Bellwether Uber sexual assault trial begins in Phoenix

PHOENIX (CN) — The first of thousands of consolidated sexual assault lawsuits against Uber began Tuesday, in which a jury will decide whether Uber failed to prevent the rape of a passenger and may influence litigation for more than 3,000 similarly situated women across the country.

In a lawsuit transferred to federal court in Phoenix, Jaylynn Dean says she was raped by a driver while intoxicated in November 2023. Her attorneys say the ride-hail giant had been aware of a massive “sexual assault problem” since 2014 and failed to take reasonable steps to improve safety features like improved background checks and mandatory in-vehicle cameras that could have prevented Dean’s assault.

“It’s the growth at all costs that often prevails over safety,” Dean’s attorney Deborah Chang, of California’s Chang and Klein LLP, told nine jurors Tuesday morning.

Chang said Uber specifically marketed its ride-hail services to drunk women, emphasizing safety over risk. She played Uber commercials featuring seemingly drunk women and TikTok videos made by female content creators encouraging their audiences to play it safe and use Uber rather than drive drunk.

“Uber knew it wasn’t doing anything to keep women safe,” Chang said.

Chang said evidence will show that Uber was aware of the problem as early as 2014 but made no material changes to its practices. In 2018, Uber’s director of global communications, Andrew Hasbun, said, “We have a sexual assault problem.”

Uber tracked risk factors for sexual misconduct by drivers that included, Chang said, a higher likelihood to accept female passengers, a preference to drive on nights and weekends and a refusal of Uber’s optional dashboard camera. Phoenix, she added, is the most dangerous city for sexual assaults in Ubers.

“When they see the risk factors, they don’t investigate and act on them,” Chang said.

Defending the tech giant, Kirkland and Ellis attorney Kim Bueno said Uber has greatly improved safety in the last 10 years, including comprehensive background checks and repeated annual screenings. She added that more than 185,000 drivers have been removed for misconduct thanks to those checks.

By 2023, Bueno said Uber deployed real-time ID checks requiring drivers to update their profile with a selfie to ensure they are the driver, an emergency button to connect passengers with emergency services and an option to connect with a live ADT agent for the duration of the trip.

“Uber has shown and demonstrated a commitment to innovation and safety,” she said.

Despite those innovations, Dean says a driver named Hassan Turay pulled over while driving her to a hotel in Tempe, Arizona, in November 2023 and forcibly had sex with her, turning the Uber GPS off to avoid detection from the company. Dean was drunk and returning to her hotel after visiting a man she met on a dating site.

Chang told the jury that Uber conducted a “superficial” background check on Turay that only included the time he spent in the U.S., but not the 39 years he lived in foreign countries. Chang said Uber asked for no references, proof of prior work, a resume or a fingerprint, and did no social media or Google searches on him. Further, she said Uber ignored previous complaints against him made by other passengers.

Bueno said Turay had no credible sexual misconduct accusations before 2023 and had earned thousands of five-star ratings from other passengers. She denied the suggestion that Uber would have uncovered a criminal past had it conducted background checks in other countries.

Turay told police that Dean initiated sexual conversation while in the car and that the sex they had was consensual. Bueno suggested Dean changed her story later.

“It’s easy to point the finger at a large corporation and win a lawsuit for money,” Bueno said, prompting an objection from Dean’s lawyers over getting argumentative.

More than 90 individual federal lawsuits against Uber were consolidated in the Northern District of California — based in San Francisco, where Uber is also located — in October 2023, and thousands more have been added to the multi-district litigation since.

In July 2025, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ordered Uber and a coalition of plaintiff attorneys to select 20 so-called bellwether cases to serve as templates for future trials or settlements. Dean’s is the first of six initial bellwether cases that will soon move forward to trial.

However, in addition to the claims filed at the federal level, hundreds of similar complaints have also been brought in California state court, which held its first Uber driver sexual assault trial in September. Although jurors indicated Uber was negligent in failing to protect passengers, they also found that negligence did not substantially contribute to the attack and thus the company was not liable for damages.

The jury in Dean’s case is presumably unaware of the consolidated cases and corroborating claims against Uber.

“You’re deciding this case,” Bueno told the jurors. “Not any other case with any other rider than in this case.”

Attorneys say they expect the trial to last three weeks.

Follow @JournalistJoeAZ