Uber Retracts Rebuttal to Buzzfeed's Report On Car Service's Rape Claims

As it turns out, Uber’s explanation is fiction, something Buzzfeed learned and confirmed with Zendesk before the car service sent a corrective note. Nonetheless, on March 7, around 1:10 p.m., Buzzfeed received the following update from Uber:

“*An earlier version of this post stated that ‘Any email address or rider/driver last name that contains the letters R, A, P, E consecutively (for example, Don Draper) are included. After analyzing the data, we found more than 11,000 rider names and 17,500 rider emails with the letters ‘rape.’’

Zendesk, one of our customer support platforms, contacted us to say that their search tool would not return a name such a ‘Don Draper’ when searching for the word ‘rape.’ However, such a search would (and did) return names that start with the letters R, A, P, E — even if the ticket itself had nothing to do with a claim of rape. We apologize to Zendesk for using an imperfect (and fictitious) example that doesn’t accurately represent their search functionality. This does not impact our analysis of the overall numbers, which was based on a manual review of these tickets rather than a simple keyword search.”

According to Buzzfeed, Zendesk contacted Uber regarding the falsity of their explanation after Buzzfeed reached out to them to clarify the system’s functionality. And whatever elliptical logic the car share service provides, the fact remains that women have reported being raped and assaulted by their Uber drivers many, many times.

Image via Getty.