She should get home safely. Her boyfriend therefore ordered her an Uber. But the danger was driving: An Uber driver sexually harassed Lona H. (30). But for the public prosecutor’s office there is no sufficient suspicion of a crime.
Retrospect: On a Saturday evening in June, Lona, a Berlin woman, is at a company party on Warschauer Street with her boyfriend. Around midnight she wants to go home, her boyfriend calls her an Uber – because her mobile phone has just been stolen. When she gets into the passenger seat, she cries about it.
“At that moment he probably thought: just the perfect victim,” she tells the newspaper BILD. The Uber taxi is supposed to take the 30-year-old to her flat in Wilmersdorf.
At the beginning, the driver chats with her and tells her that he is originally from Lebanon and doesn’t like Berlin. He has been driving Uber for about two years now. Suddenly, the 55-year-old becomes silent and serious. At a red light he says, “I’m going to turn off the Uber app now. I need to get gas, we’re not allowed to do that.”
The Uber app also tracks the GPS signal. Lona waits, checks that the doors are locked. The car stops in a dark corner behind a Total petrol station on the Tempelhofer bank.
“Then he put his hands on mine and stroked my neck and tried to pull my head towards him,” says Lona. She keeps calm, says she just wants to go to the toilet for a moment and comes back.
Instead, the escape: Lona runs to the night counter and asks the petrol station employee to call the police. The officers catch the driver and question him. The statements coincide, he confirms the touching, but then claims “that he just wanted to comfort her” because she had lost her mobile phone.
Then, in September, the scandalous statement: The public prosecutor’s office discontinued the investigation according to § 170 paragraph 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure – no sufficient suspicion.
The reason: “The stroking of your hand and the touching of your neck are initially not clearly sex-related.” And further: “Even if he wanted to pull you towards his head, it is not sufficiently certain that this was intended to result in sexual intrusiveness.”
BILD asks what this contact was supposed to result in instead. According to the prosecution, this was only a “preparatory act”. “Such an attempt at sexual harassment has not been criminalised by the legislator,” the public prosecutor’s office states.
Unbelievable: In order for the perpetrator to get a punishment, Lona would have had to take the chance!
She says: “That was the first time I went to the police, and actually I had confidence. I still felt I had to be raped first to report it.”
According to the public prosecutor’s office, the young woman could appeal against the dismissal of the case – but given the legal situation cited, this would not be very successful.
At least there is a small consolation for Lona: she will never encounter this man in an Uber taxi again. And he won’t be able to harass other women there either.
A spokesperson for the Uber company told BILD: “In consultation with the driver’s employer, we deactivated the driver on our platform immediately after the incident was reported.