An Uber Driver Who Threatened A Same-Sex Couple In Melbourne Has Been Given The Sack
We spoke to passenger Lucy Thomas about her "pretty fucked" experience on Saturday night.
On Saturday night in Melbourne, an Uber driver threatened and verbally harassed two young women after they asked him not to use the word “faggot”. Lucy Thomas, co-founder of well known anti-bullying organisation Project Rockit, uploaded a recording of some of the abuse which got worse when the driver realised that she and another female passenger were gay.
When we spoke to Thomas this morning, she said that the aggressive language began when she and her girlfriend were discussing AFL. “We were talking about watching the football on the weekend and that’s when the Uber driver started saying that football is terrible and AFL is for faggots and how they just jump around touching each other,” she says. “He just kept talking about ‘faggots’.”
According to Thomas, before she started recording, the Uber driver was “physically threatening and aggressive” towards she and her girlfriend, despite their calm demeanour. In the recording, Thomas refers to other racial and homophobic slurs the driver used during the journey.
When Thomas asked the driver, who was in his fifties, to stop using the word ‘faggot’, he turned around to the passengers and asked if they were gay. “That’s when the mood shifted and he got super aggressive, basically towards [my girlfriend, Chelsea],” Thomas says.
“It was super messed up because she wasn’t even the one challenging him. He became quite aggressive and physically threatening and he just kept calling her a ‘faggot’. He was looking at us through the rear view mirror saying, ‘Oh you must be gay — why would you care about being called a faggot?’ and that’s when he realised that we were actually together.”
Once they arrived at their destination, Thomas began recording the driver’s rant because she was worried that they wouldn’t be able to report the incident to Uber without proof (she had heard that due to their privacy policies, “it can be very difficult to have an outcome”). Although Uber contacted Thomas immediately after she made a complaint, they told her that she would not be informed of the outcome of her report, a strange lack of transparency for a company that advertises its accessibility.
After being threatened by our @uber driver, my girlfriend and I stood up to him and recorded it. LISTEN: https://t.co/5IIdpBLSHJ #homophobia
— Lucy Thomas (@lucylockit_) June 5, 2016
“It’s skewed in favour not of the person making the complaint but protecting the person being complained about,” Thomas says. “I understand the basic principles of privacy, but this still involves contacting the driver and telling him there has been a complaint made about him, and he knows my address. He was provoked by having his behaviour challenged at the time, so I don’t know what’s going to happen with the report.”
Apparently Uber is not obligated to provide driver information to the police in this case — the police have to go to court in order to obtain an employee’s name.
Uber has supplied Junkee with a statement about the incident, saying that: “Uber does not tolerate any form of discrimination, and we have been in contact this rider to offer our support. As soon as we were made aware of this incident, we removed the driver from the platform”. Thomas and her partner had not been informed that the driver had lost their job, saying: “Well it’s their policy not to tell me that”.
THEY SACKED HIM ???✨ thanks @UberAus
— Lucy Thomas (@lucylockit_) June 6, 2016
Thomas says she is pleased that the matter has been dealt with, but is still incredulous that their process of handling complaints is kept in the dark — particulalry when Uber is considered by many to be a safer transport option.
“When you think about it in the basic sense of someone being harmed and having the courage to speak report the incident, in any other setting online or offline there is a degree of expectation that there’s transparency about that process. I take Uber all the time because it does feel safe, and to me this is just a big glitch,” she says.
“To know that there is no systematic process after doing the right thing, is pretty fucked.”
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Image supplied by Lucy Thomas.