NO FREE RIDES FOR ACCOUNTABILITY: Willford Leads 275+ State Lawmakers Calling on Congress to Protect Victims of Rideshare Sexual Assault

DENVER, CO – Colorado State Representative Jenny Willford today organized a letter to U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson demanding that Congress strike an amendment from the BUILD America 250 Act that would undermine recently enacted rideshare accountability and safety laws. 

Willford, who survived a rideshare sexual assault and sponsored Colorado’s landmark rideshare safety law, signed on to the letter with more than 275 women state legislators from 42 states and one territory that outlines the harm of a narrowly adopted amendment. 

In the letter, the lawmakers warn that the amendment “...would make it far harder and, in the cases that matter most, effectively impossible to hold multibillion-dollar rideshare corporations accountable in court when a passenger or a driver is sexually assaulted on its platform.” 

If adopted, the amendment would also preempt the state safety laws enacted this year, including Colorado’s HB26-1424 and Virginia’s HB-1273 and HB-1469, which strengthened driver verification and cracked down on impersonation following documented assaults.

“Two years ago, a rideshare driver sexually assaulted me within view of my own home. I know exactly what is at stake when a corporation sells you safety and then walks away,” said Colorado State Representative Jenny Willford, who wrote and passed Colorado’s landmark rideshare safety law this year and organized the letter. “Survivors fought for our day in court, and we are winning, but Congress wants to change the rules. This amendment is a permission slip for rideshare companies to continue their limited accountability and safety measures that place riders and drivers in dangerous situations. Our coalition is vast, but one thing we all can agree on is that no corporation gets a free ride from accountability. Speaker Johnson must strike Amendment 041.”

“In Virginia, we did the work. We held the hearings, we listened to survivors, and we passed real protections  and the Governor signed them,” said Virginia Delegate Jackie Glass, who passed rideshare safety legislation in the Commonwealth this year. “Now, a single amendment, slipped into a highway bill at two in the morning, would override what our states just built. State legislatures must keep the power to see a danger in our communities and act on it. Congress should be raising the bar on safety -  not cutting the floor out from under us.”

The lawmakers wrote that if the amendment remains, it “would extend the vicarious-liability shield of the Graves Amendment to app-based rideshare and delivery companies…”. This essentially eliminates all opportunities for survivors to seek justice. 

In addition to this letter, on June 10th, 128 members of Congress, led by the Democratic Women’s Caucus, sent Speaker Johnson their own letter calling for the provision’s removal.

State and federal lawmakers are urging the House to strike Amendment 041 before the BUILD America 250 Act reaches the floor. The letter is below and attached. The list of signatories is available here. 

“June 15, 2026

The Honorable Mike Johnson

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives

H-232, The Capitol

Washington, DC 20515

Re: Strike Amendment 041 (the Fong Amendment) from H.R. 8870, the BUILD

America 250 Act

Dear Speaker Johnson:

We write as women who serve in state legislatures across the country to urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to strike Amendment 041, the Fong Amendment, before the BUILD America 250 Act (H.R. 8870) is brought to the House Floor. The amendment, adopted in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee by a narrow 35–30 vote, would extend the vicarious-liability shield of the Graves Amendment to app-based rideshare and delivery companies. In plain terms, it would make it far harder and, in the cases that matter most, effectively impossible to hold multibillion-dollar rideshare corporations accountable in court when a passenger or a driver is sexually assaulted on its platform.

We hold different views on many things. On this we do not differ: under no circumstances should any corporation be shielded from liability for sexual assault. The scale of the harm is not speculative. 

In August 2025, a New York Times investigation by Emily Steel, drawing on sealed court records, reported that from 2017 through 2022 some 400,181 Uber trips in the United States generated reports of sexual assault or sexual misconduct, an average of roughly one report every eight minutes. That figure dwarfs the 12,522 incidents the company had publicly disclosed for the same period. The reporting also documented that the company developed safety tools its own experts believed could reduce assaults, and declined to fully deploy them.

The courts are now reckoning with that record. More than 3,000 passengers from roughly states have brought claims consolidated in In re: Uber Technologies, Inc., Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation (MDL No. 3084) in the Northern District of California. In February 2026, the first bellwether jury awarded a survivor $8.5 million, finding the driver was acting as the company’s apparent agent. That same month, a federal panel consolidated sexual-assault cases against Lyft into a multidistrict litigation before the same court. State and federal officials have opened their own inquiries, including the New Jersey Attorney General and a U.S. House oversight subcommittee.

