It was supposed to be a party but it turned out to be a nightmare for a 29-year-old Australian who was raped in a rented house on Airbnb in New York on New Year’s Eve 2015. To the woman, the company paid $ 7 million in exchange for signing a deal. in which he pledged not to talk about the plea deal or not to sue Airbnb or the landlord. The woman had arrived in the Big Apple with a group of friends to celebrate the New Year. They had booked a highly coveted first-floor apartment on 37th Street, a stone’s throw from Times Square. There was no one waiting for them in the house: the directions to follow required you to go to a ‘bodega’ near the building and take the keys.
On the evening of December 31st the girls went out for the celebrations and shortly after midnight, the 29-year-old decided to leave her friends and go home. Arriving in the apartment, she didn’t immediately notice that she wasn’t alone, but once she entered the bathroom she saw herself pointed at a kitchen knife. The man holding her then dragged her onto the bed and raped her, then stole her cell phone. In a panic, the girl was able to contact her friends via an iPad who came to her aid along with some agents stopped in the street. While the police were still inside the apartment, the attacker, 24-year-old Junior Lee, returned. He was immediately stopped and searched: one of the girl’s earrings, a knife and a copy of the keys to the apartment were found in his backpack. Airbnb was warned of what had happened the following day and it was immediately panic.
The company’s crisis unit got underway immediately by paying the woman a hotel and a plane ticket for her mother to reach her from Australia and offering to pay for health care costs. Airbnb has tried to keep the confidential story aware of the risks from an image standpoint. Duplicate keys represent a serious problem for the company, which has no policy on how to exchange keys between guests. And this has implications for the reputation, safety and even the possible legal liability of the company, whose business model is based on the idea that strangers can trust each other. A premise that, if it falls, could result in fewer customers and more legal actions, not to mention more stringent regulation. In short, a nightmare for Airbnb and its almost secret crisis unit, nicknamed the black box and called to intervene in the most urgent situations to prevent public relations disasters.