An woman in Australia has alleged that the driver of an Uber she was travelling in, masturbated inside the car while going to her destination, a Yahoo News report said.
26-year-old Taylor Pimlott had booked an Uber from CBD in Adelaide to Campebelltown in October last year when she observed something while seated in the backseat, diverting her attention from her phone.
Pimlott said that she saw the driver take his "pants down" and saw a "subtle hand gesture".
"Usually when someone takes their pants down, they ruffle down a bit or something. I saw none of that, I just saw this subtle hand gesture. I could see clearly that he (the Uber driver) had his penis out and he was masturbating," the woman told Yahoo News.
The woman said that her mind was cluttered with hundreds of thoughts after watching the scene in the car and feared getting sexually assaulted inside the vehicle.
"There was a part of me that thought, 'Oh god, I could die, I could be raped, this man could touch me'. My brain was frozen and my heart was pounding... I was petrified," she said.
The woman decided it would be best for her to behave as if nothing happened, but admitted to have felt "ashamed" in not making a fuss out of the issue. "I felt if I made a huge fuss about this I think that would put me in more danger. I had to be polite. I felt ashamed," she said.
The woman, eventually, raised a complaint with Uber about the driver's behavior inside the car, who removed his "partner’s access to the app", permanently.
"What’s been reported has no place in the Uber community or anywhere else. As soon as we were notified of this report, we removed the driver partner’s access to the app immediately and permanently."
"We continue to work to build cutting-edge technology and features to help improve safety for riders and driver-partners on the app, such as the Safety Toolkit, the emergency assistance button and Share my Trip feature. Trips on the Uber platform are not anonymous and all trips are GPS tracked in real time," an Uber spokesperson said in a statement to Yahoo.
Following the incident, the woman decided never to use an Uber to go anywhere. "I thought I was okay. But then I realised like, 'Oh, hey, I can't really leave my house without being petrified. I'm never using Uber again," she said.
This is not the first instance where a woman has found an Uber driver masturbating, while seated in the front seat.
In June 2022, a woman claimed that Uber had cancelled her account after she had filmed a driver masturbating and added that the person had filed a complaint against her, before she could inform the rider app.
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