Airbnb says it will change its TOS this fall to no longer require arbitration in cases involving sexual assault of hosts and guests, after two women sued
Olivia Carville / Bloomberg : Tweets: @rileyraygriffin , @sylviavarnham , @livcarville , @business , @livcarville , and @livcarville Tweets: Riley Ray Griffin / @rileyraygriffin : Sexual assault survivors have publicly called on Airbnb to remove a longstanding forced-arbitration clause in its 10,000-word terms of service. Critical reporting from @livcarville has led the company to now make a change: https://www.bloomberg.com/... via @technology @sylviavarnham : Airbnb claims it stopped enforcing a binding arbitration clause in sexual abuse cases two years ago but this story shows it tried to enforce it in a case just last year. Great reporting by @livcarville: https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/... Olivia Carville / @livcarville : An Airbnb lawyer emailed Sherry Dooley's lawyer saying she was bound to arbitrate her claims against the company because she signed the terms of service. We quote directly from the email here: https://twitter.com/... @business : Sherry Dooley and Natalie White decided to speak publicly to call on Airbnb to remove a longstanding forced-arbitration clause in its 10,000-word terms of service https://www.bloomberg.com/... Olivia Carville / @livcarville : Last week Airbnb announced it was updating its terms of service to “empower sexual assault survivors.” The backstory behind that change: Two women brave enough to share their stories and call on the company to stop “silencing” survivors. https://www.bloomberg.com/... Olivia Carville / @livcarville : When Airbnb made its announcement, it said it hadn't forced a survivor into arbitration since January 2019. Sherry Dooley and her lawyer say this is corporate deception. “They can't say upfront that they changed this when their actions are just the opposite,” her lawyer said.
Context & Ripple Effects
Airbnb has been here before, in name only: back in 2018 it joined eBay in promising to end forced arbitration for sexual harassment claims. The gap between that pledge and practice is what today's story exposes — Bloomberg's reporting alleges the company kept trying to enforce its clause in sexual-assault cases even after claiming it had stopped, until hosts Sherry Dooley and Natalie White sued to force the removal.
The move follows a template set by rideshare rivals: Uber dropped mandatory arbitration for assault and harassment claims in 2018, with Lyft following within a day, though both kept barring class actions. For Airbnb, the change lands on top of a safety record already under strain since a 2015 host sexual-assault case and the party-house deaths that forced listing verification and a neighbor hotline in 2019.
First-order effects
- Dooley and White and future survivors can now take sexual-assault claims against Airbnb to open court rather than private arbitration, ending what the lawsuit targeted.
- Airbnb inherits direct courtroom exposure — public filings, discovery, and jury verdicts it previously shielded itself from with the 10,000-word TOS.
Second-order effects
- Mass-arbitration filers of the kind Keller Lenkner and FairShake deployed against DoorDash lose one venue but gain leverage elsewhere: companies still enforcing assault-arbitration clauses face the same lawsuit-plus-headlines playbook Airbnb just absorbed.
- Rideshare peers that carved out individual claims while keeping class-action bans — Lyft's structure per the 2018 coverage — now face pressure to explain why their carve-outs are narrower than Airbnb's new terms.
Third-order effects
- If the 2018 Uber-Lyft-eBay wave plus this suit marks the pattern, forced arbitration for personal-safety claims becomes commercially indefensible across consumer platforms, leaving clauses intact mainly for commercial disputes.
- Trust-and-safety shifts further from boilerplate toward verifiable policy: Airbnb's sequence — hotline, listing verification, now court access — suggests platforms concede procedural rights one headline at a time.
The trend: Consumer platforms are abandoning forced-arbitration clauses for sexual assault and harassment claims under combined pressure from survivor lawsuits and investigative reporting, while quietly preserving restrictions like class-action bans.