Uber's Aggressive Legal Strategy Against Sexual Assault Plaintiffs: 'What Were You Wearing?'

Despite publicly branding itself as a survivor-centered company that treats victims of sexual violence with dignity, Uber has deployed a strikingly aggressive courtroom strategy against the thousands of passengers suing the company for sexual assault. With more than 4,000 lawsuits filed — so many that they were partially consolidated — Uber's lawyers have routinely questioned women about their clothing, underwear, alcohol consumption, drug use, childhood abuse, consensual sex history, and prior sexual trauma. In one deposition, a lawyer asked a woman who was raped while unconscious by a driver already serving a 10-year prison sentence what she had been wearing, how many milligrams of Adderall she had taken, whether she felt regret about mixing drugs and alcohol, and whether she had ever exchanged sex for money.

The pattern extends across multiple cases. In one, Uber petitioned a judge to force a plaintiff to disclose details of childhood sexual abuse by a family member. In another, the company compelled a woman to undergo a psychiatric examination to investigate other assaults she had previously reported. Uber's court filings have argued that plaintiffs 'conducted themselves in a negligent and careless manner' and 'contributed to causing their own injuries' — language that directly contradicts the company's own internal training materials, which explicitly instructed customer service staff to 'recognize and interrupt victim-blaming attitudes' and stated that victims do not provoke attacks by what they wore or how much they drank.

The legal pivot has a traceable origin. When Chief Legal Officer Tony West — a former Justice Department official and brother-in-law of Kamala Harris — joined Uber in 2017, he publicly pledged that the company would no longer force sexual assault claimants into arbitration and would resolve claims 'in a way that is best for the survivor.' But ending mandatory arbitration opened the floodgates to civil lawsuits. As litigation costs mounted and revenues collapsed during the Covid-19 pandemic, internal discussions shifted: executives calculated that aggressively contesting cases could save millions of dollars. Uber has so far committed more than $15 million to anti-gender-violence organizations, and maintains that 99.9% of rides occur without any incident.

Legal and sexual violence experts say the tactics go far beyond standard fact-gathering, and are likely designed to re-traumatize plaintiffs and pressure them into settling or abandoning claims altogether. Stanford Law professor Nora Freeman Engstrom called it 'an old and ugly script,' noting the deep irony that Uber built its brand on being a safe alternative for people — especially women — heading home after a night out. 'Those are precisely the circumstances when Uber told consumers its service was supposed to protect them,' she said. Uber's chief legal officer declined to be interviewed but issued a statement insisting lawyers must treat survivors 'with respect, compassion, courtesy and dignity,' while his chief deputy general counsel defended the company's right and responsibility to contest lawsuits, noting roughly 30 cases were dismissed for fraud.