Cait Alexander is a SAG-AFTRA and ACTRA actress, musician, and multidisciplinary artist, and the founder and CEO of End Violence Everywhere (EVE), a multinational registered charity in Canada and the United States, transforming her lived experience of surviving attempted murder and systemic judicial failure into cross-border advocacy, survivor support, and institutional reform.
Open, shut, open, shut.
I’m fine-tuning the cupboards above the rolling pin I keep on the kitchen counter. I use it mostly for making the healthiest flat bread. It’s also a hallmark of my survival.
After all, he beat me within inches of my life with a rolling pin.
When I fled Canada to Los Angeles to escape an abusive man, I brought a rolling pin with me to symbolically beat him back- one of sleek marble, impermeable in comparison to his wooden weapon of choice that night.
Open and shut is how I viewed the attempted murder case. I had survived: I was both a witness and the evidence. Yet every step of the way the people and systems that were supposed to provide access to criminal justice, protect me and help me heal, ripped me open and shut me down. Just like he did.
My darkest days are very public property. The harrowing near-death experience I went through has been told a hundred different ways in courtrooms and newspapers. The worst day of my life, and I, have been analyzed, scrutinized and balked at. I’ve withstood insults like “You deserved to be beaten, you white slut.” But this is the first time I’ve been asked to write about my survival.
I well up with tears as I write this.
I should be dead. He should be behind bars. Remarkably, neither is true.
An IJB analysis uncovered 1,329 women and girls have been killed in Canada since 2019 – Read more
My goal is to End Violence Everywhere. So I founded a multinational charity – and named it End Violence Everywhere – to serve survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual assault, like I did, and to support the families of those less lucky – the families that endure the indescribable torture of having a loved one murdered.
In my work, I see abusers set free because they effectively leverage their poor childhood, substance use, monetary issues, familial problems or ‘stress’ to excuse abusive behavior. But I don’t subscribe to the tricks so often peddled in courtrooms. Violence is a choice. Violent men must be held accountable.
But so often, I see abused women blamed.
I can’t stand the oft-asked question “Why did she stay?”
When we keep interrogating the choices of the victim, we excuse those of the perpetrator.
Let’s ask instead: “Why does he beat her?”
Everyone says they want to end domestic violence. Governments say it. Corporations say it. People on social media say it. But ending domestic violence requires more than hashtags, awareness months, and thoughts and prayers.
It requires consequences imposed on abusive men by functional justice systems.
Like it failed me, the justice system fails thousands of women in myriad ways: Police officers who aren’t trained in trauma-informed care; prosecutors who aren’t brave enough to take on difficult cases; judges who don’t understand coercive control; legislators who won’t close legal loopholes. And a public that is too sympathetic to men who beat and kill women.
Look no further than the Epstein files. For decades, survivors came forward but were ignored or deflated by the justice systems that should have protected them. The Epstein fiasco is a macrocosm of eco-systems of abuse. Toronto’s King West nightlife scene is one such eco-system where rape culture persists throughout generations.
Abuse is a choice. And so is our response to it. We must stop asking victims to survive violence quietly and instead demand that the system stop enabling it loudly.
To end sexual violence, we must collectively decide that violence against women is not complicated, not mysterious, not inevitable. We must fund survivor housing like we fund stadiums. Victims must be supported.
Until we build a system that treats violence against women seriously, cupboards will keep opening and shutting with rage. Cases will keep opening and shutting without justice served. And the lives of women who aren’t as lucky as me will end forever.
Seems like an open-and-shut case.
But fool me once…
- INSIGHTS: I was nearly beaten to death with a rolling pin. Then the criminal justice system failed me - 27 February 2026
- INSIGHTS: If we are serious about ending male violence against women, we must abandon the term “Intimate Partner Violence” - 13 February 2026
- INSIGHTS: Gaps in federal oversight leave First Nations patients behind - 9 January 2026