Rachel Abrams

In September 2019 a woman from New Orleans told NPR about the night her girlfriend called a Lyft to take her home from a bar. The driver kept going, away from her neighborhood and to his own house, where she said he raped and sodomized her; in the middle of the night he drove her home. “For some of it, I was probably unconscious in the car,” she said. “I walked in the door, and I called 911.” The police took her to the hospital. The driver was jailed to await trial on rape and kidnapping charges.

She wanted three things from Lyft: fingerprint-based background checks for its drivers, video recording of its rides, and a way for women to ask for a woman driver. Her lawyer was Rachel Abrams, then a partner at Levin Simes Abrams in San Francisco, which had begun suing Lyft for riders. “I think this is an epidemic,” Abrams said. Lyft turned down NPR’s requests for an interview and announced new training for its drivers, an emergency button in its app, and a planned check-in feature that would sense unexplained delays during a trip. “They can say that they’re woke, but that’s not true,” Abrams said. Her partner Laurel Simes said the firm had heard from more than 150 women, with more calling every day.

Abrams is now a partner at Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise in San Francisco, and she represents about a thousand people suing Uber and Lyft over assaults by their drivers. Federal judges have made her co-lead counsel of the national litigation against each company. Each of her New Orleans client’s three requests became an allegation in those cases.

Pink Mustaches

Lyft’s early cars wore pink mustaches, and while Uber weathered scandals of its own, Lyft was seen as the more wholesome of the two companies. It had run promotions with bars and beer companies, discounting drinks for customers who showed the app and planned to ride home: “Drink up. We’re driving.” “Most women saw the pink mustache and thought that’s a safer ride home because they said that,” Abrams told the Associated Press in January 2020, when she represented about a hundred clients suing Lyft. “They didn’t do anything to actually make themselves the safer ride home.” A Lyft spokeswoman said the company had launched more than fifteen new safety features. Lyft planned to publish a safety report but had not said when.

Suits accusing Lyft drivers of assault had begun arriving in California courts in September 2019. In December nineteen women sued Lyft together in San Francisco Superior Court. Abrams, who had filed a separate suit, and Michael Bomberger, the lawyer for the nineteen, said more than two hundred women had come forward to say Lyft or Uber drivers had assaulted them. That same month Uber released its first U.S. safety report, which counted 5,981 reports of sexual assault in 2017 and 2018, 3,045 of them in 2018. Abrams was already representing riders against both companies before either faced a coordinated proceeding.

Lyft fought to keep the California suits apart. Each one, its lawyers argued, arose from different facts, most of them in other states with laws of their own; Lyft’s filing counted at least thirty-eight alleged incidents in nineteen states. Judge Kenneth Freeman of Los Angeles County Superior Court ordered the cases heard together in one court in San Francisco, where Lyft has its headquarters. Bringing them together, Abrams said, would show that Lyft’s response to “the sexual predator crisis among Lyft’s drivers” had been “appallingly inadequate no matter where their customers were assaulted.” By 2026 the coordinated California Lyft cases, JCCP 5061, had been running in San Francisco for more than five years. The claims against Uber were coordinated in California as JCCP 5188, and Abrams has worked extensively in both.

In January 2021, representing a group of women suing Lyft, she told CNET: “Each of these plaintiffs’ experiences are horrifyingly unique. But what has not been unique is Lyft’s appallingly inadequate response.” In June 2021 CBS News asked her what would have prevented most of the assaults. She pointed to equipment neither company required: “99% of these crimes would be prevented if there was a camera.”

Lyft published its first safety report on October 21, 2021. It counted 4,158 reports of sexual assault from 2017 through 2019, among them more than 360 rapes. “We’ve all been waiting for it,” Abrams told The New York Times. “They are not implementing the safety measures to prevent this from happening, and it’s just going to keep mounting.” Lyft, she said, should put video surveillance in its cars.

The next afternoon she went on NPR’s All Things Considered. “No, it doesn’t surprise us,” she told Audie Cornish, and she said that “our firm alone represents over a thousand women that have been sexually assaulted.” The in-app tools Lyft had added since 2019 failed the riders who most needed them, she said. A rider’s phone “may have been out of battery.” “Someone may have called the ride for them,” so the feature was not active. “Some of them may be too intoxicated to be able to utilize the phone and that feature.” She wanted recording required in every car and drivers interviewed before they were hired: “even a five, 10-minute Zoom interview would probably weed out a lot of potential problem drivers.” Nothing had changed, she said, “since that interview with my client, Jane Doe, since late 2019.”

