Federal Jury Holds Uber Liable for Driver's Assault of 19-Year-Old Passenger in First Rideshare Bellwether Trial
After trial: Uber said it would appeal and has filed a renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law and an alternative motion for a new trial. We found no ruling on those motions and no Ninth Circuit appeal as of this writing.
Won by Anapol Weiss.
A 19-year-old woman from Oklahoma said her Uber driver raped her during a late-night ride in Arizona in November 2023. On February 5, 2026, a nine-person federal jury in Phoenix found Uber liable under an apparent-agency theory and awarded $8.5 million in compensatory damages. It was the first trial among more than 3,000 consolidated rideshare assault cases. The jury declined punitive damages and rejected the negligence and defective-design claims.
What happened
On February 5, 2026, a federal jury in Phoenix returned the first verdict in the multidistrict litigation over sexual assaults by Uber drivers, finding the company liable for an assault on a 19-year-old passenger and awarding $8.5 million in compensatory damages. The plaintiff, an Oklahoma woman whose name we omit, sued over a ride she took in the Phoenix area in November 2023. She had been traveling to her hotel after a late night out.
She testified that the driver stopped the ride short and raped her in the back seat. The driver was not a party to the lawsuit, and the defense pointed to his record: no criminal history, a dozen background checks passed over seven years, and roughly 10,000 completed rides, more than half of them rated five stars. According to Bloomberg Law's account of the trial, he maintained that the sexual contact was consensual.
The case was tried before U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, who presides over the Uber MDL from San Francisco and sat in Phoenix for the trial. It was chosen as the first bellwether from more than 3,000 consolidated lawsuits, so the result was watched as a test of how juries would treat the claims that follow. Alexandra Walsh of Anapol Weiss and Sarah London of Girard Sharp led the trial for the plaintiff, with Anapol Weiss colleagues Holly Dolejsi and William Smith also appearing for her. In closing, Walsh told jurors that Uber had made riders believe its service was a safe place, telling them: 'Women know it's a dangerous world.'
The plaintiff's central theory was that the driver was Uber's agent, not an independent contractor. After a trial before a nine-person jury, the jurors agreed, finding him an apparent agent of Uber, which made the company answerable for his conduct. They rejected the separate claims that Uber was negligent and that its safety systems were defectively designed, and they declined to award punitive damages.
The $8.5 million award consisted entirely of compensatory damages. The sources do not break it down further by category.
Uber said after the verdict that it would appeal and pointed to the claims the jury rejected. It has since filed a renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law and, in the alternative, a motion for a new trial. The parties agreed to stay enforcement of the judgment pending appeal, and the court waived a bond. We found no ruling on those motions and no appeal to the Ninth Circuit as of this writing.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.U.S. District Court, D. Ariz., No. 2:25-cv-04276, jury trial transcript, day 16, Feb. 3, 2026·Archived copy
- 2.NBC News, 'Uber ordered to pay $8.5 million in trial over driver sex assault claims', Feb. 6, 2026·Archived copy
- 3.Bloomberg Law, 'Uber Jury Awards $8.5 Million Damages in Sexual Assault Case', Feb. 6, 2026·Archived copy
- 4.Carrier Management, 'Jury Finds Uber Must Pay $8.5M Over Driver Sex Assault Claims', Feb. 6, 2026·Archived copy
- 5.Anapol Weiss (firm)·Archived copy
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