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Warning: The following article contains sensitive material. Please read with caution.
Learning that a 16-year-old’s friends attempted to murder her is unbelievably sad and hard to imagine. TikTok user @lexiweinbaum has been speaking about what happened to her for a while now, and she is now sharing more details about her survival.
Lexi shared in a previous video that her friends tried to murder her by giving her marijuana in 2015. However, a substance was in the water bottle instead. Prior to that, she experienced abuse. In a recent TikTok, she started off by saying, “I was in the right place at the right time where the right person came out and called 911. I was five minutes from the hospital. Otherwise, I would not be alive talking to you today.”
Those are chilling words, and Lexi’s story is heartbreaking. She explained that when she was attacked, she thought that being loud would be a way for people to realize that she was there so they couldn’t just make her body disappear (an even more chilling thought). Because Lexi was noisy, one of the guy’s mothers ran into the room and said she “wasn’t allowed to die on her property.” That’s just one beyond harsh and brutal part of this story. Although she felt “paralyzed,” she forced herself to move thanks to fight-or-flight. Lexi added that she did two more important things: yelling “I’m going to f*cking die” when she got outside and asking herself questions in her mind such as her favorite music genre, eye color, and hair color. That last part might be the most crucial since she stopped herself from panicking and was “connected to reality.”
Lexi emphasized that one man who was walking by her on the street decided to help her, which is why she’s still here. One user commented “This is horrifying,” and it’s tough to find a better word than that to describe her near-death experience. When others asked if Lexi’s friends ended up in jail, someone said no, they didn’t, which is hard to wrap your head around.
Lexi’s description of going into fight-or-flight mode is key. According to Harvard Health, people react this way when their lives are at stake, but they can also feel the same when dealing with overwhelming and anxiety-inducing parts of daily life, such as work problems and sitting in traffic. This describes why Lexi felt she couldn’t physically move but she was able to get out of the room and the house anyway. Healthline also noted that people can react to trauma by having a “freeze response” or a “fawn response.” The latter comes from Pete Walker, a therapist, and is when people attempt to make sure that their attacker is content and when they’re nice to them even though they’re in an abusive situation.
A commenter also wrote, “Why is it always the “best friends’?!” It might be surprising to hear that Lexi’s good friends were the ones who abused, attacked, and tried to murder, but according to RAINN, in 8 out of 10 instances of rape, the victim knows the attacker.
Lexi shares more about what happened to her on her TikTok page, including advice and support for those who have been through trauma. Although nothing can make up for this absolutely terrible and unfair situation that never should have happened, Lexi is helping many others by talking about vulnerable topics that aren’t easy to share about.