Summary: A billionaire with a penchant for 13-year-old girls forces them to give him massages with happy endings. He pays most of them off. But one French girl finally reports it, and the SVU detectives find his semen inside the girl. The billionaire shows up at the police station (with an expensive lawyer) and claims the girl raped him. He says he was sleeping in his massage room at home when the girl walked in and started fondling him. When he woke up, she threatened to cry rape if he didn’t finish, so he had sex with her. But the police soon find more girls he molested, as well as videos he made of his sex assaults. They arrest him and mock him for having a small penis.

Verdict: B+

What they got right:  Some child molesters do try to get out of rape charges by claiming the child did the dirty work while they slept through it. It’s the sex-offender version of “The dog ate my homework.” Convenient, easy, and pretty damn unlikely. Defense experts have coined a term to try make it sound scientific: “sexsomnia” – having sex while you’re sleeping. I think this theory became popular in recent years because DNA testing shuts down every other defense for child molesters. It’s hard to say you didn’t touch a child when your semen is found inside her. If the victim was an adult, the guy could claim that his semen got there during a consensual encounter. But consent isn’t a defense to statutory rape. It doesn’t matter if a naked 15-year-old hands you a can of Redi-Whip and begs you to lick it off her – if you have sex with her, you’re on the hook. And so “sexsomnia” became an excuse for desperate defendants who need to explain how their semen ended up inside a child.
                       I had a defendant who made a similar claim. He was 55 years old, and had raped and impregnated his 13-year-old stepdaughter. At first, he denied ever touching her. But DNA testing proved the baby was his. So then he claimed that he was passed out drunk on the couch one night, and the girl (who was a virgin) climbed on top of him, had her way with him, and impregnated herself while he remained mostly unconscious. Right. She raped him. Because every 13-year-old girl dreams that her first sexual experience will be with her smelly, drunk, passed-out stepfather. (That guy is now serving 20 years.)

What they got wrong:  Okay, let me get this off my chest (no pun intended): the DA’s cleavage. Was she applying for a search warrant or a job at Hooters? Real female sex-crime prosecutors are a conservatively dressed bunch. We’re in court all day talking about sex (and not the nice variety). We say words like “vagina,” “breast,” “penis,” and “ejaculate” hundreds of times a week. To each other. To witnesses. To judges and jurors and thugs and rapists. We’re immune to talking dirty, but we don’t want our lovely lady lumps bouncing around as demonstrative aids. You’re more likely to find a male lawyer in a kilt than a female sex-crime prosecutor showcasing her cleavage in court. 
                  A more technical nit: will these defendants never stop talking to the detectives without their lawyers present? This billionaire’s lawyer probably charged him close to $1000 an hour. Seriously. So I’d expect that he’d advise his client not to talk to the police without him. That’s bare-bones first-year-law stuff. Yet the billionaire invited the NYPD into his mansion and showed them the massage room and the TV where he taped all his sexual assaults – giving them grounds for the search warrant that finally sunk him. 
               And what about that scene after the billionaire was arrested, and he was put in a holding cell in the middle of the police precinct, where he could watch and comment on the detectives as they reviewed his sex tapes and strategized about their investigation? That was some seriously bad feng shui. Our poor SVU detectives should be able to work without the defendant watching their every move. That setup was akin to handing Nixon the key to the Watergate and inviting him to make himself at home.

*The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Justice.