On April 30, a 31-year-old New York woman took an Uber home around 2:30 a.m. from her DJ gig on the Lower East Side. The woman, who we’re not identifying by name, says she fell asleep in the car and awoke to find her driver caressing her face. The woman says the driver then jumped in the back of the car and tried to kiss her before she managed to escape. You’ll be reassured to know it’s only taken the NYPD and Uber a little under a week to get the driver’s full name and maybe start looking for him.
The Uber customer—who has also spoken to Gothamist, in a story they published on Friday—says she called an Uber Black. The car that pulled up was a large black Chevy Suburban with tinted windows (“I was confused at first,” the woman says. “It was huge. It looked like a celebrity’s car”).
The driver, whose first name was Muhammad, chatted with her briefly. He told her he was from Pakistan, and asked where she was from. The woman was sitting in the back seat on the passenger’s side. After just a few minutes, she fell asleep. “I had a long day, I was tired,” she says. “The next thing I know, I wake up to someone caressing my face from the front seat.”
The woman was confused and disoriented, she says. As she tried to wake up: “Next thing I know he gets out of the car, jumps in the backseat, grabs my shoulder and attempts to rub them. I tell him, ‘That’s enough.’ When I try to push him away he grabs my face to go in for a kiss. I just lost it. That’s when I really wake up.”
The car doors were unlocked; the woman says she managed to grab her things and jump out of the car. They were parked right outside her home. “He knows where I live now and he has my phone number.”
The woman was “hysterical,” she says. She told her boyfriend what had happened, but at first resisted calling the police. “At first I didn’t want to do anything. It sucks that my initial thought was that it was my fault. I felt embarrassed and ashamed that I fell asleep. That I shouldn’t have been out late. That I shouldn’t have had those two drinks. But he encouraged me to put the word out.”
The woman filed a police report in New York’s tenth precinct on the Lower East Side. The case has been moved to her home precinct, which we won’t identify. She also contacted Uber as well as the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, which licenses Uber drivers in New York City.
Although she’d understood that her case was being investigated as a sexual assault, the NYPD’s public information office tell us it’s currently being investigated as harassment. An NYPD spokesperson tell us, “The most serious thing that the complainant did describe as happening is he grabbed her shoulders and touched her face and attempted to kiss her. It’s still classified as harassment. Unless he’d touched her or fondled her in some private part—her breasts or her private area. Then it would be like a forcible touching.” (The NYPD says the woman was asked if she was “forcibly touched or fondled” by the driver and that she responded that she hadn’t; the woman says she absolutely told multiple police officers that the driver had grabbed her and tried to kiss her, which certainly does sound like forcible touching, which under New York law means touching the “sexual or other intimate parts of another person” to degrade or abuse them, or to satisfy their own sexual desire.)
On the same day, the woman spoke with someone from Uber’s support team, who she said was empathetic and called her back several times, but was vague about what the company actually planned to do about the incident. She was told that Muhammad would immediately be locked out of using the app (not fired; Uber drivers are not employees, but independent contractor “driver-partners”).
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