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Get the exam first. It is free, it does not require a police report, and for an adult it is available within 120 hours. The Houston hospitals that perform it are listed on our Houston SANE exam locations page, and our what to do now page walks through the first days in order.
If you are able to, report to the police now. You are not required to, but the same early evidence that builds a prosecution builds a civil claim.
Then call 713-521-0059, or message us, and say it happened this week. We will tell you what your case needs and get it started, beginning with written notice to whoever holds the video and records so it is kept. There is no guaranteed response time, but we typically respond within 12 to 24 hours of a call or message.
If you showered, changed your clothes, waited days or years, told nobody, or never called the police, you did what most people do. That is an ordinary response to a sexual assault, not a mistake, and it is rarely what decides a civil claim.
A claim against a hotel, an apartment complex, a business or an institution is built substantially out of that organization’s own records. Those records usually do not depend on what you did in the hours afterward. What cannot wait is the business’s video and access logs, because those systems overwrite themselves on a schedule. Call 713-521-0059 before the records that decide your case are gone.
Usually not, when the claim is against a business or an institution. The question a lawyer asks about a business is not what happened to you. It is what the business knew and what it failed to do. That is answered by documents the business created itself, on its own systems, before you ever called anyone.
Those documents include surveillance video, key card, fob and gate access logs, and incident and security reports. They include prior complaints by other people about the same employee, the same driver, the same broken gate, the same unlit stairwell. They also include calls for service to the address, guard schedules and patrol logs, and work orders for the lock that was broken for a month. And they include personnel files, applications and background checks for whoever had access.
That is the evidence that decides whether a business is responsible. The main threat to it is time, because those systems overwrite themselves on a schedule. Our page on what evidence matters and what disappears goes through the whole list and the clocks that run on it.
If the assault happened recently, you may still be able to have one. There is no seventy-two hour rule in Texas. The figure in Texas law is 120 hours, set by article 56A.303 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and it is not a cutoff. It is the window within which a provider must perform the exam, or refer you to one that does, for an adult who consents.
Past 120 hours the exam is still required where law enforcement refers you. It is also required where a physician, a sexual assault examiner or a sexual assault nurse examiner does a preliminary evaluation and decides an exam should be done. So the question is not whether you are too late. It is whether an examiner who looks at your situation thinks there is something to collect. That is a question to ask rather than to answer for yourself.
Physical evidence is not the only proof of a sexual assault, and the absence of a finding is not a finding of absence. A published study of 501 sexual assault case reports compared what hospitals found at the bedside against what the crime laboratory found later. Sperm were detected at the bedside in only 41 percent of the cases where the laboratory later found sperm. What an examiner sees that night is not the measure of what the evidence holds.
There may still be evidence in state custody with your name on it, and that is a concrete thing that can be checked. Texas law generally requires a kit collected from someone who did not report to be preserved. Article 56A.306 of the Code of Criminal Procedure sets the period. The kit is kept until the earlier of the fifth anniversary of the day it was collected or the day you give written consent to release it. After the fifth anniversary it can be destroyed only if notice is entered in the tracking system and no objection from you is received before the 91st day after the notice.
There is also a tracking system you can use yourself, called Track-Kit. It lets you follow the status and location of your own evidence through the process.
For evidence collected on or after 1 December 2025, Texas law lets you have the DNA tested without reporting to police. The results come back to you. The Department of Public Safety may not tell anyone else or use them for any other purpose without your further written consent.
Section 420.0736 of the Government Code governs that limited consent. The trade-off, which the law requires the consent form to spell out, is that results obtained this way are not compared against DNA databases and are not used in a criminal case. Our page on how long a rape kit is kept in Texas sets out both the retention rules and the exact language of that warning.
Delayed disclosure is normal, and it is well documented. A 2025 study of 540 survivors measured how long people waited before telling anyone in person, on a scale running from within 24 hours to more than ten years. It found the delay longer for some groups than others because of stigma and the fear of how people would react.
Studies of childhood abuse populations put the delay longer still. In one, of 253 men with childhood sexual abuse histories, those who eventually told someone had waited an average of 15.4 years. In another, of 164 childhood abuse case files, the delay grew where the abuse was more severe, happened more often, or where the person responsible was closer to the survivor. None of that is a character finding; it is what delayed disclosure ordinarily looks like.
