Skip to main content

Lawyers in latest sexual assault lawsuit against Lyft expect more women to join

Lyft is being sued by a group of more than 20 women who say they were raped or sexually assaulted while using the ridesharing service. This is the second such lawsuit against the company in four months. The story was first reported by the Washington Post.

Mike Bomberger, a partner at the California law firm Estey and Bomberger LLC, told Digital Trends that in 80 percent of these complaints, the women were drunk or somehow vulnerable, and the driver assaulted or raped them in the vehicle.

Recommended Videos

Estey and Bomberger runs the website UberSexualAssaultLawyer.com, and is also representing the plaintiffs in a class-action suit filed against Lyft in September that involves 14 women with similar complaints.

“We have over 100 complaints, and we anticipate more,” Bomberger said. “We will be filing more lawsuits.”

A Lyft spokesperson told Digital Trends in a statement that the company has implemented 15 new features to boost safety, including continuing criminal background checks and in-app emergency assistance.

“What these women describe is something no one should ever have to endure. Everyone deserves the ability to move about the world safely, yet women still face disproportionate risks,” the spokesperson said. “We recognize these risks, which is why we are relentless in our work to build safety into every aspect of our work. That means continually investing in new features and policies to protect our riders and drivers.”

In September, days after the last class-action suit was filed, the company announced it was partnering with the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, and mandating driver education. In May, it announced that a panic button was being added to the app.

Such fixes depend on a user being awake and able to access their app. Bomberger said a more effective fix may be one Uber began rolling out last month: Recording the rides. All of the rides.

“If an employee knows they’re being recorded, the rate of assaults go down exponentially,” he said. “Right now, Lyft is trying to initiate safety features that you use only after the assault has started. Let’s try the novel idea of preventing the assault before it’s started.”

Bomberger said that at the very least, they hope to force Lyft to admit to the high numbers of people who have experienced similar assaults. “We’re expecting Lyft to try to do what they’ve done for five years, which is conceal the number of people assaulted in their vehicles,” he said. There are currently no public numbers as to how many people are assaulted in rideshare vehicles every year.

“Based on what we’ve heard from cities and states around the country, we know the number is in the thousands,” Bomberger said. “I’ve had hundreds of calls since September.”

Maya Shwayder
I'm a multimedia journalist currently based in New England. I previously worked for DW News/Deutsche Welle as an anchor and…
Google just gave vision to AI, but it’s still not available for everyone
Gemini Live App on the Galaxy S25 Ultra broadcast to a TV showing the Gemini app with the camera feature open

Google has just officially announced the roll out of a powerful Gemini AI feature that means the intelligence can now see.

This started in March as Google began to show off Gemini Live, but it's now become more widely available.

Read more
This modular Pebble and Apple Watch underdog just smashed funding goals
UNA Watch

Both the Pebble Watch and Apple Watch are due some fierce competition as a new modular brand, UNA, is gaining some serous backing and excitement.

The UNA Watch is the creation of a Scottish company that wants to give everyone modular control of smartwatch upgrades and repairs.

Read more
Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues
Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

Read more