A federal jury in North Carolina on Monday found Uber liable for a sexual assault by a driver in 2019, handing the ride-hailing company a second consecutive defeat in its first trials of more than 3,000 pending sexual assault and sexual misconduct lawsuits.<\/p>\n
The plaintiff, Brianna Mensing, said her Uber driver grabbed her upper, inner thigh and asked if he could \u201ckeep it with him\u201d at the end of a late-night ride in March 2019 when she was 23.<\/p>\n
During the weeklong trial, lawyers for Uber argued that Ms. Mensing\u2019s claims lacked credibility, stating that they came to light only as part of the lawsuit and that the trip occurred during the \u201cheight of her drug addiction.\u201d<\/p>\n
The lawsuit was a second bellwether in federal court proceedings that have consolidated thousands of lawsuits against Uber, allowing some procedural matters to be presented before the same judge while each case is tried individually.<\/p>\n
The verdicts in bellwether cases are not binding on the other lawsuits, but they provide a test of the arguments in front of a jury. Each side selects a set of cases that play to what it believes to be the strengths of its arguments.<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs picked the first case, in which a federal jury in Phoenix ordered Uber in February<\/a> to pay $8.5 million to a passenger who said a driver had raped her.<\/p>\n Uber picked the North Carolina case, in Charlotte \u2014 yet the company still lost. \u201cThis was supposed to be one of Uber\u2019s stronger cases,\u201d said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies mass litigation. \u201cIf the company could not persuade a jury here, that sends a powerful signal about the risks it faces going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n Matt Kallman, a spokesman for Uber, noted that the jury had awarded Ms. Mensing a far smaller sum of $5,000. \u201cThe jury\u2019s award represents a tiny fraction of previous demands, and should further bring these cases back to reality,\u201d Mr. Kallman said. He added that Uber had \u201cstrong grounds for appeal\u201d in both cases.<\/p>\n Uber faces scrutiny<\/a> across the country as lawmakers, investors and others move to hold the company accountable for the prevalence of<\/a> sexual violence during rides. Uber has long maintained that the vast majority of its trips in the United States \u2014 99.9 percent \u2014 occur without an incident of any kind and that it is one of the safest ways to get around.<\/p>\n Ms. Mensing, who testified that she had struggled for much of her life with addiction to drugs and alcohol, said her greatest fear in pursuing the case was that she would not be believed. She said she had continued with her lawsuit in the hope that the company would take responsibility.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m here because this is ridiculous that it keeps happening to women,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal jury in North Carolina on Monday found Uber liable for a sexual assault by a driver…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28,259956,259960,64486,259958,2256,91901,259957,24304,259959],"class_list":{"0":"post-596548","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-car-services-and-livery-cabs","10":"tag-compensation-for-damages-law","11":"tag-decisions-and-verdicts","12":"tag-federal-courts-us","13":"tag-north-carolina","14":"tag-regulation-and-deregulation-of-industry","15":"tag-suits-and-litigation-civil","16":"tag-uber-technologies-inc","17":"tag-women-and-girls"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}