Uber Australia fires Melbourne driver after verbally harassing lesbian couple

An Uber driver in Melbourne has been sacked by the ridesharing company for hurling homophobic abuse at a lesbian couple over the weekend. The unnamed driver was recorded calling Lucy Thomas and her partner Chelsea Lang “fa-----“ and demanding they get out of his vehicle.

On Saturday, Thomas and Lang were harassed by their Uber driver after they asked him not to use the word “fa----.” Thomas told Junkee that the verbal abuse started when she and Lang were discussing AFL. The Uber driver then started saying how football was terrible and that AFL was for “fa-----.”

“He just kept talking about fa-----,” Thomas said. She started recording their conversation when the driver became “physically threatening and aggressive” towards Lang despite their calm demeanour.

“It was super messed up because she wasn’t even the one challenging him. He became quite aggressive and physically threatening and he just kept calling her a fa----.’ He was looking at us through the rear view mirror, saying, ‘Oh you must be gay – why would you care about being called a fa----?’ And that’s when he realised that we were actually together,” Thomas recalled.

In the recording, the driver can be heard telling the woman that he could do whatever he wanted as long he was prepared to suffer the consequences.

“Are you going to give me a one rating and make a complaint? And when I write my report about two fa----- who do not like being called fa-----, then what are they going to say?” the driver challenged them before telling them he didn’t have a clue and he didn’t care of the consequences.

He then demanded they get out of his car or he’d drag them out and call the police.

Thomas posted the recording on Twitter, and Uber Australia immediately reached out to her. She was pleased to learn that the company had sacked the driver, but she was still sceptical of Uber’s process of handling complaints.

As Junkee noted, Uber is not obligated to provide driver information to the police, and the police need a court order to obtain the driver’s name. Thomas, the co-founder of anti-bullying organisation Project RockIt, was also told she would not be informed of the outcome of her complaint.

“It’s skewed in favour not of the person making the complaint, but protecting the person being complained about,” she said. “I understand the basic principles of privacy, but this still involves contacting the driver and telling him there has been a complaint made about him, and he knows my address. He was provoked by having his behaviour challenged at the time, so I don’t know what’s going to happen with the report.”

Thomas has also reported the incident to the police.

Last month, the Victorian Government formally apologised to gay people for the historic anti-homosexual laws. Premier Daniel Andrews asked members of the LGBTI community to hold their partner’s hand in public “with pride and defiance.”