Accused Rapist Cab Driver Wants You to Know He's a Stand-Up Guy

A week or so ago, New Orleans cab driver Sohail Khan allegedly raped a female passenger after she fell asleep in the back of his cab. But then—plot twist!—just two days later he totally did a guy a solid by returning his lost wallet! Sooo…he’s pretty much breaking even, right? Sohail Khan, PR wizard, seems to think so:

Two days after he allegedly raped an unconscious passenger in the back seat of his taxi, a New Orleans cabbie refused a reward for returning another fare’s wallet containing several hundred dollars. Instead, that passenger said, the driver, Sohail Khan, urged him to tell NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune about his good experience.

“I took out a $100 bill and without a beat, he says, ‘No, no, no. I don’t want any money. I represent New Orleans. If you can tell somebody about it that would be fine,'” recalled David Goldwyn, 54, a Washington, D.C., energy consultant who was in town for Jazz Fest. “He said, ‘You could write something.’ I said, ‘Who do I write?’ He said, ‘NOLA.com.'”

Listen, man, this whole “alleged rapist” thing is really doing a number on my Yelp score. If you could just hop in there and write a review saying that not only did I not cover the in-cab surveillance camera and then creep into the backseat and violate your body like a slimy predator, I also returned your rightful property to you without leveraging it for reward money, that’d really help me get more people into my cab. Which is, clearly, a place where more people ought to be.

And the guy did it! He wrote a letter to the editor of the Times-Picayune, which was embarrassingly published the same day as a story about Khan’s arrest. “I wanted to note Mr. Sohail Khan’s grace and integrity,” he wrote. “New Orleans is represented well.”

NOLA.com, a website affiliated with the Times-Picayune, later wrote up the story of Khan’s stirring heroism under the headline, “New Orleans cab driver accused of raping passenger later did a good deed, rider says.” Oh, he did a “good deed,” you say? By not stealing a dude’s wallet and then using it to extort good press in the wake of a brutal (alleged) rape? WELL BYGONES, THEN. Those two things certainly do deserve equal billing. I might have gone with “Our boneheaded paper didn’t notice that we published a mash note to an alleged rapist on the same day we wrote about his arrest,” but I’m just a blogger. (For the record, I have literally not-stolen-a-dude’s-wallet-and-then-used-it-to-extort-good-press-in-the-wake-of-a-brutal-alleged-rape every day of my life so far. Can I have a headline too???)