admitted to digital penetration.<\/p>\n
Attia\u2019s attorney, Ed Welbourn, argued during the trial that the woman made sexual advances toward Attia and instigated the sexual contact. Attia\u2019s actions were morally and ethically wrong, but not criminal, his attorney told jurors. And the woman didn\u2019t want to tell her boyfriend or her parents what happened, he added.<\/p>\n
The prosecution argued that the woman was too intoxicated during the ride to consent to a sexual encounter. A blood test taken when she was at the police station found that her blood-alcohol level was more than three times the legal limit to drive.<\/p>\n
Deputy District Attorney Elise Levy told jurors that Attia took advantage of the fact that \u201cIt was in the middle of the night, she was alone in a car with him, no one else was around and she was unable to protect herself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Attia was previously convicted of misdemeanor sexual battery in 1983, the prosecutor said during his trial, when he admitted to touching an intimate part of another person against their will for the purpose of sexual arousal.<\/p>\n
The exact number of sexual assault reports tied to rideshare companies is unclear. Uber and other companies have long argued that the vast majority of trips, more than 99 percent, are without incident. But a 2025 New York Times investigation<\/a> found that Uber received a report of a sexual assault \u201calmost every eight minutes on average between 2017 and 2022.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Uber driver who admitted to a sexual encounter with an intoxicated female rider he picked up from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,1312,723,138,100,136],"class_list":["post-452729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-courts","tag-crime","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-news","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}