How Rideshare Assault Advocates Helps Survivors of Rideshare Sexual Assault

What Help From This Practice Means for a Survivor or Family

Rideshare Assault Advocates is a personal-injury law practice focused on one subject: sexual assault connected to rideshare trips. The site covers the civil side of these cases, meaning claims a survivor or family can bring in court, as opposed to criminal charges the government brings. Its pages are written for survivors, for parents of survivors, and for families after a death.

The first step is a case evaluation, a confidential talk with our attorney. Talking about a ride does not obligate anyone to file anything, and a survivor can stop, pause or decline to continue at any point.

The steps described here are general. Every situation is different, and the order in which things happen depends on the survivor, the facts and the law of the state involved. Some people want to talk about the legal side right away. Others first want to understand their options for medical care or reporting. A person can read for weeks before deciding whether a conversation makes sense, and that pace belongs to the survivor.

What a Survivor's Civil Claim Has to Show

A civil personal-injury claim generally rests on four elements. Each one has to be shown, and whether it is met depends on the facts of the specific case. For a survivor, these four elements are the questions a claim will have to answer about what happened during and after the ride.

First, did the person or company owe a duty of care, a legal obligation to act with reasonable care toward you? Second, was there a breach, meaning they fell short of that obligation? Third, is there causation, meaning the breach actually led to the harm you experienced? Fourth, are there damages, the losses the law recognizes as flowing from the harm, such as medical costs or emotional injury?

A civil claim and a criminal case are separate proceedings. A criminal case is brought by the government against the accused person, decided under the highest standard of proof, and can end in a sentence such as incarceration. A civil case is brought by the survivor or family, is usually decided under a lower standard of proof, and seeks damages rather than punishment. One can move forward without the other, and an outcome in one does not decide the other. A survivor's civil options do not depend on whether criminal charges are filed.

In rideshare assault cases, the people or businesses who may be named as defendants generally fall into two categories: the driver who is accused, and the rideshare platform that connected the driver to the passenger. Courts have considered several legal theories in these cases. General negligence asks whether a party failed to use reasonable care. Negligent hiring or retention asks whether a party's screening or continued use of a driver fell below that standard. Platform liability theories ask what responsibility a company carries for the service it runs and the safety measures connected to it. Each theory describes a question the evidence has to answer, not a conclusion about any company. A fuller look at these claims appears on the page about the rideshare sexual assault lawyer question.

Who May Be Responsible for a Survivor's Harm: More Than One Potential Defendant

The question many survivors and families ask first is simple: who is actually responsible? In a rideshare case, the answer can involve more than one party, because of how the service is set up.

Rideshare drivers are often classified as independent contractors. An independent contractor is a person who works for themselves and is hired to do a job, rather than an employee whose work the business directs and controls. That label matters because, in many situations, a business is not automatically responsible for the acts of a contractor the way it may be for an employee. The classification does not end the inquiry, though. A claim against a platform can rest on the platform's own conduct, not only on the driver's.

That is where negligent hiring and negligent retention come in. Negligent hiring asks whether a business failed to use reasonable care when it screened and accepted a person, and whether that failure led to the harm. Negligent retention asks whether a business kept working with a person after it knew, or reasonably should have known, of a risk, and whether that choice led to the harm. Both theories focus on what the business itself did or did not do.

Fault can also be divided, and the rule a state uses can change what a survivor may recover. Under comparative fault, responsibility is split among the parties by percentage, and any recovery is adjusted to match. Under contributory fault, a stricter rule, a person found partly at fault may be barred from recovering at all.

No single state's rule on platform liability applies everywhere. The same ride could be analyzed differently depending on where it happened and where a case is filed, which is one of the questions a conversation with an attorney can help sort out.

Records From a Survivor's Ride That Often Matter

Evidence in a civil case connects the facts to the four elements. Some records come from the survivor's own life after the ride; others sit with the platform.

