Uber hit with $5,000 jury verdict for driver’s creepy behavior; company vows to appeal

Rideshare giant Uber is liable for the behavior of a driver who grabbed the inner thigh of a passenger as she was leaving the front seat of his car and asked if he could “keep her” with him, a jury in North Carolina found Monday. The federal jury in Charlotte awarded the plaintiff $5,000 in damages, said Ellyn Hurd, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers. The so-called bellwether case is part of a broader group of sexual assault lawsuits filed against Uber in multiple jurisdictions around the country and is the third to go to trial. In February, a federal jury in Arizona ordered Uber to pay $8.5 million to a woman who said one of its drivers raped her during a trip using the platform. Last year, a California jury found Uber not liable for the alleged assault of a rider. Uber, in an emailed statement, took note of the relatively small financial judgment in the North Carolina case and that the jury found that battery had occurred and not sexual assault. “The jury’s award here should further bring these cases back to reality, as it represents a tiny fraction of previous demands,” the Uber statement said, adding that the company has strong grounds for appeal because it believes the jury was incorrectly instructed on the question of liability. The AP does not typically name people who have said they were sexually abused unless they have given consent through their attorneys or come forward publicly. Hurd said the verdict bodes well for other plaintiffs, saying that Uber, not the plaintiffs, selected the North Carolina case as a test case for the broader group of pending lawsuits. “This was a case that they thought going in that they were going to win,” Hurd said. “They picked all the criteria — this is the case that they picked, that they wanted to try. And the jury believed the plaintiff and they lost.” The lawsuits follow years of criticism of Uber’s safety record, including thousands of incidents of sexual assault reported by both passengers and drivers . Because Uber driver…