The people who train this field say the same thing about the evidence. End Violence Against Women International, which trains investigators and nurses, states that viable evidence can exist well beyond the historical time frames. It also states that medical forensic care can help a survivor and a case even when it is delayed a long time. The United States Department of Justice, in its national protocol, directs case-by-case decisions rather than a cutoff and notes that advancing DNA technology keeps extending the limits.
What waiting does affect is a deadline, and that, along with records being overwritten, is the real reason not to wait longer. Legal deadlines apply to these claims, they are shorter than most people expect, and they depend on facts you should not have to sort out alone. The deadline for a claim against a business is not always the same as the deadline for a claim against the individual responsible. Our page on the statute of limitations for sexual abuse claims in Texas explains the periods. It is a question worth asking a lawyer early rather than late.
In general, no. No arrest, no charge, no conviction and no police report is required to bring a civil claim. A civil case is your own case, brought on your own timeline, and it is decided by a lower standard of proof than a criminal prosecution. What a civil claim does need is evidence, and most of that evidence belongs to the business.
For purposes of crime victims compensation, Texas law treats the exam itself as evidence that you cooperated. It provides that a victim receiving a forensic medical examination “constitutes sufficient evidence that a victim has substantially cooperated with an investigation of a sexual assault or other sex offense.” The program separately requires that the offense be reported to law enforcement within a reasonable period, subject to limited extensions (art. 56B.053). That reporting requirement does not apply where the victim is a child. If you had the exam and went no further, ask about the reporting requirement before you apply.
Making a report does help a civil case, and you should know why before you decide. It creates a dated, third-party record of what you said happened and when you said it. It also opens the route to having the kit tested and compared against DNA databases.
It is also your decision and nobody else’s. You can make a report without asking for a prosecution. You can also have an exam, and for evidence collected on or after 1 December 2025 have the DNA tested, without making one at all. Our page on bringing a civil claim without a criminal case explains how a civil case works when there was never a criminal one.
If you told someone, that matters more than you may think, because in a civil case the person you told is a witness. A friend, a roommate, a family member, a nurse, a counselor or a coworker can speak to when this happened, what state you were in, and what you said at the time. You may have told someone who worked for the business, such as the hotel front desk, a manager, a courtesy officer, a property manager, a school or an employer. That person can be more valuable still, because they may establish when the business was notified. If you have not written down who you told and roughly when, that is worth doing today, before the dates become uncertain.
Every statute and case linked above was read at its primary source. Texas statutes change every legislative session and case law is constantly changing.
This page is general information about Texas law. It is not legal advice about your situation, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
None of this asks you to have reported anything. It is about what still exists, and what still counts. If you are a SANE nurse, an advocate or a counselor, our page for advocates, SANE nurses and counselors answers your questions directly.
You do not have to arrive with a case. A date, an address, and what you remember is enough to begin with. We start by finding out which records the business holds and sending the letter that asks it to keep them. Then we identify who you told, what evidence still exists, and which deadline applies to your claim.
Schiffer Law Firm is a Houston personal injury firm with 50 plus years of combined experience representing injured people and survivors across Texas.
If you are an advocate or a counselor asking on someone’s behalf, you are welcome to call with a general question. We will not ask you for their name.
There is no charge to talk, and no attorney’s fee unless there is a recovery.
Written by Jacob Schiffer, Attorney, Schiffer Law Firm. State Bar of Texas No. 24105175.
Call 713-521-0059.
It is an ordinary response, and it is rarely what decides a claim against a business. That case is usually built out of the business's own records, which usually do not depend on what you did afterward.
Not necessarily. Past 120 hours the exam is still required where law enforcement refers you or where an examiner evaluates you and decides an exam should be done. Ask rather than assume.
Not necessarily. An unreported kit is preserved until the earlier of the fifth anniversary of collection or your written consent to release it. After the fifth anniversary, it can be destroyed only if notice is entered in the tracking system and no objection from you is received before the 91st day after the notice.
For evidence collected on or after 1 December 2025, Texas law lets you do that, and the results come back to you. Results obtained this way are not compared against DNA databases and are not used in a criminal case.
Not necessarily. Delayed disclosure is common, and End Violence Against Women International states that, for a forensic exam, viable evidence can exist well beyond the historical time frames. What waiting does affect is the legal deadline, which depends on your facts, so ask a lawyer early.
In general, no. No report, arrest, charge or conviction is required. What a civil claim needs is evidence, and most of it belongs to the business.