Content warning: sexual assault & rape mentions
Uber announced Wednesday that it had fired senior executive Eric Alexander amidst an ongoing investigation of the rape of a passenger by her Uber driver in Delhi, India. According to The New York Times, Alexander was not on any sort of watch list to be terminated, but after he “obtained the medical records” of the woman involved in the case and it began to seek media coverage of them, the company had to take action.
“Both Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, and Emil Michael, the company’s senior vice president of business, had read and discussed the woman’s medical records with Mr. Alexander at length,” according to The New York Times. For some reason these men didn’t find their actions heinous in this instance. What did they have to gain exactly by seeing those records?
Alexander apparently thought the rape case was just a ploy by a competitor to ruin Uber’s business in India. “[Alexander] was let go only after reporters asked Uber about his actions, despite several high-level executives having knowledge of the matter,” The New York Times reports. And people think that rape culture is a doesn’t exist.
It seems the transportation and food delivery titan is constantly in the news these days—and never for good reasons. Just yesterday, news broke that 20 people at Uber had been fired as a result of a wider investigation of company practice with regard to sexual assault.
The week before, a teenage girl stabbed her Uber driver to death in Illinois, and earlier this year CEO Travis Kalanick had to cancel plans to become one of President Donald Trump’s economic advisers after #DeleteUber trended on social media.
I personally deleted my Uber app after the Trump situation. I’m a devoted Lyft user now, and there are plenty of alternatives — consider moving your hard-earned money to Safr, a ridesharing company “built for and powered by women” or Moovn, a black-owned transportation service.