UPDATE: Includes new statement from Lyft

The ride-hailing company Lyft is mishandling what amounts to a “sexual predator crisis” involving its drivers, a new lawsuit alleges, including failing to use its own technology to protect passengers and inadequately responding to reports of sexual abuse.

The case was filed Wednesday on behalf of 14 women who say they were sexually assaulted by their drivers in 2018 and 2019. Five say they were raped, including one woman who is blind.

Only one of the 14 women whose stories underpin the claim says she was told by the company that her driver was removed from the app. Others have worried their drivers may have kept contracting with Lyft even after the women reported them to the company or the police.

Gladys Arce, 40, a mother of four, told USA TODAY she was kidnapped for hours by a driver who teetered between professions of love and threats of violence before raping her. Months after she filed a police report, she says, the investigator on her criminal case told her the man was still driving for Lyft.

“We were doing the right thing. We were getting a Lyft driver to get home safely,” Arce said. “A drive that should have been 10, 15 minutes turned into a nightmare.”

In a statement responding to the suit, which was filed in superior court in Lyft’s hometown of San Francisco, Lyft said the safety of its passengers is fundamental to the company. Spokeswoman Lauren Alexander said the man Arce accused of rape was removed from the app but did not say when.

The new allegations are at odds with Lyft’s public image as the socially conscious alternative to Uber, its predecessor in disrupting the taxi industry that in recent years has come under fire for its workplace culture and response to safety concerns. Lyft, founded in 2012, has seen huge gains in the market, in part by billing itself as a safe option for female passengers.

Yet, Lyft has been behind the curve on implementing key safety measures.

The company said that within the next few weeks, all users will have access to an in-app emergency button they can use to quickly call 911. Under the rollout, about half of riders have access to it now. Uber launched its emergency button in May 2018.

Lyft also was nearly a year behind Uber when it in April announced it would institute continual background checks of drivers, who are independent contractors, instead of doing them only annually. Uber said it has removed more than 30,000 U.S. drivers since it implemented the system in July 2018. A spokeswoman for Lyft declined to say how many drivers the company has removed.

Provided a list of cases included in the new suit, the spokeswoman verified that, in addition to Arce, seven other drivers “were permanently deactivated.” She declined to say when any of them were removed.

In the remaining five cases, only the driver’s first name – which is all that is included in the passenger's app – was known to the women. Provided that name, the date of the incident and the city where it took place, Lyft could not determine whether the drivers were still on the road.

The accounts in the lawsuit are harrowing.

One woman said she was raped by a Lyft driver who followed her back to her hotel room, then stole her phone and added a $25 tip to the ride. Another said she woke up in the back seat of the car to find her driver on top of her, her pants unzipped. One driver was accused by two women who shared a Lyft ride home after a night out in Chicago. They said the driver molested one of them at her front door, then got back in the car, drove the second woman home and molested her there.

"What the victims describe is terrifying and has no place in the Lyft community,” Mary Winfield, head of Trust and Safety at Lyft, said in a statement. “As a platform committed to providing safe transportation, we hold ourselves to a higher standard by designing products and policies to keep out bad actors, make riders and drivers feel safe, and react quickly if and when an incident does occur."

The firm that filed the suit began to see an increase in inquiries from potential clients about ride-hailing companies a few years ago. The flow became so steady, Estey says, the firm added a page to its website on the topic, which drew even more inquiries.

“It’s mind-blowing the number of inquiries we get a week,” said attorney Steven Estey of Estey Bomberger. “It’s absolutely crazy.”

Though it's impossible to know how many women are sexually assaulted by ride-hailing drivers each year, according to the suit Lyft received nearly 100 reports in a single state in the year ending May 2016 – and the company has only grown since then. Lawsuits alleging sexual assault have followed, including seven filed against the company last month.

Estey says Lyft has tried to cover up the extent of the problem by keeping investigations internal and stonewalling law enforcement. Although Lyft denies it, the lawsuit alleges the company has gone as far as not complying with subpoenas.

“It’s not unique. It’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to keep everything suppressed so they don’t get bad publicity,” Estey said. “The reality is, when you advertise yourself as being a safe alternative and safe ride, and in fact it’s the opposite, it’s fairly frustrating.”

Lyft driver warns he has 'done evil stuff'

The suit accuses Lyft of being a tech company that hasn’t leveraged technology to deter sexual assaults by its drivers.

Alleging that Lyft was negligent in the design of its app, the lawyers say the company should more rigorously monitor rides, including by recording audio and video inside the cars, banning drivers who turn off the app midtrip, and sending messages to both the driver and the passenger when a ride veers off course.

"They have the technology to easily do this," said Michael Bomberger, another attorney on the case. “These drivers that are perpetrators and predators, they'd be far less likely to drive off course (or) turn off their app (if they were being monitored). ... It's an easy fix.”

Arce says the receipt from her ride shows her trip ending just over a mile from her home, 16 minutes after her driver picked her up. In reality, she said, she didn’t make it home until nearly five hours later.

She had taken a Lyft the night of Oct. 28, 2018, when she and her friends were too intoxicated to drive after a Halloween party near Los Angeles. Her sister ordered her a car. When the driver arrived, she buckled Arce into the back seat, told the driver Arce had been drinking and asked him to get her home safely.

