The video showed a man walking her to her front door with his hands groping her breasts as she was struggling to walk and speak coherently.
DALLAS — A North Texas woman is preparing to sue rideshare company Lyft after claiming the company did not do enough to protect her from being assaulted by one of its drivers.
Lorin Christianson had gone out to a popular bar in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood in April 2022 to celebrate one of her coworkers. Christianson said, during that season of her life, a night out was a rarity.
“I wasn’t very social, so it was a one-off for me,” Christianson recalled. “…I went and had a blast.”
Christianson said she and her coworkers had multiple drinks and at the end of the night she was too drunk to drive home. One of her coworkers ordered a Lyft ride to take her to her home, which was less than two miles from the bar.
It wasn’t until the next morning, after waking up to a number of notifications from her doorbell camera, that Christianson would review the footage and see something that horrified her.
The video showed a man walking Christianson to her front door with his hands groping her breasts as she was struggling to walk and speak coherently. Throughout the video, Christianson can be heard asking the man who he is and who he works for. At one point, the man adamantly says he works for Lyft but continues to say he is a third-party contractor driving for the company before seeming to try to help her unlock her door.
Christianson’s neighbor can be seen on camera coming out to ask if she was OK, after the driver had parked his car in front of the neighbor’s home further down the street instead of parking outside of Christianson’s house. Her neighbor, after initially checking in, eventually came back to her home a few minutes later and asked the driver to leave.
“I am so lucky,” Christianson said. “Thank God for my neighbor. I could be dead. If he had gotten into my house…I couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine. It feels gross.”
Christianson said she almost discounted the incident altogether until a male co-worker happened to walk by her the next day at work while she was re-watching the footage on her phone. He urged her to report the incident to the police.
“I really had no recollection of it happening until seeing the videos. My first reaction was embarrassment. I thought I shouldn’t have gotten that drunk…it was my fault,” Christianson said.
She filed a report with Dallas Police that day.
“I have video. I want to make a change,” she said. “I had to call my daughter and tell my daughter that I was drunk. God bless my daughter…she said mom it wasn’t your fault…you did the right thing…you were protecting yourself and potentially other people.”
In addition to filing a police report, Christianson worked with the woman who called the ride for her to contact Lyft to report the incident, requesting the driver’s license plate number for the police report because the woman’s account deleted that information after the ride was complete. She said she felt dismissed by the company’s response.
Messages shared with WFAA show the person messaging on Lyft’s behalf asked what part of Christianson’s body was touched inappropriately before going on to share the link with instructions to requesting data from Lyft, writing that the incident had be investigated and that “necessary actions” had been taken and refunding the $8.69 that was charged for the ride.
Christianson said her decision to pursue legal action against the company comes down to wanting more accountability for keeping riders safe, including riders who may be intoxicated, and trying to take proper steps to secure safe transportation. She also wants there to be help for riders who may be assaulted and need support from Lyft to seek justice.
“Better vetting? Maybe when you report something happen, maybe something happen to the driver. It’s unclear at this point if anything happened to driver. Is he still driving? I don’t know. Lyft basically said, ‘we’re so sorry…here’s a refund.'”
In a statement to WFAA, a Lyft spokesperson said:
“The behavior described has no place in the Lyft community or our society. We take reports of sexual assault very seriously, and when incidents such as these are reported to us, our trained team takes immediate action to investigate and works with local law enforcement so that appropriate actions can be taken. As soon as we were made aware of this incident, we deactivated the driver and we stand ready to assist law enforcement in any investigation.”
Christianson’s attorney, Brooke Cohen, said she meets with clients with cases like these often.
“Women are sexually assaulted in rideshares more than you would like to believe,” Cohen said.
Her firm, Cohen-Hirsch, currently represents more than 100 people suing rideshare companies after being sexually assaulted by drivers.
“What we’re trying to do and what we’re hoping to do is have cameras in all of the cars…where there’s at least some kind of deterrent,” she said.
As for any criminal charges, the man who is seen in the video was never identified or arrested when Christianson filed her initial police report in 2022 citing a miscommunication in getting the footage to the department. DPD confirmed the case has been suspended pending any new leads.
Cohen said she hopes to get the driver’s information through court proceedings once she files a lawsuit in Christianson’s case this month.