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If you were sexually assaulted, two things decide whether a lawyer can help: what proof exists and how fast it is disappearing. Some of it is on your body and your phone. Most of it is in the records of the business or building where it happened, and those records are on an automatic timer. You do not need to decide anything today. You only need to keep the option open.
Nothing on this page requires you to have called the police. Nothing on this page requires a criminal case. And if you have already showered, changed, waited, or told nobody, keep reading, because that is rarely what decides these cases. The case against a business is built out of the business’s own records.
This is the part almost nobody tells survivors, and it is the part that usually matters most. A claim against a hotel, an apartment complex, a bar, a school or a company is built substantially out of that organization’s own records, not out of your body.
Surveillance video is the single most important item and the fastest to go. These systems record over themselves on a loop. In a 2014 case the Supreme Court of Texas described one store’s cameras this way: they “recorded surveillance video in a continuous loop that, after approximately thirty days, recorded over prior events.” In that same case the store preserved about eight minutes of footage and let the loop overwrite the rest. Eight minutes is what survived, out of a system that held roughly a month. Every system is set differently, nobody outside the business knows how its system is set, and what a business chooses to save is a decision it makes in the first days. That is the reason to act now rather than a reason to wait and find out.
Keycard and access logs. Hotels and controlled-access buildings record every door entry with a timestamp. These purge on a schedule and are frequently the only objective record of who went where and when.
Which records exist at all depends on the kind of place, and we set that out venue by venue on our pages on hotel and motel assault, apartment complex sexual assault, and being sexually assaulted at a business or on commercial property.
Rideshare and app data. Trip records, GPS routes, in-app messages, driver history and prior complaints about the same driver live on a company’s servers and not on your phone. There is more about that on our page on rideshare sexual assault.
The physical scene. Broken gates get repaired. Burned-out lights get replaced. Locks get fixed. The condition that made the assault possible is often corrected within days, and the correction is itself proof that disappears.
Incident reports, complaint records and prior-crime history for the address. What the business already knew is usually the whole case. Complaints by other people about the same driver, the same employee, the same broken gate or the same unlit stairwell go directly to what the owner knew before it happened to you.
There is a legal reason the calendar matters this much. In Texas a business is not obliged to preserve anything until it knows, or reasonably should know, that there is a substantial chance a claim will be filed and that the records in its possession will matter to that claim. Until it is told, an automatic overwrite is just a machine doing its job. A dated, specific letter from a lawyer is what changes that, and it is the first thing this firm sends. It has to go out in days, not weeks.
A preservation letter is a written demand to whoever holds evidence that they retain it. It does not start a lawsuit, does not name anyone as a defendant, and does not commit you to anything at all. It does two things. It stops the automatic deletion, because a company that receives one and destroys the material anyway faces consequences for that destruction separate from the underlying case. And it identifies specific categories, which matters a great deal: a letter that asks a company to “preserve all evidence” does far less work than one that names the camera locations, the retention setting, the access control system, the vendor holding the telematics and the specific personnel file.
If the assault happened recently, a forensic medical examination is the single most useful thing available to you, and much of what survivors believe about it in Texas is wrong.
The exam and the kit are free. Texas law says a survivor of sexual assault “may not be required to pay for” the forensic portion of the forensic medical examination or the evidence collection kit, and the provider bills the Texas Attorney General directly. Other medical care you receive that night is handled on a separate track, so it is worth asking the hospital which part is which. Texas also runs a crime victims compensation program that can help with some costs, and we explain it on our page on Texas Crime Victims Compensation.
You do not have to report to the police to get an exam. Texas law says a survivor “may not be required to participate in the investigation or prosecution of an offense as a condition of receiving a forensic medical examination.” That is not a favor a hospital does for you. It is a statutory prohibition on requiring it.
