What actually counts as evidence?

The truth is closer to the opposite. Cases are built grain by grain, out of small pieces that look minor on their own and only show their weight once they're lined up. So the short answer to "what counts" is: far more than you think.

What can be evidence

• Your own account — written down close to when it happened, with the date on it. A note, a journal entry, a log. A contemporaneous record is evidence.
• Messages — texts, emails, DMs, voicemails, call logs. The actual words, with who sent them and when.
• Images — photos, screenshots, video: of injuries, damage, a scene, or the messages themselves.
• Documents and records — police reports, medical records, receipts, financial records, court papers, letters.
• Witnesses — anyone who saw or heard something, even something small. A neighbor, a coworker, the friend you told at the time.
• Physical things — objects, damaged property, anything tangible tied to what happened.
• Patterns over time — the dates and the repetition. A single incident can be waved off; a documented pattern is much harder to dismiss.
• The small stuff — timestamps, locations, the quiet metadata that proves when and where.

The mindset that matters most

Your job is not to decide what's relevant. That's the trap — people throw things away, or never save them, because they decided it "wasn't important enough." Everything counts until someone with the authority to decide says otherwise. Preserve broadly; let the lawyer, the advocate, or the detective sort out relevance later. That's their job. Yours is to make sure there's something to sort.

A few rules of thumb:

• Keep originals. Don't delete, don't edit, don't crop the source. Make copies to work from, and leave the original untouched.
• Write down context while you remember it — what a message meant, who someone is, what happened right before.
• Date everything — when it happened, and when you recorded it.

A boundary worth being clear about

This isn't legal advice. Whether a particular piece is admissible — whether a court will accept and weigh it — is a legal question only a lawyer or the court can answer for your situation. That's exactly why you preserve broadly and let them decide: your job is to keep it, theirs is to weigh it. (If you're not sure who to ask, here's how to find a lawyer or advocate.)

And if you're in immediate danger, that comes first — call 911 or see crisis resources before anything else.

Before you go

You don't need the one perfect piece of proof. You need to stop throwing away the small ones. Start with what you have — keep it, dated and unaltered — and let the picture build. And when it starts to pile up, here's how to organize it.

Every grain matters.