As Uber Prepares to Go Public, Its Lead Lawyer Races to Clean It Up

Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer and a former Justice Department official, is navigating the ride-hailing giant’s numerous legal issues.

Not long after Tony West joined Uber as chief legal officer in November 2017, he began a delicate task: crafting a transparency report to quantify how many people had been sexually assaulted during Uber rides.

The effort was part of Mr. West’s mandate to help clean up Uber, which had been grappling with legal entanglements, safety issues and a problematic workplace culture.

So Mr. West directed Uber employees to work with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, a nonprofit, to review 221 instances of sexual misconduct that occurred during rides in 2017. He listened to customer service calls, including one in which an Uber driver said he had raped a passenger. And the company began auditing past complaints to determine whether it had evidence of old assaults.

Nearly 16 months later, the work is far from over. “This is a hugely underreported set of situations,” Mr. West, 53, said. “Those numbers, as we continue to count them, they actually might go up.” read more »

Ted Baker founder resigns after allegations of sexual misconduct

Ray Kelvin, chief executive of the high-end British fashion line Ted Baker, resigned on Monday, months after allegations that he made sexually suggestive comments toward employees and was prone to inappropriate hugging and touching at work.

Kelvin took a voluntary leave of absence in December after more than 200 employees released a petition saying Ted Baker’s HR department ignored earlier reports of harassment. The allegations spurred an independent committee to investigate. read more »

Rise in sexual abuse, harassment of female cadets at Coast Guard Academy

Reports of unwanted sexual contact – behavior that ranges from unwanted touching to rape – from female cadets at New London’s Coast Guard Academy rose from 8 percent in 2016 to 12.4 percent last year.

And 45 percent of female cadets at the academy said they were sexual harassed last year, up from 36 percent in the previous report released in 2016.

Those were the preliminary results of the 2018 Service Academy Gender Relations Survey, which will be released in its final form in April. read more »