Twenty-Two Applications

The Uber cases became national first. On October 4, 2023, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation sent the federal suits against Uber, by then seventy-nine of them in thirteen districts, to Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer in San Francisco as In re: Uber Technologies, Inc., Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation, MDL No. 3084. A week later Abrams said her firm was filing “dozens of cases” against Uber every day. “Thousands of sexual assaults are reported to Uber every year, yet it refuses to make necessary safety changes,” she said, and she named them: mandatory video in the cars, background checks with fingerprints, sexual-harassment education, and zero tolerance for drivers who broke the rules. Uber had used a background-check system “designed to get drivers approved as quickly and conveniently as possible,” she said, and had collected “hundreds of millions of dollars” through a $1 safe-rides fee without making those changes. Uber “feels very strongly that it is not Uber’s job to go to the police,” she said, when one of its drivers rapes a passenger. “We’ve always been told not to get into a car with strangers.”

Breyer received twenty-two applications for the plaintiffs’ leadership. On December 6, 2023, he appointed three co-lead counsel: Abrams, Sarah R. London, and Roopal P. Luhana. His order made them responsible for the plaintiffs’ position on every matter arising before trial, for the scheduling and conduct of discovery, and for settlement negotiations, though they could enter no binding agreement without express authority. He named Alexandra M. Walsh, who would later try the first bellwether alongside London, to the steering committee.

Abrams had held appointments like these for two decades. Judge Cynthia Rufe put her on the twelve-member national steering committee for the Avandia litigation. Judge Joseph R. Goodwin put her on the steering committee for the transvaginal-mesh litigation in his court, five separate MDLs against American Medical Systems, Bard, Coloplast, Boston Scientific, and Ethicon and Johnson & Johnson, coordinated under one appointment. Judge Cathy Seibel named her to the steering committee for the Mirena IUD litigation, Judge Donovan Frank to the one for the Stryker Rejuvenate and ABG II hip implants, and Judge Matthew Kennelly to the one for testosterone-replacement therapy. In the Viagra litigation Judge Richard Seeborg made her liaison counsel, the lawyer who carries communications between the court and every plaintiffs’ firm in the case. Before Judge Jack B. Weinstein, in the Zyprexa litigation, she co-chaired the committee that handled the scientific and expert evidence. When Judge William Orrick chose thirteen lawyers for the JUUL steering committee after more than seventy applicants presented to him, she was one of the thirteen.

Those committees run the discovery shared across thousands of claims, work with the experts, and sit at the table when a settlement or a bellwether verdict sets terms that other plaintiffs will live with. Abrams has done that work over twenty-four years of personal-injury and product-liability practice, first at Levin Simes Abrams, the firm now named Levin Simes, and then at Peiffer Wolf. She has taken hundreds of depositions, has prepared and assisted with dozens of trials in state and federal courts, and lectures on the procedures of California’s coordinated proceedings and federal MDLs. She studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, earned her law degree at the University of San Francisco, and is admitted to practice in California.

In April 2024 the three co-leads set out the plaintiffs’ case against Uber in a sworn declaration. Uber ran a driver’s name and Social Security number, “which may or may not be that of the actual driver,” through “often-sparse public databases,” they wrote, without fingerprints and without the FBI database used in the taxi industry. When Maryland and Massachusetts ran their own fingerprint-based checks, “12-15% of drivers who were eligible under Uber’s standards flunked the official background checks.” Uber did not meet its drivers in person or online. “It does not interview them,” the co-leads wrote. “It does not require any references. It does not contact prior employers.” For most of its years in business, they alleged, Uber had required more than one sexual-assault complaint before it would remove a driver, and until 2018 it had made confidentiality a condition of its settlements with survivors.

Individual Basis Only

Uber answered with its own terms of use. Claims against the company could be brought “on an individual basis only,” the terms told riders, which meant “you cannot bring such claims as a class, collective, coordinated, consolidated, mass and/or representative action against Uber,” and “no action brought by you may be consolidated or joined in any fashion with any other proceeding.” Uber asked the Ninth Circuit for a writ of mandamus to undo the Panel’s order, arguing that the waiver deserved the controlling weight courts give forum-selection and arbitration clauses. Before Breyer, the plaintiffs had argued that Uber had not proven every plaintiff actually agreed to its terms. Samuel Issacharoff argued the plaintiffs’ side in the Ninth Circuit in October 2024, with Abrams, London, and Luhana on the brief.

