LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) - Uber Technologies had no duty to protect women who got into cars driven by men who sexually assaulted them even though the ride-app company knew people were printing out official-looking Uber stickers on home computers and using them to lure victims, a California appeals court ruled.
Uber didn’t have the “special relationship” establishing a duty to protect several women identified as Jane Doe who were assaulted after leaving Los Angeles night spots in 2017 and 2018, California’s Second District Court of Appeal ruled in a June 1 decision. Unlike a store that can be liable for crimes committed in its parking lot, the court said, Uber didn’t have control over the place where the women waited for their rides or a duty to protect them from third parties.
The decision upheld a trial court’s dismissal of the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs ordered rides using Uber’s app but failed to verify the car they got into had the same license plate as the one the app said would pick them up. Two women acknowledged they didn’t check, while a third said the driver told her he had failed to update his identification after getting a new car.
The women argued Uber was a common carrier subject to liability under California law not only while passengers were in a vehicle but while they were waiting to be picked up. They also argued Uber was on notice that rapists were printing up stickers for their cars and using them to lure women into thinking they were official Uber drivers.
The problem for the plaintiffs is California law draws a distinction between defendants who create the situation that puts a plaintiff at risk and those who merely fail to protect a plaintiff from a foreseeable danger caused by third parties, the court said. The court cited a case where a rock station was liable for running a contest encouraging teenagers to track down a disk jockey as he moved from place to place, during which one of them ran another car off the road and caused a fatal accident. In another similar case, there was no liability for a host of a rave where teens took drugs and later got into a fatal car accident, because taking drugs wasn’t a requirement of attending the party.
“The fake Uber scheme may be a foreseeable result of the Uber business model, and the Jane Does’ assailants may not have been able to as easily commit their crimes against the Jane Does, were it not for the Uber app and the Uber business model,” the court said. “But these connections cannot establish that the harm the Jane Does suffered is a `necessary component’ of the Uber entities’ actions.”
The court also rejected arguments a statement on the Uber website saying “you stay safe and comfortable wherever you are until your driver arrives,” didn’t create a contractual obligation to protect the plaintiffs. Their case isn’t equivalent to lawsuits where a person is assaulted by a third party on the defendant’s property, the court said.