There is no seventy-two hour rule in Texas. You may have read that there is. The Texas figure is 120 hours, and it is not a cutoff. It is the point at which a provider must perform the exam for an adult who simply walks in and consents. Past 120 hours the exam is still required where a law enforcement agency refers you, or where a physician, a sexual assault examiner or a sexual assault nurse examiner does a preliminary evaluation and decides an exam should be done. For someone under 18 the duty applies regardless of when they arrive.
So if you are past five days, the question is not whether you are too late. The question is whether an examiner who looks at your situation thinks there is something to collect, and that is a question to ask rather than to answer for yourself. The United States Department of Justice, in its national protocol for these examinations, says decisions about whether to collect evidence should be made case by case, notes that many jurisdictions have moved past the seventy-two hour figure they traditionally used, and observes that “advancing DNA technologies continue to extend time limits because of the stability of DNA and sensitivity of testing.”
A trained examiner, usually a sexual assault nurse examiner, goes through it with you and explains each step before it happens. There is a history, a medical assessment, and collection from the places evidence is likely to be, which the Texas protocol lists as oral, genital, anal, hair, clothing, fingernails and dried secretions. The kit is then sealed and documented.
You are entitled to more than the collection itself. Texas law requires the facility to give you a private area, if one is available, to wait or to speak with medical, legal or crisis-center staff; access to a sexual assault program advocate, if one is available; a private treatment room, if one is available; medication to prevent sexually transmitted infection where your history indicates it; the name and telephone number of the nearest crisis center; and, if the facility has showers, a shower at no cost after the exam. The law also directs the facility to presume that an adult survivor asking for an exam is competent to consent to it.
Nothing is done without your consent, and consent to one part is not consent to all of it. You can stop.
If you are a nurse, an advocate or a counselor reading this for somebody else, there is a version of this written for you on our page for advocates, SANE nurses and counselors.
If the exam has not happened yet and you are able to, avoid showering, bathing, changing or washing your clothes, using the restroom, and combing or brushing your hair first. That is RAINN’s guidance for survivors nationally. If you have already done any of it, which most people have, it does not close the door, and it is not a verdict on your case. The section further down explains why.
If you have already changed, keep the clothes. Paper bags, not plastic, each item sealed separately, unwashed. The Texas evidence collection protocol directs examiners to seal items of clothing “separately in paper bags,” and RAINN says paper as well. Plastic holds moisture and works against you.
Swabs from the mouth are taken before you eat or drink, so if an exam is a possibility in the next little while, hold off on both if you can.
Your phone is evidence and it is fragile. Texts, voicemails, call logs, social media messages, in both directions, including messages you regret. Do not delete anything, including anything that embarrasses you. Do not rely on screenshots alone; a screenshot loses everything underneath it, and phones get replaced, wiped and upgraded. Back the phone up now.
Photographs. Injuries, including ones that only become visible after a day or two. The place itself. The conditions, meaning the broken lock, the missing camera, the propped door, the dark stretch of parking lot.
Anything that proves you were there and when. Receipts, ride records, hotel folios, key card records, ticket stubs, parking stubs, bank and card transactions.
Every report you made and every answer you got. What you told the front desk, the manager, the courtesy officer, the property manager, the school, the employer, and what they said back, in writing wherever possible. Follow a conversation up with a short email or text to the same person, so a date exists. This is often the most valuable thing a survivor can create after the fact, because it is the moment the business was told.
The names of the people you told. Friends, family, a roommate, a nurse, a counselor. In a civil case each of them is a witness who can speak to when this happened and what state you were in.
Your medical and counseling records. The harm in these cases is often mental anguish, and mental anguish is proved substantially through the treatment record. Getting care is the right thing to do for its own sake, and it also documents what was done to you.
Two different rules, and the difference matters.
If the assault was reported to law enforcement, Texas law requires that the contents of the kit be kept “for not less than 40 years, or until any applicable statute of limitations has expired, whichever period is longer,” and it applies “regardless of whether a person has been apprehended for or charged with committing the offense.”
