A fleet of self-driving Uber cars in San Francisco last December. The company has settled a lawsuit stemming from a rape in India in 2014.
James Martin/CNETUber has settled a lawsuit involving a woman raped by one of its drivers in India and allegations that the company had obtained and mishandled her medical records.
Court documents filed Friday said the case would be dismissed in January. The terms of the settlement weren’t revealed.
The lawsuit (PDF), filed this past June in the Northern District of California, alleged intrusion into private affairs, public disclosure of private facts, and defamation. It said executives at Uber believed the woman was “fraudulently claiming that she had been raped” in collusion with one of the company’s rivals.
The woman was raped by an Uber driver in Delhi, India, in December 2014. At the time, she sued the ride hailing service over the sexual assault, alleging that company negligence and fraud had led to the attack. Uber settled that case in September 2015. The driver, Shiv Kumar Yadav, was found guilty in October 2015 and given a life sentence for kidnapping, rape and criminal intimidation.
The subsequent lawsuit, about the medical records, followed reports in Recode and The New York Times about the records and their handling.
Last month, Uber was hit with two separate lawsuits alleging rape by Uber drivers. The legal actions followed a number of scandals this year, including the revelation, in November, that Uber waited a whole year to reveal a data breach that exposed information on 57 million users and drivers.
The problems also included a #DeleteUber movement in January, workplace sexual harassment allegations and an internal investigation led by former US Attorney General Eric Holder. In June, Uber’s board of directors forced founder and CEO Travis Kalanick to resign. New CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says he’s trying to turn things around.
Neither Uber nor the attorney for the plaintiff in the medical records suit responded to a request for comment on the settlement.
CNET’s Roger Cheng and Dara Kerr contributed to this report.
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