On March 10, 2025, Judge Lucy H. Koh, writing for herself and Judges M. Margaret McKeown and Anthony D. Johnstone, denied the petition. The statute that governs the Panel “contains no requirement that common factual questions predominate over individual ones,” she wrote, and it gives the Panel power to centralize cases “even over the objection of the parties.” A rider’s contract could not take that power away: “Under the plain text of Section 1407, the JPML may centralize a case, or decline to do so, notwithstanding any private agreement to the contrary.” And: “Parties may not opt out of Section 1407’s ‘mandatory’ procedure.”

In July 2025 Breyer ruled on Uber’s motions against the first bellwether complaints. The claims that survived included product-liability claims over the app’s lack of any option to match a rider with a driver of a particular gender, the third of the requests Abrams’s New Orleans client had made of Lyft in 2019, and fraud claims alleging that Uber’s notifications to riders left out drivers’ prior misconduct and criminal histories. Six months later the first bellwether went to trial.

Jaylynn Dean

The first bellwether was Jaylynn Dean’s case. Dean was nineteen and an Oklahoma resident when, on November 15, 2023, after an evening at her boyfriend’s home, she asked the Uber app for a ride to her hotel in Tempe, Arizona. She lay down in the back seat. The driver made vulgar comments, she alleged, then stopped the car, got into the back seat, and raped her. She reported it right away, to Uber and to the police. On December 29, 2023, three weeks after her own appointment as co-lead counsel, Abrams filed Dean’s complaint in San Francisco with Adam B. Wolf of Peiffer Wolf, under Dean’s own name.

The complaint made the arguments Abrams had been making in public since 2019. “Uber does not verify driver identities with biometric background checks,” it alleged. “Uber failed to install video cameras in the cars.” And Uber, it alleged, had “fought for and implemented a less robust hiring process knowing it would be at the expense of passenger safety.”

Breyer presided over the trial in Phoenix in January 2026; London, Walsh, and Deborah Chang tried it. Uber argued that drivers on its platform are not its employees and that it could not be held liable for what a driver did outside its technology services agreement. On February 5, after deliberating for most of two days, the jury found that the driver had been acting as Uber’s apparent agent: Dean had reasonably believed he was driving for Uber. It awarded her $8.5 million in compensatory damages. The next day Breyer entered judgment for that amount.

“My heroic client, Jaylynn Dean, did what so few survivors feel safe to do: she reported her assault immediately to three people, despite a system that too often blames victims and counts on their silence,” Abrams said that day. Because of Dean’s bravery, she said, “a corporation valued at more than $150 billion globally will now be held to account for the lifelong harm it caused her.” She called the verdict “a sign of what’s to come.” “We won’t rest until Uber takes the necessary safety measures to protect users from the dangers on its platform.” Uber said it would challenge Breyer’s apparent-agency instructions on appeal, and it has appealed.

A Common Carrier

Two months later the second federal bellwether went to trial in Charlotte, North Carolina. Abrams, London, and Luhana oversaw it as co-leads; William Smith of Anapol Weiss was co-lead trial counsel, with Sejal Brahmbhatt and John Boundas of Williams Hart & Boundas. Before trial Breyer ruled that Uber qualifies as a common carrier under North Carolina law and so owed a “heightened, non-delegable duty to provide a safe ride,” a duty it could not hand off to its drivers. The jury found Uber legally responsible for the driver who had grabbed Brianna Mensing’s upper thigh during a ride on March 26, 2019. The co-leads called the verdict “a clear signal that Uber cannot escape responsibility when its drivers assault the passengers who trust it.”

Ninety-Nine Years

In late June 2026 Uber changed how it screens drivers in the United States. Its checks on new drivers, and its annual rescreening of existing ones, would now trace a driver’s Social Security number back ninety-nine years instead of seven. Violent felonies, among them armed robbery, aggravated assault, child abuse, strangulation, and stalking, would disqualify a driver even when the conviction was more than seven years old; Uber already barred drivers convicted of sexual assault and other sexual offenses. The plaintiffs wanted to know why Uber had waited. Magistrate Judge Lisa J. Cisneros allowed discovery into whether the new checks could have been put in place earlier, and in September Breyer upheld her order over Uber’s objection.

