28-year-old Lyft driver Kevyn Rojas has been charged with rape of a female passenger whom he was scheduled to take to her hotel. The female passenger, too intoxicated to fight him off, was raped in the back of his vehicle.
Rojas made his initial court appearance on Wednesday, when a judge set his bond at $500,000 and ordered him to turn in his Colombian and American passports.
Details of the Case
According to an arrest report, the alleged rape took place on February 27, when a female tourist visiting from Texas had gone to a bar in Wynwood with a friend. The victim said she repeatedly told Rojas to stop, but she was too intoxicated to physically fight him off.
Following the alleged rape, police said Rojas drove the woman back to her hotel, where she immediately called 911 to report the crime.
Lyft and Uber Rape Cases
Rideshare companies such as Lyft and Uber have been the subject of a number of disturbing allegations concerning physical and sexual attacks on their customers over the last few years. Lyft received more than 4,000 reports of sexual assaults during rides from 2017 to 2019, the company revealed in a new report, including 1,800 reports in 2019 alone.
In a class action lawsuit in 2018, nine women accused Uber of attempting to silence their reports of sexual assault by forcing them to individually settle their cases through arbitration, a private process that often results in confidentiality agreements. Uber was fined $59 million by a California regulator in 2020 for failing to comply with a request for data on sexual assault incidents in its vehicles.
Lyft was sued by more than a dozen women in 2019 who alleged the company had failed to enact basic safety measures that would have prevented the alleged assaults. The women also said the company.
If you have faced a similar situation, Rheingold Giuffra Ruffo Plotkin & Hellman LLP can help. Call our NYC Sexual Assault Lawyers today for a confidential consultation.
