The Uber Cultural Defense: Driver Reportedly Insists That Woman “Asked For” Groping Due To Her Dress

botros09Uber taxi driver Ramy Botros has a curious defense after he allegedly put his hand down the shirt of a 25-year-old female customer: she was asking for it and in Egypt such assaults are considered justified for women wearing such outfits. This of course was in Orlando, but that did not seem to matter in this rather curious use of the cultural defense, something that I have discussed earlier.

The woman said that she noticed that the man was driving in an odd pattern and back tracking while telling her how attractive and pretty she was. He then allegedly stopped his Honda Civic and started groping her breasts.

Botros, an Egyptian immigrant, reportedly dismissed her objections and said that the fondling was harmless. She later picked him out of a photo lineup. Police say that Botros said that it was not his fault because she was “wearing a revealing shirt with no bra” and that, in Egypt, if a “girl like her . . . means she asking for that.”

Botros was only charged with a misdemeanor and released on a $500 bond. However, Uber has suspended his driver’s account. It appears that the company does not subscribe to the same cultural defense theory.

Source: Orlando Sentinel

48 thoughts on “The Uber Cultural Defense: Driver Reportedly Insists That Woman “Asked For” Groping Due To Her Dress”

  1. Oh no! Jabbari is set to be executed tomorrow morning! She’s the girl who was sentenced to death for the murder of an Iranian intelligence agent. She claimed he tried to rape her after luring her, a decorator, to his office for a job. Chemical analysis of her drink verified it contained a date rape drug. He was a large man, but he inexplicably died from a small wound in the shoulder from her little pocket knife. I smell a rat, but Iran has refused to investigate further.

    She has only hours left to live.

    If she had been raped, she would have been killed as an adulteress. Now she’s being killed as a murderer.

    http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/09/29/iran-set-to-execute-woman-accused-killing-attempted-rapist/?intcmp=latestnews

  2. Pete- Perfect observation! I am not certain that the now ex-Uber driver ever asserted his Muslim faith as an excuse, but did assert his cultural influence. He is far off base, of course. Just as misogynistic entertainers, religious leaders, writers, politicians, sports figures, etc. in our own culture are far off base in asserting their right to feel up a woman because of her outfit. He deserved a far tougher sentence. (I avoided the word stiffer, because…well……)

  3. Its all a matter of self control and he obviously is deficient in this area. It should not matter if the lady were topless. Fired from Uber is a good start. Maybe a little probationary community service would be in order, perhaps ending in a nudist resort.

  4. Well it’s tedious to constantly hear the complaints about silly things like latte salutes, it takes away from the seriousness of real wrongdoings by Obama.

    Oh my! I’ll be interested to read more on the seriousness of the real wrongdoings by Obama. I’ll bet an accounting of this reality by those complaining of sadness, tedium and weirdness will double the interest factor and send the already rising numbers through the roof.

  5. SMH,
    Humans do what their nature have always and will always do. Evil exists in the mind of the faithful and faithless; so religion cannot be the cause but rather the excuse for behavior.

    The tragic irony is the greatest effort to remove religion from our culture comes from those that deny the existence of unalienable rights. So the result of this ignorance is we lay bare our individual security of rights to the will of an electorate that believes they have the sovereign power to reject them.

  6. every religion has its nuts there isnt one religion that hasnt been scandal plagued since its inception.

    every religion has its not so understandable tenets to it.

    every religion has murdered in the name of their GOD

    every religion has its pedophiles , rapists, and bs

    there is no religion better then the other

    every religion causes dissension between one another and its followers

    they all have their conservatives and orthodox sects

    in laymans terms ALL RELIGIONS HAVE BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS AND IT ISNT THE BLOOD OF JESUS OR WHATEVER NAME YOUR GUIDE USES

  7. DBQ,
    Your natural right to self-defense is rapidly becoming what some in this blog consider “alienable”. It’s no wonder then how our culture responds when the government turns their back on the security of unalienable rights.

  8. Karen,
    I agree with your analysis and have vowed to treat those schoolyard comments with the same depth of reason by which they were offered.

  9. @NickS

    Thanks! BTW, here is an excerpt by Camille Paglia related to some of these same issues:

    Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

    Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

    The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

    http://time.com/3444749/camille-paglia-the-modern-campus-cannot-comprehend-evil/

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  10. This is exactly the kind of thing I thought would start happening with these Uber and Lyft services… There are reasons for licensing taxicabs, and I personally am not getting in a stranger’s car who is not being monitored by any publicly accountable entity.

  11. Apparently anyone other than a black perpator is responsible for the conduct of that black perpetrator. When will our white society get over the guilt inflicted upon them by these current day blacks that just crossed the Mason-Dixon Line via the Underground Railroad?

  12. To wrxdave – call this incident “sexual blowback”. The guy “lost it”. He was wrong. But she, in her dress, was willing to risk the event happening. In the same way, a woman will have sex, at the risk of getting pregnant, and then have an abortion. For some reason, yet to be articulated, her body is inviolate and sacred, and the babies body is a “blob of cells”. Maybe the Egyptian should have said, “those things I grabbed were just a blob of cells”.

  13. So, can I use the cultural defense angle if I claim it is part of my culture to protect myself and shoot the attempted rapist in the gonads?

    🙂

  14. Well, there is an Irish Poem in all this:

    A Non-Prophet Enterprise???
    An Irish Poem by Squeeky Fromm

    There once was a guy from the Nile,
    Who drove for Uber for a while.
    Til he fondled the rack
    Of the chick in the back
    In the typical Middle East style!

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  15. “NY taxi driver sentenced to 20 years in prison after raping passenger at knifepoint” May 2014
    “A Panama City Beach taxi driver has been arrested and charged with sexual battery on two spring breakers” March 2014
    “A Santa Cruz taxi driver was arrested Monday on suspicion of attempting to rape a woman on her way home (the second city taxi driver assault in a month)” April 2014

    Doesn’t seem like Uber has much to do with it, but the cultural defense angle is abhorrently noteworthy.

  16. Hugh – here I was thinking troglodytes might be extinct. So – in your world- not only is a girl in hot and humid weather “asking for it” if she wears a t-shirt, but she automatically makes the decision to terminate her pregnancy when she’s raped (things, as you put it “not going her way”) simply because the baby is inconvenient?

    Wow!

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