These numbers represent real people across the country: a passenger in New York fell asleep after a night out and woke to her driver in the back seat, with a hospital later confirming a sexual assault; a rider in Texas whose roughly twenty-minute trip became a multi-hour ordeal ending in rape; women in Utah and California subjected to unwanted touching and worse; and, in Denver, a man kidnapped a dozen women and sexually assaulted two before his conviction on thirty counts.

The danger runs in both directions: investigators and survivors’ advocates emphasize that this crisis harms passengers and drivers alike. Drivers, too, have been assaulted by strangers an algorithm placed in their cars with little to no safety restrictions.

Proponents describe Amendment 041 as a narrow fix for "abusive litigation" and insurance costs. There is nothing narrow about the amendment, as it will serve to essentially eliminate Uber and Lyft's accountability for sexual assault. We urge you to look past the framing to the mechanics. The amendment imports the Graves Amendment model (49 U.S.C. § 30106) which strips vicarious liability from rental car companies. There is a critical qualitative difference between rental car companies and rideshare companies. Vicarious liability and common-carrier duty are precisely the theories on which survivors hold companies answerable, because with rideshare companies it is the company, not the individual driver, that controls the platform, runs the background check, dispatches the ride, and sets the safety rules. Stripping those theories away does not trim a frivolous claim; it forecloses the meritorious ones. An Arizona jury that held Uber accountable did so on exactly the agency theory this amendment is designed to extinguish.

We would ask the provision’s defenders a simple question: can they name any other industry in America that Congress has granted immunity from liability for sexual assault committed through its service? We are aware of none. The Graves Amendment itself expressly preserves liability for an owner’s own negligence or criminal wrongdoing, and it concerns vehicle crashes, not sexual violence. Common carriers such as airlines, buses, and taxis have long owed their passengers a heightened duty of care, not a shield from their own responsibility. Carving out a singular exception for the most powerful platforms in the mobility economy would be without precedent.

This amendment would also run directly against Congress’s own recent and bipartisan actions. Just four years ago, in the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2022, the first substantive amendment to the Federal Arbitration Act in roughly a century, Congress decided that survivors of sexual assault must be free to bring their claims in open court, rather than be forced into private arbitration. Amendment 041 would take back with one hand what that law extended with the other. It allows survivors to reach the courthouse, only to bar the door once they are inside. Congress should not, in the space of a single, unrelated transportation bill, reverse a protection it so recently and deliberately enacted.

The amendment would also override the considered work of state legislatures responding to documented harms in our own communities. This year alone, Virginia enacted HB 1273 and HB 1469, signed by Governor Spanberger, tightening driver background checks and identity verification and requiring in-app recording options. And in Colorado, after a multiyear effort led by a legislator who was sexually assaulted by a Lyft driver, the General Assembly passed HB26-1424, with the Governor expected to sign it into law. That measure cracks down on driver impersonation and account-sharing, and strengthens the state’s ability to hold companies accountable. A federal vicarious-liability shield would preempt precisely the accountability these laws were written to secure.

State legislatures must retain the ability to identify a problem in their communities and to enact meaningful, responsive policy. That is the constitutional design, and it is a practical one: these harms look different in Denver than in Norfolk, and the people closest to them are best positioned to respond. It is telling and deeply troubling that when Uber and Lyft could not prevail in state legislatures, city councils, or in the courtroom, they turned to Congress to change the rules for everyone at once.

This matters all the more because of what these companies have spent years, and billions of dollars, telling the public about themselves. Uber markets itself as a safe ride home and has built campaigns around the image of friends out for the night and the responsible choice not to drive. It has partnered with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, with Feeding America, and with the American Red Cross, and Lyft has done the same. Companies that sell safety and positive community impacts as their products, that control the platform, take payment for the ride, pay the driver, and shape the marketing, cannot credibly disclaim responsibility when that promise fails catastrophically. It is unacceptable to sell a promise of safety and then turn away when the stakes are highest.

Uber tells the world that its first value is to “Do the right thing. Period.” We want to take the company at its word. Doing the right thing here is straightforward: it means not seeking, and not quietly accepting, a federal shield from accountability for sexual assault. To our knowledge, since Amendment 041 was adopted, neither Uber nor Lyft has publicly asked Congress to remove it. Their silence prompts the only question that matters: do the right thing for whom?

We respectfully and urgently ask you to strike Amendment 041 from H.R. 8870 before the bill reaches the House Floor. Survivors deserve their day in court. States deserve the authority to protect their residents. And no corporation, however large, should be permitted to write itself out of responsibility for the gravest harms committed on the platform it controls.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter.”