Country singer Clare Dunn has tearfully revealed how a rideshare driver yanked her from the car and violently threw her face-first into the ground — with the driver busted early Tuesday, online records show.
“This has been hell,” the “Get Out” singer tearfully told People magazine, sharing a photo of her bloodied and bruised face from the June 26 attack in Tennessee.
The Colorado-based star had been recording in Nashville when she and a friend shared a Lyft home from a girls’ night out, with the pal dropped off first, Dunn said.
The driver then got increasingly agitated as the 34-year-old singer asked him to take a slower route avoiding highways, and then pointed out that he had missed her turn, she recalled to People.
“He was screaming at me,” Dunn recalled.
“And I just knew in that moment that I wasn’t going to get on that interstate with him. I wasn’t going to go quietly where he wanted to take me. And I think he realized maybe this girl was going to be more trouble than she’s worth,” she said.
The driver then pulled over less than a mile from her house, she said.
“Before I could even get my shoes off or get my phone to try and call 911, he grabbed me by the collar, ripped me out of the backseat and slammed me face-first down into a ditch,” she told People.
“Somehow in the scuffle, I thought I called 911, but I didn’t even get the number right. But it was a miracle. They called me back.
“And when I came to, I was screaming, and I saw headlights. He ended up just leaving me alone at that point and took off,” she said, recalling how she ran home with blood on her bruised face.
“He knew what he was doing,” she said of the accused driver.
“He hit ‘complete the ride’ after it was done,” she said, saying that doing so removes key information about the driver from the passenger’s app.
The singer said she and her friend later admitted to each other that they felt “alarm bells” about the driver and are tormented at having ignored them.
“I had that intuition that something was wrong, and I ignored it,” Dunn said, saying she assumed she was “overthinking it.”
“I blame myself,” she said, crying.
Nashville Metro police on Monday put out an alert for suspect Albert Boakye, 46, and he was booked into Metro jail at 12:46 a.m. Tuesday, online records show. He was released just after 4 a.m., with no details immediately available about possible bonds.
He had been on a warrant for misdemeanor assault after Dunn provided a photo of him along with her trip information from the Lyft app, police told WKRN.
Lyft told People mag it had reached out to the singer and also helped police with the investigation.
“Safety is fundamental to Lyft. The behavior described is appalling, and we permanently removed the driver from the Lyft platform as soon as we learned of this incident,” a spokesperson told the mag.