Instead, Arce says, the man held her hostage, refusing to say where they were going as he drove around the Los Angeles area. He appeared to be on drugs, she says, and darted between telling her he loved her and warning that he had “done evil stuff” to others. At one point, she says, he told her he had been accused of rape by a passenger when he worked as a taxi driver in another country.

“He looked at me with these really evil eyes, like he wanted to kill me,” she said.

As night turned to morning, Arce says, the man took her to a beach and pulled her from the car. As she trembled from fear, he asked if she was cold. Then he raped her on the sand, she says.

“It was so fast,” she said. “I just concentrated on the waves.”

Back in the car, Arce decided to change tactics and stop trying to placate the man. She stared him in the eye, told him she had family members who worked in law enforcement and pleaded with him to take her home. He did.

She went to the police the next day, where she says detectives told her she should not contact Lyft because they would do it. Officials from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to requests for information on the investigation.

Arce says police matched the driver’s DNA to a sample taken from her rape kit, but a detective told her they do not plan to prosecute because the driver claimed the sexual contact was consensual.

If Lyft had cameras in their cars, she says, there would be no question of what happened that night. And it might have never happened at all.

Company accused of not cooperating with law enforcement

Several of the women say they decided to pursue legal action – some by speaking out publicly – out of frustration over how Lyft handled their reports and their safety. The suit says company responses to reports of rape and assault are “appallingly inadequate.”

Perhaps most troubling to Estey and his colleagues is the company’s interactions with law enforcement.

The company is not a mandatory reporter, meaning it is not legally required to report allegations of sexual assault to law enforcement. When law enforcement gets involved, Estey says, “the cooperation Lyft gives to police is sketchy at best.”

Lyft’s policy on law enforcement requests says the company requires a valid subpoena, court order or search warrant to provide any information to police. In cases involving an “immediate threat of death or serious bodily harm to a person,” only law enforcement is permitted to request information from Lyft, and it is instructed to do so via email.

“We’ve seen this in other large organizations that want to divert complaints and keep them internalized not have third party like cops involved,” Estey said. With Lyft, “we’ve seen instances where they’ve not complied with subpoenas.”

In one case, the lawsuit says police tried to contact Lyft but were unable to get in touch with the safety representative who had handled the assault report. Police are working to obtain a warrant for that driver’s name and other information, according to the suit.

Survivors also recount receiving automated responses that felt impersonal and traumatizing, the generic wording failing to match the seriousness of their experiences.

Brittany Robinson, 33, a mother of five from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, says that after reporting her assault, she received a call from a Lyft employee asking for more details. She felt uncomfortable sharing those details with the male representative.

“It felt like I was being assaulted again,” she said.

Robinson is blind and relied on ride-hailing companies for most of her transportation. She ordered a car on a Saturday in January 2018 to take her to the grocery store. She said her driver followed her in, saying he would help her shop. She told him it wasn’t necessary, but he persisted, then offered to drive her back home. Once there, he helped her take her bags inside, again ignoring her protests.

He took her cane, she says, then sat her on the couch while he walked through her home, perhaps checking to make sure they were alone. Then, she says, the man led her to a bedroom and raped her.

In the coming days, Robinson reported what happened to the police and Lyft. Police later told her that the driver, known to her only as Christopher, claimed the sexual contact was consensual. They declined to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence.

After her call with the male Lyft representative, Robinson says, the company followed up via email with what seemed like a form letter. She says it felt like “a band aid.” In it, the employee wrote that he was “so sorry to hear about this awful experience” and could “definitely understand why this made you feel unsafe and uncomfortable.”

“Lyft is happy to cooperate with any information police may need,” he wrote, “as long as they can provide a subpoena or formal legal order.”

Others report similar responses between periods of radio silence.

Kim Natural was riding an electric scooter home from a night out for her birthday and a friend’s graduation when she was approached by a driver who said he worked for Lyft.

It was winter and the driver said he’d be glad to take her home. She sat in the front seat, as she usually does, happy to meet a new person – her favorite aspect of Lyft. She pulled up the app, ordered the ride and plugged in her address.

The driver began complimenting her on her appearance before pulling up to her house, she says. When the car stopped, he reached over the center console. He grabbed her neck forcefully, pleading with her to kiss him goodnight.

Natural pushed him off, ran inside and locked the door. She filed a report with Lyft the next day, then reported it to police, too.

She received a phone call and email from a Lyft safety representative. The representative said the company would reach out with any further questions.

Then, nothing more from Lyft, even after her driver pleaded guilty to battery. She tried to follow up to see whether her driver was still on the app.

“Their response to me almost sounded automated in a way, it was very impersonal, that they were unable to disclose the status of the driver, and that they are working with detectives on their platform,” Natural said. “That’s all I got from them.”

Lyft told USA TODAY the driver’s account was among those that had been permanently deactivated, but declined to say when that happened.

“I just felt so insignificant. That they're not concerned about not only my well-being,” Natural said, “but any of their customers’ well-being.”

Cara Kelly is a reporter on the USA TODAY investigations team, focusing primarily on pop culture, consumer news and sexual violence. Contact her at carakelly@usatoday.com or @carareports. Tricia L. Nadolny can be reached at tnadolny@usatoday.com or @TriciaNadolny.