A case has been filed at the San Francisco County Superior Court, revealing that Uber is being sued by 550 women who were allegedly assaulted by drivers working for the platform.
The complaint was made on Wednesday by attorneys at Slater Slater Schulman LLP, a prominent full-service law firm, alleging that passengers "were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, sexually battered, raped, falsely imprisoned, stalked, harassed or otherwise attacked by Uber drivers".
Uber has been aware since 2014 that its drivers "sexually assaulted and raped female passengers". But the company reportedly prioritized "growth over customer safety".
The lawsuit further accuses Uber of "actively giving sexual predators a platform to find and assault women, without conducting proper background checks on the drivers or providing adequate safety measures for riders."
In addition, the complaint accuses Uber of benefiting monetarily from rides where women were sexually assaulted.
At least 150 other cases are being actively investigated.
The recent revelation by a media consortium, dubbed the 'Uber Files', said that when a driver raped a passenger in the cab during an Uber ride, the company shifted the blame on the "flawed" background checks of drivers in the country that led to the incident.
Internal emails and excerpts from around 124,000 pages of documents published in British daily newspaper The Guardian -- which is part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists -- reveal how the company's staff in its San Francisco headquarters panicked after a sexual assault was performed by an Uber driver inside his cab in Delhi on 5 December.
Indian media reports in 2017 alleged that Uber was secretly collecting the private medical information of the victim.
In December 2017, the woman filed a new defamation suit in the US after Uber claimed it had investigated the complaint and concluded that she might have been making up the incident to defame the company.
At that time, Uber's Asia business head shared the victim's record with chief executive Travis Kalanick, who claimed that the incident could have been a "sabotage attempt" by Uber's competitor in India -- Ola.