"I Would Have Handled It Differently." No, You Wouldn't.
My brother wasn't there the night I was assaulted. He got the story secondhand, and he carried a load of anger about it that he hadn't said out loud to me. When I finally took him to coffee and told him he could ask me anything, one of his first questions was this: "Why didn't Chad or Dad kill him right there, or at least beat the shit out of him?"
We both started to cry. He'd been angry at my husband and my dad, and I think some of it was his own rage that he hadn't been there to protect me.
His question assumed there was an obvious thing to do that night, and that two men who love me had failed to do it. I understood the assumption, because before that night I'd made it myself. I'm sure I said some version of "if that were me, I would have fought back" more than once.
Why are we so sure we'd handle a crisis better than the person who lived it?
We're sure because we picture it from a safe chair, wide awake, already knowing how it ends. From there the right move looks obvious. You'd scream, you'd swing, you'd call 911, you'd leave. Movies have shown us that scene so many times that we think we've rehearsed it.
The person inside the moment has none of those advantages. They don't know what's happening yet. Under threat, the body's emergency system takes over.
What do people actually do in the worst moment of their lives?
Almost nothing they would have predicted. Nobody in my house did that night.
I woke up to hands that weren't my husband's, and at first I believed I'd been dreaming. I got out of bed and walked out of the room in a daze without looking behind me. I didn't scream until I saw Chad outside on the patio and understood that the person in our bed hadn't been him. What came out was one sentence, over and over: "It wasn't your hands!"
Before the police arrived, I stripped the sheets off our bed because I couldn't stand to look at them. I still don't know why I thought I'd ever wash those sheets and use them again. Later, when he was led out of my house in handcuffs, his wife was crying and asking why we were doing this, and for whatever reason, I apologized to her. Why?
Chad didn't follow the script either. People asked him afterward how he managed not to hit the man. He writes in the book that he was in shock and focused on one thing, which was getting himself between that man and me. Calling the police hadn't crossed his mind until my mom said it.
None of this is unusual. A 2017 Swedish study of 298 women treated at a Stockholm emergency clinic after a sexual assault found that 70 percent experienced significant tonic immobility, an involuntary paralysis, during the assault. Nearly half experienced it in an extreme form. Fighting back is the response everyone expects, and for most of the women in that study it wasn't available.
What does "What I would have done..." cost the person who hears it?
It turns their worst night into a test they failed. The speaker thinks they're describing themselves. The listener hears that there was a correct way to get through that night and they missed it. I've had it aimed at me as "why didn't you" questions, from people who were angry about what happened.
It also lands on the people who were nearby. My brother's anger had been sitting on Chad and my dad the whole time, and my dad didn't need any help with that. When he and I finally talked over dinner and a beer, he told me he was still angry, and that he kept replaying that night and wondering why he hadn't done more. He was already asking the question. He didn't need anyone else to ask it for him.
At that coffee, I told my brother what that night had taught me: you can't predict how you'll react when you're facing your worst fear. I also told him it was probably a good thing neither of them did what he pictured. I needed my dad to drive me to the hospital, and I needed Chad next to me, which is hard to do from a jail cell.
Did Jane Doe wait too long to report in the Cornell case?
No, and she didn't wait years, whatever the comment sections say. If you've been online this month, you've seen the case people are calling the Cornell 7. A former Cornell student, identified as Jane Doe, was raped by multiple men at a fraternity house in October 2024. One of the loudest reactions has been that she sat on it for years before coming forward.
According to CBS News's timeline of the case, she went to campus police on November 8, 2024, about three weeks after that night. The "years" come from her civil lawsuit, which she filed this September after no one was criminally charged. The case is still unfolding, with a special prosecutor now assigned.
I'd say the same thing if it had been years. Federal crime surveys have found for decades that most sexual assaults are never reported to police at all. In 2016, the Bureau of Justice Statistics put the reported share at 23 percent. The reasons aren't hard to find. There's shame, there's fear of what people will think, and there's fear of not being believed. The comments about Jane Doe this month are proving those fears right, and survivors who haven't told anyone are reading them.
I reported the same night, and I can't take credit for it. The decision to call the police got made around me while I was on the bathroom floor. Even with a police report on file, I went back to work three days later and told no one there for a month. And waited even longer to tell some family and close friends.
I have a name for what's happening in those comment sections. I call it "should've-ing all over someone". She should've reported sooner. She should've gone to the hospital that night. Each one is another way of saying "I would have handled it differently."
Why does this matter during Domestic Violence Awareness Month?
October has its own version of the sentence, "I would have left," and it comes from the same chair. My story isn't a domestic violence story, so I'll leave the details to the people who've lived one and the advocates who work with them. What those advocates say is plain. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, leaving an abuser is the most dangerous time for a victim. The person being judged for staying is often weighing risks the rest of us can't see.
"Why didn't she fight" and "why didn't she just leave" are the same question. Both assume a clear choice the person in the moment didn't have, and both move the attention off the person who caused the harm.
What can you do instead?
Start from the one thing you know for sure, which is that you weren't there. My brother's question was blunt, and I'm glad he asked it to my face, because it meant I could answer it. He'd been carrying a conclusion for a long time, and that coffee was my first chance to give him the rest of the story. It changed things between us. We talk more now, and we're closer.
The same holds in smaller rooms. When a coworker or a friend tells you about the worst thing that's happened to them, "I would have reported it sooner" or "I never would have put up with that" closes the conversation. "I wasn't there, and I believe you" keeps it open.
I would have handled it differently, too. I know that because I didn't.
If you or someone you love needs support, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233 (or text START to 88788), and RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline is 1-800-656-4673. In the Kansas City area, MOCSA's 24-hour crisis line is 816-531-0233 in Missouri and 913-642-0233 in Kansas.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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