"[Others] would have read [my tweets] and just kind of like said 'Oh this is another incident of stalking' or 'Wow! That’s scary' but swept it under the rug because we hear about these things happening all the time," she told us. "Showing the footage makes it more 'real' than saying 'this happened to me.' You can’t deny what’s going on in that video."

Alexa has since watched the surveillance footage documenting the 1-2 hours prior to the incident and concluded that the man targeted her specifically because of her gender. "There were many male neighbors coming in and out of the building and not a single one of them had to worry about what happened to me," she told BuzzFeed. "None of them were followed into my building. Nobody had to turn around to make sure that they weren’t being followed. But the first woman that approaches the building gets followed in. The obvious reason: because [I’m] a woman."