Experts dispute victim numbers in Uber Sexual Assault Trial. - Mark P. Loftus

Rideshare giant Uber is currently on trial in California in a bellwether trial involving hundreds of accusers claiming various levels of sexual assault from Uber drivers over the last several years.

Lawyers for the victims argued at the start of the trial that Uber vastly underreported incidents of sexual assault and misconduct and that Uber puts growth and profits over passenger safety. Natalie Weatherford, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers told jurors that from 2017 to 2022, Uber reported just over 12,000 total incidents from five separate categories of “serious sexual assault” – a term apparently coined by Uber and its lawyers. Weatherford told the jury that when additional categories were included the reported incidents actually exceed 300,000.

Last week Victoria Stodden, an associate professor from USC took the stand as a statistics expert for Uber. Stodden told the jury that David Madigan Phd, plaintiffs expert, had grouped all the incidents into one category – “Sexual Malfeasance”. Stodden however, took a different approach where she broke the reported incidents down into a less serious behavior. And in her analysis, she found that two specific categories – Comments & Gestures – made up most of the reported incidents. “The category around comments and gestures, [and] and the category around leering, its about 70% of the incidents.”

Stodden broke her analysis down further by saying that it included flirting, personal questions, comments on the passenger’s appearance as well as staring/leering. On cross examination, Stodden was forced to admit that she didn’t know that precise % of the reported incidents fell into categories that Uber considered “most serious” but guessed that the number was under 30%. Curious that Uber’s expert would not know the % of “most serious” reports as that would seem to be an important fact for an expert to know. And despite Stodden’s attempt to soften most of the incidents as inappropriate comments and flirting, she had to acknowledge that that nearly one third of the reported incidents were serious.

And Stoddard was forced to acknowledge that in 2017-18 there were 5,980 serious incidents; 3,824 in 2019-20 and 2717 in 2021-22. No statistical slight of hand can soften those numbers, which translate to over 4000 sexual assaults over that three year period. Those numbers will be difficult to explain away for Uber.