A woman without a mask who coughed at an Uber driver in San Francisco and grabbed her cell phone with profane rage admitted she was disrespectful, but said the situation could have been avoided. (Watch the video below.)
The video of the confrontation went viral while the police investigated. No arrests were made until Tuesday, police told HuffPost. The names of the passengers were not released.
According to police, the driver picked up the three women on Sunday, but ended the trip shortly afterwards because one refused to wear a mask. It was then that the confrontation broke out, with one of the passengers coughing in the driver, taking out his cell phone and taking off his mask, while the other two shouted profanity and insults.
In a social media clip seen by CBS affiliate San Francisco on Tuesday, the coughing passenger told her side of the story, minimizing her aggression. “All I did was take off the mask and cough a little,” she said.
“Okay, yes, I’m not going to lie,” she continued. “That was fucking disrespectful. I was totally wrong for that. But that could have been avoided. “
She accused the driver of trying to drop passengers off in a dangerous neighborhood. “He could have just waited and made sure we were safe,” she said.
She threatened to sue Uber, which in a statement on Monday called passenger behavior “terrible” and banned it. Then she made an impromptu endorsement of her Uber rival.
“That’s why I take Lyft!” she declared.
She doesn’t need it anymore. Lyft banished it too.
“Although this incident does not involve the Lyft platform, the unacceptable treatment of the driver in this video forced us to permanently remove the driver from the Lyft community,” the hitchhiking company said in a statement to KPIX. “Driving in a pandemic is not easy. Please wear a mask, respect each other and be a good person. “
The driver, Subhakar Khadka, said one of the women applied pepper spray to him as he exited the vehicle. Khadka, 32, from Nepal, also said that women shouted prejudiced comments because he is an immigrant.
In other videos leading up to the fight, the women refused to get out of the vehicle until another Uber arrives, and Khadka threatens to let them out “in the middle of the highway” if they don’t leave immediately, CBS noted.
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