Yes, survivors of rideshare sexual assault in California can generally sue both the driver and the company, such as Uber or Lyft. Claims against the company commonly rest on negligent hiring, retention and supervision. For assault on or after age 18, the deadline is generally the later of 10 years from the assault or three years from discovering a resulting injury.
Yes. If you were sexually assaulted by a rideshare driver in California, the law generally allows you to bring a civil lawsuit against the driver and, in many cases, against the company that put the driver on the road, such as Uber or Lyft. A civil claim seeks compensation for the harm done. It is separate from any criminal case and does not depend on one.
This article explains how these claims work, what the company's responsibility can rest on, the deadlines, and what the civil process involves. It does not ask you to decide anything.
Yes, You Can Sue a Rideshare Company: Here Is What That Actually Means
Two separate legal systems can respond to a sexual assault, and they do different things. A criminal prosecution is brought by the State of California, through a district attorney, against the person accused. The survivor is a witness in that case, not a party, and the possible outcome is punishment such as jail or probation. A civil lawsuit is brought by the survivor, who is called the plaintiff, against the people or companies responsible. Its purpose is compensation, meaning money paid for the harm caused. Our page on civil and criminal sexual abuse cases covers that distinction in more depth.
In a rideshare case, a civil claim can name more than one defendant (the person or company being sued). The driver can be sued individually. The rideshare company can also be sued, on the theory that its own choices about who it allowed to drive, what it knew, and how it protected passengers contributed to what happened.
Uber and Lyft are the two largest platforms in California. Other app-based ride services operate under the same state framework, so the same basic analysis generally applies to them.
The word "sexual assault" in a civil case is not a judgment about how serious something was or whether it "counts." California's adult sexual assault deadline statute defines the term by reference to a list of crimes in the Penal Code, including attempts and assaults with intent to commit them. Whether a particular experience fits a legal definition is a question for a confidential conversation with an attorney. Unwanted conduct that falls outside that definition may still support other civil claims.
If the person was under 18 at the time, a different California statute, the one governing childhood sexual abuse, sets the deadlines, and those rules are generally more generous. Everything below about adult deadlines applies to assault that happened on or after a person's 18th birthday.
How California Law Defines Rideshare Company Liability
Liability means legal responsibility to pay for harm. A company is rarely the one who commits an assault, so a claim against Uber or Lyft has to rest on a theory that connects the company's own conduct, or its legal relationship with the driver, to the harm. Courts continue to evaluate each of the theories below, and none produces an automatic result.
Negligent hiring and negligent retention
Negligence is a failure to use reasonable care that causes harm.
Negligent hiring is the claim that a company failed to use reasonable care in screening someone before giving them access to the public. In the rideshare setting, the questions usually concern background checks: what the company checked, what it overlooked, and whether a reasonable screening process would have flagged the driver.
Negligent retention is the claim that a company learned, or should have learned, that someone posed a danger and kept them on anyway. Here the focus shifts to what happened after the driver was approved: prior passenger complaints, safety reports, deactivations and reactivations, and how the company responded to warning signs.
Closely related is negligent supervision, the claim that a company failed to reasonably monitor the people it put in contact with the public, which can involve how the company used the trip data, ratings and reporting tools it already controls.
The independent-contractor question
Uber and Lyft classify their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees. That classification matters because, under a long-standing legal rule, an employer can be held responsible for some acts of its employees simply because of the employment relationship. Companies generally argue that because drivers are not employees, that form of responsibility does not apply.
Assembly Bill 5 (2019), commonly called AB 5, adopted a stricter test for when a worker counts as an employee rather than an independent contractor. In 2020, California voters passed Proposition 22, which modified how those classification rules apply to app-based rideshare and delivery drivers and treats them as independent contractors for many purposes. Proposition 22 itself has been the subject of litigation.
AB 5 and Proposition 22 concern how drivers are classified, largely for wage and benefits purposes. They were not written to decide whether a company owes its passengers a duty of care. Negligent hiring, retention and supervision are claims about the company's own conduct and do not depend on the driver being an employee.
