The shortfall of AirBNB over here is that they might care, but they aren't coming across as someone caring, and a little bit of empathy coupled with a genuine act of kindness will go a long way over here.
I think the reason they don't do anything to really fix it rather than lip service and lawyer wrangling and dirty PR tricks is they are afraid of setting a precedent. However, they should have thought that through a bit more. They are saying they've had a million rentals or some such with no incident. If that is true, covering someone's damage for the 1 in a million case should be something they can do. Let's say it costs $10,000. That's nothing compared to their profit for those million cases where it didn't happen. By not doing this they are sending several possible messages. One is that they believe that a lot more robberies are going to happen and they have been lucky so far. It's not going to be 1 in a million it's going to be 1 in a 100, and they can't afford to fix 1% of all stays that turn into robberies. This message also means they believe it is impossible to fix, they give up on the idea of ever being able to truly identify renters (the rentees are not as big an issue to identify since their names are on the deeds). I think that's crazy since it's really obvious they have been severely legally negligent in not actually acquiring real identities of renters, though they have certainly implied to rentees that it was safe as if they had. That's probably going to end up being determined by some court or consumer advocacy agency like the FTC to be a misrepresentation. The other bad message they send with this is that if they truly believe it is 1 in a million and they don't want to help her out by finding a place to stay and fixing her apartment, then they are obscenely greedy. There are costs to doing this sort of business after all, you can't just starve the business and take it all for yourself. Some money needs to be set aside for these sorts of 100% predictable and inevitable occurrences.
Whoever is on their hack legal team is should be fired and they should get some real lawyers in there. Obviously they are obsessed with CYA and avoiding responsibility. If that is where they want to be fine but then they have no business running this sort of business. This business is going to have robberies, rapes and murders from time to time. They should have had a plan. Yelling "it's not our fault", threatening the victim, playing the hypocrite, and attacking people who reasonably comment on the story (and through a third party, what cowards) is absolutely not the right approach. What you mentioned is pretty good though, but it's pretty clear that was brought up and dismissed as something that might cost a couple hundred bucks they were too greedy to let go of.
Keep in mind the other story doing the rounds here about the guy in Germany who go stuck with fraudulent rentees charging him money to stay in a house they didn't own, and having to deal with the house owner showing up and asking what he was ding there...
Fact is, before anything else, this is a personal matter, so do it as a person - ideally on your spare time (if you ever can make some) with your personal funds if you can - everyone will accept a founder doing this, it will not engage any responsibility/liability whatsoever, it will not establish any precedent, and it will change the reception radically, for both the victim, the company and the public.
This is a person offering another person to meet, talk aaaaaand 3 years from now we have "Beds & Breaks" hitting the theatres, a movie loosely based on real facts, starring...
As a side note, how big are those appartments in San Francisco? Here in Paris for that kind of money each month you get 60 square meters and no single person can afford those. Most live in a third or a half of this surface.
I think the original sin in all this was yanking the original AirBnB support person who was helping EJ and replacing this contact with CYA bullshit. From EJ's perspective it probably looked very much like AirBnB turning their back on the problem and clamming up. At that point, any offer of financial help just looks like AirBnB trying to pay her to go away.
they are afraid of it to become systematic, that's why they are trying to keep it secret that they are helping her materially etc, but it really doesn't need to:
such a thing happened for the first time, the next times anybody suffered would have to blame only themselves, because they knew the EJ story but handled their keys to stranger without the extensive check.