Uber's Courtroom Playbook Against Sexual Assault Plaintiffs: Clothing, Drinking, and Childhood Trauma

Uber, a $145 billion company that has publicly positioned itself as a champion of sexual assault survivors, is deploying an aggressive litigation strategy against the thousands of passengers who have sued it for failing to protect them from driver-perpetrated sexual violence. The strategy — documented across thousands of pages of court records — involves interrogating women about what they were wearing, how much they drank, their childhood abuse histories, their sex lives, and their psychiatric records, in ways that legal and trauma experts say go well beyond normal fact-gathering and into re-traumatization.

More than 4,000 lawsuits have been filed against Uber, so many that thousands were consolidated for procedural purposes. The litigation stems partly from a 2018 decision by Uber's chief legal officer, Tony West — a former Justice Department official and brother-in-law of Kamala Harris — to voluntarily end mandatory arbitration for sexual assault claims, a move celebrated at the height of #MeToo. But that decision opened the floodgates: litigation costs mounted, revenues collapsed during COVID-19, and internal discussions shifted toward fighting cases aggressively in open court to save money, according to people briefed on the conversations.

The pattern that has emerged in the cases that have advanced to discovery and deposition is striking. In one Florida case, a driver had already pleaded guilty to raping a 24-year-old woman while she was unconscious and was serving a 10-year prison sentence — yet Uber's lawyer still asked the plaintiff what she had been wearing, whether she'd felt regret mixing vodka and Adderall, whether she had sex for money, and probed her childhood relationship with her parents. Uber's court filings argued she had "conducted herself in a negligent and careless manner" and contributed to her own injuries. In other cases, Uber petitioned courts to force women to hand over childhood sexual abuse records, compelled one plaintiff to undergo a full psychiatric examination, and asked another whether she had become "extra sexually active" after the incident.

Uber's public messaging and its courtroom behavior are in direct contradiction. The company has committed over $15 million to anti-gender-violence organizations, partnered with leading anti-sexual-assault groups, and trained its customer service agents to "recognize and interrupt victim blaming attitudes" — including the idea that victims provoke attacks by what they wore or how much they drank. Its driver training videos state that sexual violence is never the survivor's fault. Yet in civil court, these are precisely the lines of attack its lawyers pursue. Stanford Law professor Nora Freeman Engstrom called it an "old and ugly script" that targets the exact circumstances — a woman drinking, riding alone at night with imperfect memory — that Uber's own marketing promised its platform was designed to protect against.

Uber's chief legal officer Tony West declined to be interviewed but issued a statement saying his legal team must treat survivors with "respect, compassion, courtesy and dignity," and that defending the company and treating survivors with humanity are "not mutually exclusive." Lawyers for Uber maintained that questions about clothing, drinking, and past trauma were legitimate efforts to gather specific facts relevant to damages calculations — particularly since most plaintiffs are seeking compensation for pain and suffering, which requires establishing what actually caused their distress. About 30 cases have been dismissed for fraud, the company noted. Critics, however, say the breadth and intimacy of Uber's demands — years of gynecological records, therapy notes, suicide attempt histories, and details of unrelated sexual assaults — far exceed what is necessary to evaluate damages, and are more likely designed to intimidate plaintiffs into settling or abandoning their claims entirely.