The third federal bellwether, in Austin, Texas, turned on a background check. The plaintiff, a woman suing as Jane Doe, alleged that failures in Uber’s screening had put a dangerous driver on the platform before he assaulted her during a 2020 ride; her lawyers alleged that Uber’s 2020 check on him had missed a sexual-assault charge pending since 2017 and a 2018 warrant for his arrest. A jury later convicted him, and he was sentenced to eleven years in prison. During jury selection Uber stipulated that it would not contest that the assault occurred. It settled the case in early October 2026, less than forty-eight hours after the jury was chosen and on the eve of opening statements. “Uber chose to resolve this case rather than let a jury hear the evidence,” Abrams and her co-leads said.

The co-leads said Uber “has begun to make changes to its safety practices because of this multi-district litigation and because survivors like Jane Doe refused to stay silent.” “Those changes come far too late for the thousands of passengers who have already been assaulted and irreparably harmed.” Breyer had by then urged Uber to consider a settlement covering the entire litigation, and in September the court appointed a settlement master. In July, Uber had told the court that 972 of the federal claims were subject to pending settlement agreements. More than 4,400 claims were pending in the federal litigation, and no settlement covering all of them had been announced. “With approximately 5,000 survivors seeking justice,” the co-leads said, “we hope this is a sign that Uber is finally willing to come to the table on behalf of all survivors.”

Off the App

In federal court, Lyft was still defending its cases one at a time. On January 10, 2024, Abrams sued Lyft in San Francisco for Tabatha Means, a Florida woman who said that the Lyft driver who picked her up one night in April 2019, after her former husband ordered the ride from a bar and left, repeatedly raped her, and that she became pregnant and gave birth to his son. Genetic testing indicated with near-total certainty that the driver was the father. “I had never met that man before in my life,” Means said.

Lyft said the assault “did not take place on the Lyft platform while using the Lyft app” and instead “involved a separate trip arranged between the individuals involved,” hours after the official ride. Abrams released the Lyft receipt, which showed an eleven-minute ride shortly after midnight, from a residential area to a street of restaurants and bars. It did not show the whole ride, she said; the driver had likely ended the trip in the app soon after Means got into the car. “This incident absolutely involved a trip booked through the Lyft App, and Lyft’s attempt to deflect liability is a perfect example of its bad faith handling of this crisis,” Abrams said. Means had tried mediation before she sued. She and Abrams asked Lyft to fingerprint its drivers, to interview them “either in person or through online platforms such as Skype or Zoom,” to train them on their conduct with riders, and to put cameras in its cars that keep their recordings.

The Lyft Docket

By early 2026 seventeen Lyft suits were pending in ten federal districts, and a plaintiff asked the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to bring them together. Lyft opposed it. Riders, Lyft argued, should bring their claims in the California coordinated proceeding, which had been running for more than five years and already included claims from other states. On February 5, 2026, the Panel answered that even if one state proceeding were the most efficient course, it “cannot require these or any future plaintiffs to file in California state court.” It sent the cases to Judge Rita F. Lin in San Francisco as In re: Lyft, Inc. Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation, MDL No. 3171. Lin had never presided over an MDL; the Panel said it was “confident that Judge Lin will steer this litigation on an efficient and prudent course.”

In late March 2026 Lin appointed three co-lead counsel: Abrams, Luhana, and Aimee H. Wagstaff. She named Abrams plaintiffs’ liaison counsel as well. “I think it’s a great team,” Lin said. She set the appointments to run for a year, with extensions available, and told the parties to begin discovery without waiting for a consolidated complaint. “I just don’t see a reason to wait,” she said.

By September the federal Lyft docket held 132 cases, and more than two thousand were pending in the California coordinated proceeding. None has yet been tried to a jury. Case-specific fact discovery for the first group of Lyft bellwether cases is to be completed by December 10, 2027, and the first trial is not expected before mid-2028. Abrams represents about a thousand people suing Uber and Lyft.

The questions the Panel found common to every Lyft case include whether the company failed to screen and background-check its drivers properly and whether it failed to adopt standard safety measures such as video and audio surveillance, two of the three things Abrams’s client from New Orleans asked of Lyft in September 2019.