Uber Accused Of Covering Up Sexual Assault Numbers In New Lawsuit
Three public pension funds this week sued Uber's chief executive and board members alleging company directors collected millions of dollars in safety-linked bonuses while knowingly concealing from shareholders and the public the true scale of sexual assault on the platform—allegedly more than 400,000 incidents from 2017 to 2022.
Three pension funds—Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension & Relief Fund, Boynton Beach General Employees' Pension Plan and Steamfitters Local 449 Pension Fund—filed the suit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The complaint names CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, board chair Ronald Sugar and eight other current directors as defendants, alongside the company's president and two former chief financial officers.
The suit alleges Uber's executives knowingly concealed the scale of the sexual misconduct problem with its drivers, publicly disclosing only 12,522 accounts of “serious sexual assault” in the six-year window, in which 400,181 total reports of sexual assault or misconduct were actually made.
The suit also claims the company built tools and wrote policies that could have prevented dangerous incidents—including installing cameras in cars, training drivers, implementing more stringent background checks and using a machine-learning model to forecast which driver-passenger pairings might result in a sexual assault—but either nixed them or delayed their implementation.
Uber in 2017 coded a software that uses 43 predictors (including reports of a "creepy driver," the driver’s safety incident history and other data) to predict—with 51% certainty—when a sexual assault may occur but didn't roll out the tool until 2022 and, even after, continued to dispatch trips it had identified as high risk without any warning to the rider, the lawsuit claims.
The suit also alleges Uber's 2024, 2025 and 2026 annual proxy filings contained false statements about board safety oversight.
Forbes has reached out to Uber for comment.
The complaint alleges Uber’s own head of safety told company personnel that passengers "ride Uber at their own risk," a statement the pension funds cite as evidence that executives knew the platform posed dangers they never disclosed to shareholders.
The lawsuit asks the court to say Uber’s current and former executives breached their fiduciary duties to the company and asks they be forced to repay what the plaintiffs claim is millions of dollars in bonuses and financial incentives tied to Uber’s safety record.
Uber has faced a growing list of legal, regulatory and operational challenges this year, including litigation over passenger safety. At the same time, the company is facing disputes over its treatment of drivers, including a high-profile legal battle in New York City over rules governing driver deactivations. Uber is also navigating uncertainty around autonomous vehicles as it races to become the leading robotaxi platform while cities push for stricter oversight, and competitors, like Waymo, expand their own services.
Wednesday's filing isn't the first shareholder derivative suit against Uber's board in recent weeks. On June 22, shareholders led by the Police and Fire Retirement System of the City of Detroit filed a similar action in the same San Francisco federal court, accusing directors of ignoring repeated warnings about driver abuse and the treatment of disabled passengers, according to Reuters. That complaint described Uber as "a serial compliance offender" whose reputation had been "irredeemably damaged" by negative press coverage. Uber said at the time that the Detroit suit was based on "misleading, false narratives." Both cases seek to require directors to personally reimburse Uber for alleged breaches of their duties to shareholders.
Uber was ranked No. 197 among Forbes' annual list of the Global 2,000 largest public companies and it now has a market capitalization of $140.1 billion. Three billionaires have been minted due to their association with the company: Forbes estimates co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick is worth an estimated $3.6 billion; co-founder and chairman Garrett Camp, who owns about a 4% stake in the company, is worth $4.7 billion; and Uber's first employee and former CEO Ryan Graves is worth $1.3 billion.