‘This was divine intervention’: Woman decides not to hook up with bartender and is proven right when she receives chilling message the next morning

Warning: This article includes mention of sexual assault. Please read with care.

It’s almost too much to think on a daily basis about how every single decision we make could have major ripples throughout the rest of our lives. Typically, we’ll never know what might’ve transpired if we’d taken a different path (or missed some sliding doors, if you’re Gwyneth Paltrow). TikTok user @really.rayven got a horrifying hint at her own alternate timeline, though, after making the right call one night at a bar.

In her video, Rayven explains that she stopped at a bar that turned out to be empty one night. Although she only anticipated having a single drink, she ended up having a few more and chatting with the bartender. The guy encouraged her to stay until closing time so the two of them could go back to his place. Rayven was in two minds about the proposition, as she knew she had a long drive back ahead of her, but she wasn’t sure whether to take the bartender up on his offer or not. When she went to the restroom and looked in the mirror, however, she says she “heard a voice inside say ‘Go home.'”

Rayven ended up being very glad that she turned him down.

In a genuinely chilling revelation, Rayven then shares a screenshot of the Instagram message she received from the guy the following morning after she had refused to go back to his place. “Damn,” reads the message, from an account named William CK. “I guess I should’ve just r*ped you then, huh?”

Rayven confirms in the comments to her video that she shared the screenshot of the message with William’s boss at the bar, and it thankfully resulted in him getting fired. But he then reached out again, to which Rayven explained, “I called the owner the next day and asked if I could just send him the screenshots of our convo, no context, no defense. Then got a message from Will, blaming me that he got fired over ‘a joke.'”

Even after all the infuriating evidence that there are an unsettling number of men out there who are convinced they own everything from a woman’s time to her body, the bartender’s shameless, thoughtless, insidious threat is still deeply shocking to hear. Even for those who already thought we’d seen it all. “After 25+ years on the internet, VERY little surprises me, but I audibly gasped at that screenshot. Good god what the…” wrote one user. Another was so thankful that Rayven made the decision she did: “GIRL. I’m so sorry this happened, but so glad you were able to avoid it. That was divine intervention.”

Rayven, who goes by the penname Rayven Libre Veritas, has written a poetry collection titled Psychopaths Are Sexy that’s inspired by her experience with domestic abuse. She hopes the book will help others find their own “exit strategy,” and she plans to donate one copy to women’s shelters for every book sold. As she writes in her caption to the above video, “if you didn’t think I was qualified to be writing a book called ‘Psychopaths Are Sexy’ before, do you believe that I’ve had enough experience with them now? Hopefully he’s the last.”

If you know someone suffering from sexual violence, contact RAINN or the National Sexual Abuse Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.