In sexual assault trial, Uber driver admits lack of consent

PHOENIX (CN) — In a deposition for a federal sexual assault lawsuit against Uber, former driver Hassan Turay admitted that Jaylynn Dean could not consent when he had sex with her in the back of his car in 2023.

“I had a responsibility to make sure she was in a right state of mind, and I did not do that,” Turay said in a video deposition played in court Wednesday afternoon.

Dean is one of thousands of women who have sued Uber in the last few years, claiming the ride-hailing company failed to upgrade safety standards after they were sexually assaulted by their drivers. Uber admits that assaults have occurred and says it has done everything it can to reduce the rate of assaults on its platform, though it insists that Dean was not raped but was rather an enthusiastic participant with Turay.

“I’m so drunk right now,” is the first thing Dean said when she got into the back of Turay’s car, he recalled. She called him through the Uber app to drive her from a friend’s apartment to her hotel in Tempe, Arizona, in November 2023. Turay said she told him she had sex with her friend twice before throwing up in his bathtub.

Turay said in his deposition that he asked whether Dean had orgasmed, leading her to ask whether he wanted to have sex with her.

“At this time, she was playing with herself in the backseat,” Turay said. “She had taken off her shorts.”

Turay turned off the Uber app, exited the highway and pulled over in a dark neighborhood, where the two had oral and vaginal sex.

At the beginning of his testimony, Turay insisted that Dean was not drunk and that the sex was consensual, but later acknowledged she could not consent as questioning continued.

“Honestly, I didn’t do too much to make sure that she could consent,” Turay said when asked. He never checked in with her or asked if she was OK. “You’ve just made me see another aspect with the whole thing of consent.”

By the end of his deposition, Turay said he was wrong to have had sex with Dean.

“She did say the words ‘maybe you should have sex with me,’ but she also said she’d been drinking,” he acknowledged. “So I definitely was, I feel like, I did the wrong thing.”

An attorney for Dean asked again at the end of his deposition whether Turay believes he raped Dean.

“I don’t feel like I did, but she feels like I did, and I also have to consider how she feels,” he answered.

When matching drivers with riders, Uber uses an AI-powered safety feature called the safety ride assistant dispatch, or SRAD. SRAD gives potential driver-rider matches a score from 0 to 1 based on potential for sexual assault and aims to make matches with the lowest risk. Risk factors include location and time of day, but SRAD also considers a driver’s weekend and nighttime request rate, scoring them as more risky because they may be more likely to be searching for easy victims.

Uber sets different thresholds at which a trip could be blocked based on the city and time of day. Phoenix has the highest rate of sexual assaults of any U.S. city in which Uber operates.

The SRAD score for Dean’s trip with Turay was 0.81, which was higher than the late-night average for the Phoenix area.

Uber said it never informed Dean of its risk assessment.

“We did not, nor would it be practical to provide that information to riders,” Sunny Wong, Uber’s director of applied science, said in a deposition played for the jury earlier in the day.

Wong said the SRAD score does not consider the gender of the driver or past complaints made against the driver.

Wong said it would be misleading to read the SRAD score as a probability for assault and is instead simply a score used for real-time comparisons and risk assessment.

In the deposition video, an attorney for Dean suggested Uber could prevent 50% of all reported sexual assaults if it blocked trips with the top 10% of SRAD scores.

Uber moved for a mistrial before lunch. While questioning a member of Uber’s safety team, plaintiff attorney Sarah London mentioned a woman named Jennifer Chase who had made multiple nearly identical sexual harassment complaints against Uber drivers in an attempt to be refunded for rides. London asked if the witness knew whether Chase was in the courtroom.

“We can’t imply that someone in the gallery is here to vouch for a sexual misconduct allegation,” Uber attorney Kim Bueno told U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer.

Breyer told the jury it should disregard whether Chase is in the courtroom, but Uber’s attorneys said a limiting instruction will do no good. Breyer said he will take up the matter at a later date.

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