Control over the platform
A rideshare company decides who gets access to the app, how riders and drivers are matched, what the rating and reporting systems do, which safety features exist, and when a driver is removed. Plaintiffs have argued that this level of control creates duties similar to those of a business owner who controls a physical space and must take reasonable steps to keep visitors safe, often described as a premises-liability analogy. Some plaintiffs have also argued that rideshare companies function like carriers that transport the public for hire, which can carry a heightened duty of care under California law. Companies dispute both characterizations, and courts have not settled them in a single rule.
These theories focus on records the company holds and decisions it made, which is why the facts of an individual case, and what discovery reveals, carry so much weight.
What the California Litigation Landscape Looks Like
A large number of rideshare sexual assault claims have been filed, and the courts have built procedures to manage them.
In federal court, passenger sexual assault claims against Uber from around the country have been consolidated into a multidistrict litigation, usually called an MDL, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. An MDL gathers many similar cases before one federal judge for shared pretrial work, while each survivor's claim remains their own case. California state courts have also coordinated groups of rideshare sexual assault cases filed in California Superior Court. Which court a particular case belongs in depends on its facts.
On the regulatory side, Uber and Lyft are licensed in California as Transportation Network Companies, or TNCs. A TNC is the legal category for a company that uses an online app to connect passengers with drivers using their own vehicles. TNCs operate under the authority of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which sets rules for them, including requirements related to driver background checks and safety. Whether a company followed its regulatory obligations can be relevant in a civil case.
Both Uber and Lyft have published safety reports that disclose the number of sexual assault incidents reported on their platforms over certain periods. Those figures are company-disclosed data, not independent findings. This article does not report outcomes or amounts from any case, because no two cases are alike and past results do not predict a future one.
The Statute of Limitations for Sexual Assault Civil Claims in California
A statute of limitations is the deadline for filing a lawsuit. If a claim is filed after the deadline, a court will generally dismiss it. California has a general deadline for injury claims and a separate, longer one written specifically for adult sexual assault.
The general two-year rule
The general deadline for personal injury in California is found in Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1, which reads in full:
"Within two years: An action for assault, battery, or injury to, or for the death of, an individual caused by the wrongful act or neglect of another."
For sexual assault, this is usually not the end of the story.
The longer deadline for adult sexual assault
Code of Civil Procedure section 340.16 sets a longer period for sexual assault that occurred on or after the survivor's 18th birthday. Subdivision (a) provides that the time to file is "the later of the following":
"(1) Within 10 years from the date of the last act, attempted act, or assault with the intent to commit an act, of sexual assault against the plaintiff. (2) Within three years from the date the plaintiff discovers or reasonably should have discovered that an injury or illness resulted from an act, attempted act, or assault with the intent to commit an act, of sexual assault against the plaintiff."
In plain terms, a survivor generally has whichever is later: 10 years from the assault, or three years from the date they discovered, or reasonably should have discovered, that an injury or illness resulted from it. The second option is a form of the discovery rule (the law counting the clock from when a harm is recognized, not only from the date of the event).
Revival windows
A revival window is a period during which the legislature allows claims that had already expired to be filed again.
Section 340.16(b)(3), added by Assembly Bill 2777, the Sexual Abuse and Cover Up Accountability Act, revives adult sexual assault claims based on conduct that occurred on or after January 1, 2009, that "would have been barred solely because the applicable statute of limitations has or had expired." The statute states that such claims "may be commenced until December 31, 2026." It does not revive a claim that was litigated to final judgment before January 1, 2023, or a claim resolved by a written settlement agreement before that date.
California has enacted other revival provisions as well, and some earlier ones have since closed. Which deadline, if any, applies to a particular survivor depends on the date of the assault, the survivor's age at the time, when the harm was recognized, who the defendants are, and whether the claim was ever settled or decided. The California sexual abuse statute of limitations page covers the broader framework.