If you had the exam and did not report, the kit is not thrown away either. It is preserved until the earlier of the fifth anniversary of the day it was collected or the day you give written consent to release it. Even then it can only be destroyed after notice of the planned destruction is entered into the state’s tracking system and you have had 91 days to object.
The practical consequence is worth stating plainly. If you had an exam years ago and never reported, there may still be evidence in state custody with your name on it. That is a concrete thing that can be checked. Our page on how long a rape kit is kept in Texas goes through both rules in more detail.
Texas also runs a tracking system you can use yourself. It is called Track-Kit and it lets you follow the status and location of your own evidence through the process. It shows status and location; it does not show DNA results. There is one protection in that law worth knowing about: an employee may not give a parent or guardian information that would help them reach these records if the employee knows or has reason to believe that the parent or guardian is a suspect or a suspected accomplice.
For evidence collected on or after 1 December 2025, Texas law lets you give limited consent for the Department of Public Safety to run forensic DNA testing on the evidence from your exam whether or not you report the offense to law enforcement. The results come back to you, through the tracking system, and the Department may not notify anyone else or use the results for any other purpose without your further written consent.
There is a real trade-off and the law requires the consent form to spell it out. In plain terms: you can find out, without involving police, and the answer stays yours. What you give up is the comparison against DNA databases, which is the step that could connect the same person to other cases. The exact words the form has to use, and the date rule that goes with them, are on our page on how long a rape kit is kept in Texas.
Most people shower, wait, tell nobody or never report, and it is rarely what decides one of these cases, because the case against a business is built out of the business’s own records. Physical evidence has never been the only proof, delay is normal and documented, and a civil claim is a separate case that you control. Our page on what to do if you showered, waited or never reported goes through all of it.
Often, yes, and it is worth understanding why before you decide.
A report creates a dated, third-party record of what you said happened and when you said it, which is useful in a civil case even if no one is ever prosecuted. It also opens the route to having the kit tested and compared against DNA databases. It is one of the things this firm looks for.
It is also not required, and it is your decision and nobody else’s. If you do not want a prosecution, you can say so and still make a report. If you do not want to report at all, you can have the exam, and for evidence collected on or after 1 December 2025 you can have the DNA tested, without one.
Legal deadlines apply to these claims and they are shorter than most people expect. They depend on the facts, and the deadline for a claim against a business is not always the same as the deadline for a claim against the person who did it. Our page on the statute of limitations for sexual abuse claims in Texas explains the periods, and it is a question worth asking a lawyer early rather than late.
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.
If you are a nurse, an advocate or a counselor reading this for somebody else, there is a version of this page written for you on our page for advocates, SANE nurses and counselors.
We take calls from advocates and clinicians who want to know whether a set of facts is worth preserving, with no expectation that anyone is referring anything.
Call 713-521-0059. There is no charge to talk, and no attorney’s fee unless there is a recovery. Case expenses are explained in writing before you sign anything, and we go through them with you. You are not asked to decide anything on the first call.
What happens if you do call, on the same day where the facts call for it, is that this firm sends preservation letters to the business, the property manager, the management company and anyone else holding records, identifying the cameras, the date and time window, and the specific logs and reports we want kept. That letter is the thing that turns an automatic overwrite into a decision the business has to explain. It is also the reason the timing of the call matters more than how much proof you think you have.
You do not have to arrive with a case. You can arrive with a date, an address, and what you remember.
It depends on the system, and nobody outside the business knows how its system is set. In one case the Supreme Court of Texas described a store’s cameras recording over themselves after about thirty days, and the store kept about eight minutes. It is the single most time-sensitive piece of evidence.
A written demand that a property owner or business stop deleting specified records. It costs nothing, commits a survivor to nothing, and keeps every option open.
No. Preserving evidence and deciding whether to bring a case are two different decisions, and only the first one is urgent.
That is what most people do, and it is rarely what decides a claim against a business. The case is built out of the business’s own records, which do not depend on what you did afterwards.
Yes. We will answer a general question about how preservation works without asking who the survivor is.
