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Her driver had already pleaded guilty in criminal court to raping her vaginally, anally and orally while she was unconscious during a ride in Tampa one night in 2021. He was in prison, serving a 10-year sentence. The woman, identified as Jane Doe in court documents, was suing Uber in civil court for negligence, arguing that the company should have done more to screen and supervise the driver, a man with prior violent felony convictions.
Publicly, Uber proclaims itself to be a company devoted to handling sexual violence in a “survivor-centric” and “trauma-informed” way, supporting survivors and treating them with dignity. After years of fielding reports of sexual misconduct, the company developed instructional videos for drivers that stated, “Sexual violence is never the survivor’s fault.”
But in court filings, Uber argued that Ms. Doe had “conducted herself in a negligent and careless manner” and “contributed to causing her own injuries.” And it said Ms. Doe’s claims of pain and suffering were “unrelated to the at-issue accident.”
Now, during her deposition, Uber’s lawyer Taylor Silverberg zeroed in on Ms. Doe’s behavior on the night she was raped. Ms. Silverberg asked Ms. Doe exactly how much Tito’s vodka she had drunk, how many milligrams of Adderall she had taken and whether she had “felt regret” about mixing the two. And she asked Ms. Doe what she had been wearing. “Can you describe the dress?” Ms. Silverberg said. “Were you wearing heels or boots or flats?”
Ms. Silverberg also probed Ms. Doe’s childhood, asking if she had felt abandoned by her father or degraded by her mother.
She pushed Ms. Doe for details about consensual sex and asked whether she had previously been sexually abused or had sex in exchange for money. That is when her lawyer ended the deposition.
Uber is using this tactic of victim-blaming because, unfortunately, it works pretty often.
And this is AFTER the driver has plead guilty and is sitting in prison.