after the fact

1. After an actual occurrence, particularly after a crime. For example, I know the brakes should have been repaired, but that doesn't help much after the fact. The use of fact for a crime dates from the first half of the 1500s. The word became standard in British law and is still used in this way today. The idiom was first recorded in 1769 in the phrase accessories after the fact, referring to persons who assist a lawbreaker after a crime has been committed. Now it is also used more loosely, as in the example above.

Example Sentences

"We now need to use those same tools to curb the abuse in the first place rather than having to work with dealing with it after the fact," he said.

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“He took a life on duty—and realized another’s life after the fact—and to walk around with that is a difficult situation.”

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“That’d be a stroke of luck, wouldn’t it? Funny thing, luck. You can’t tell if it’s good or bad until well after the fact. Why, if I’d never been kidnapped by pirates, I’d never have learned to make the visibilizer....”

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Meanwhile, Mizuho desk-based analyst Jordan Klein said that Nvidia’s stock and earnings are “so over-analyzed” at this point that it “feels hard for the company to beat and guide up enough to really create a rush of buying right after the fact.”

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After the fact, Franco’s government claimed it had quietly helped many Jews leave occupied Europe; in one of the numerous instances of right-wing whitewashing cited by Kaufman, a recent American biographer has described Franco as “not particularly anti-Semitic.”

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