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More Bad News for Uber: Parisian Customer Files Law Suit over Sexual Assault Charges

It seems Uber’s fast trip to world domination is still going to face some serious bumps before getting the seconded result. After a storm of bad publicity affected the giant transportation company last year, when a female customer allegedly was raped by an Uber driver in New Delhi, India, a new case was recently reported.
Parisian Customers Files Suit over Sexual Assault Charges 1 photo
Photo: www.nytimes.com
As if the San Francisco company didn’t already have a lot of image problems, new reports of a sexual assault case in Paris have just been announced. The incident happened back in January and the Uber driver in France has been arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a female passenger outside a nightclub in Paris. According to Le Parisien, the unnamed driver will appear in court on May 29th and, if convicted, could face up to five years in jail and a fine of EUR75,000 ($82,000).

It was January 17th, when a woman in her 20s and two of her friends were chauffeured to the Show Case nightclub along the Seine river. According to the complaint filled with the police, the Uber driver then dropped off the two friends near the club, but drove a little further before letting the woman out because she was seated in the front passenger seat and there was no curb she could step out on.

That’s the moment when the driver ordered her to perform oral sex. This obviously led to a verbal fight and the woman ended up pressing charges. The man denied the accusations, but he still was suspended shortly after. Thomas Meister, spokesman for Uber France, later said the driver was “immediately suspended” when Uber was notified of the incident and that the company “is offering full cooperation to the police”.

Uber is working on some safety measures

This is where things get quite problematic, since the French newspaper reports that the Uber driver later proved to have had some problems with the law before. He was previously arrested for driving without a license.

In response, Meister said that Uber couldn’t have found the charges when they did the usual check since it’s considered a minor offense and it’s not mentioned in background checks due to French privacy protection laws.

Other than the fact we all know France really does protect their citizen’s privacy, it’s fair to mention Uber has been working on all sorts of measures to improve their customers’ safety.

Take the SOS button that allows passengers to immediately call the police in the event of an emergency (only available in India so far). Then there’s that collaboration with SafetiPin, a map-based mobile safety app that tags safety scores to locations. The initiative started in New Delhi but is supposed to spread in Bogota, Colombia and Nairobi, Kenya in the future.
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