If you were hurt during a rideshare trip, the records that often matter include medical records and documentation of treatment, the trip record and receipt in the app, any police or incident report if one was filed, photographs or video if they exist, messages or other communications with the platform after the incident, and the names or contact details of anyone who saw or heard something. Many survivors gather these slowly, and some only in part; a record that is missing or hard to look at does not have to be faced alone. Each can speak to a different element. Medical records bear on damages and causation. The trip record places the driver and passenger together at a given time. Communications with the platform can show what the company was told and when.

Other records are held by the platform itself, including GPS data showing the route, records of which driver was assigned to the trip, and the driver's background-check history. A survivor usually cannot see these directly. Civil discovery is the formal process in a lawsuit by which each side can require the other to produce documents, data and answers under oath. It is the legal mechanism through which a plaintiff's attorney can request platform-held records like these, which is how a survivor may learn what the platform knew about the driver's background. What a platform must produce, and on what terms, is decided under court rules and, where there is a dispute, by the judge.

More on these records, including how they relate to rape cases specifically, appears on the page about a rideshare rape lawsuit.

What Damages the Law May Allow — and What They Depend On

Damages are the law's word for the losses a court may recognize in a civil case. They do not measure what happened to a person, and no page can say what a court may award in any given case.

For a survivor, damages fall into two groups. Economic damages cover losses that show up in bills and records, such as medical expenses, lost income and the cost of future care. Non-economic damages cover losses that are real but harder to count, such as pain and suffering, emotional distress and loss of enjoyment of life. After a sexual assault, the non-economic side is often what survivors think about most, because the harm reaches sleep, work, relationships and a sense of safety.

Wrongful death is a separate kind of claim. It allows certain family members to bring a civil action when a person dies as a result of another's wrongful conduct, and the damages it may allow belong to the family rather than to the person who died.

Damages rules differ by state: some states cap certain categories, some limit who may recover what, and calculation methods vary. That includes who may bring a wrongful-death claim and what it may cover. What a court may award depends on the facts, the applicable law and what the evidence shows. For a family weighing whether to move forward, the useful question is which categories the relevant state recognizes, not a prediction of a result.

Why the Filing Deadline for a Survivor's Claim Differs by State

Worry about time is one of the most common reasons survivors hesitate, and also one of the most common reasons they finally look for answers.

A statute of limitations is a law that sets the period within which a civil lawsuit must be filed. If a case is filed after that period ends, a court can dismiss it no matter what happened, so a claim's strength may not matter if it comes too late. Limitation periods for personal-injury and sexual-assault civil claims vary, and no single period applies everywhere.

Some states have enacted extended limitation periods written specifically for civil sexual-assault claims, recognizing that survivors often need time before they can talk about what happened. Other states apply their general personal-injury rules. Claims involving a minor are often treated differently as well.

Tolling is a legal rule that pauses or extends the clock in certain circumstances. Depending on the state, tolling may apply while a person is a minor, in some situations involving delayed discovery of the harm, or under other conditions the state's law defines.

When the clock starts also varies. Some periods run from the date of the assault, some from a later event, and some from the date a person reached adulthood. For these reasons, this page does not state any particular period or say how much time anyone has.

Questions Worth Asking Before a Case Evaluation

Knowing roughly what a first conversation covers can make it easier to decide whether, and when, to talk. Nothing here is a checklist, and a survivor can share as much or as little as feels right.

The topics often include what happened during the ride and afterward, when and in what state it happened, what records exist, whether a police or incident report was filed, and what medical care, if any, was sought. If some answers are unknown, or a survivor would rather not discuss part of the experience yet, that is part of the conversation too. Parents and family members often come with different questions, such as what role they can play when a child or an adult relative was hurt.

Some survivors want to read about other subjects first. The site has separate pages on medical care after a rideshare sexual assault, reporting options, and privacy in a rideshare sexual assault claim. The page on your legal rights and the rideshare sexual assault FAQ cover common questions, and the Uber and Lyft MDL page explains the federal multidistrict litigation.

When you are ready, you can request a case evaluation at a pace that suits you.