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Allison Leotta, novelist, former sex-crimes prosecutor, tv critic

Author of A Good Killing, Speak of the Devil, and others.

SVU Episode #13-18: Valentine’s Day

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Valentine’s Day is notoriously tough for police in Sex Crimes and Domestic Violence units. Those crimes spike, as folks are two-timing each other, spending too much time with their baby’s mother instead of their wife, or just plain forgetting a card. It’s amazing how often a lovers quarrel turns into a trip to lockup. But this episode took the prize for Worst Valentine’s Day Ever.

Recap: We open with a hedge-fund manager Skyping with his lingerie-clad wife. She’s in her posh kitchen in the Upper East Side; he’s in Hong Kong. But with the power of video chat, she does a sexy little striptease for him across the miles. Suddenly, a masked man bursts into the kitchen, holds a gun to the wife’s head, and rapes her on the kitchen counter – all before the eyes of her horrified and helpless husband.

The wife is kidnapped and held for $250,000 ransom. Hubby is ordered not to call the police.  But you can’t fool SVU, and they’re soon on the case. They stake out the drop point, and soon … the wife comes to pick up the cash!

Okay, that’s a tip-off that we’re not dealing with seasoned kidnappers. Sending the victim to go pick up the ransom isn’t a brilliant move.

In fact … there are no kidnappers. The wife (played by the wonderful Chloë Sevigny), was sleeping with multiple delivery men, drug dealers, and even her husband’s business partner. Although she was “living the Upper East Side dream,” all those shopping sprees and trips to the Hamptons weren’t enough. So she livened things up with“screwcations” in “F-pads” while her husband was off  making the money to buy the expensive lingerie she wore to these assignations. (Did SVU just make those words up? I’m impressed, although slightly appalled … which I guess is what SVU is all about.)

And it turns out that she set up the whole rape/kidnapping, by convincing a delivery boy to pretend to rape her. (Why? It was never clear. Maybe she wanted the ransom money? But she seemed to have plenty of pocket cash. Just for thrills then? Hard to believe a rich housewife would risk so much.)

The DA charges Chloë with obstruction of justice and making a false police report. Although a hidden video shows Chloë having a delightfully orgasmic romp with the man she claimed kidnapped her, she gets off with a mistrial by seducing a juror who hangs the jury 11-1. Meanwhile, her adoring husband defends her every step of the way.

Perhaps inspired by how stupid that husband was, Nick follows his own wife (who we’ve suspected of cheating on him for a while now). He sees her knocking on the door of another man’s house. Ouch.

Verdict: B

What They Got Right:

There have been some notorious false claims of rape. A female prison psychologist in Sacramento, Laurie Ann Martinez, recently faked an assault to try to convince her husband that they needed to move to a better neighborhood. She split her own lip with a pin, scraped her knuckles with sandpaper and had her friend punch her in the face. Investigators say she even ripped open her blouse and wet her pants to look like she’d been knocked unconscious. If you want a new zip code, I recommend enlisting a realtor and having a heart-to-heart with your spouse instead.

 

Similarly, a weather reporter falsely claimed that she’d been raped while jogging through Central Park. She did it for the attention.

While false reports make headlines, the vast majority of reports of sexual assault are authentic. While hard to estimate for obvious reasons, many sources say that only one to two percent of rape reports are faked – about the same rate of false reporting as in every other crime.

 

Another authentic detail was the fact that the wife at first blamed “three black men” for her kidnapping. We’ve seen this pattern so many times: a white women falsely reporting a crime, blaming a fictional black man for perpetrating it. The most notorious and despicable of this was Susan Smith, who drowned her own children, then falsely claimed that a black man carjacked them.

 

 

 

A modern and politically charged version of blackman blaming was the case of Ashley Todd. She was a John McCain campaign volunteer who claimed that a black man saw her McCain bumper sticker, beat her up, and then branded her face with a “B” for Barack. But the “B” on her face was backwards, as if scratched on in a mirror. Todd soon fessed up to having staged the whole thing herself.

 

What they got wrong:

I was shocked to hear Olivia say why she didn’t believe Chloe’s story: “Most rape victims shut down,” Olivia said. “But not her.” That’s wrong. Crime victims react in every possible way: from sobbing, tearing at their hair, or rolling on the floor, to dead calm, matter-of-fact, emotionless recitations. Some get sad, some angry, some laugh out of nervousness. One reaction is not any more valid or truthful than the other. Of all the characters in this show, Olivia would know that.

Nick told Chloe, “The rape kit shows that you were sexually assaulted.” A rape kit can’t do that. It can reveal whether the victim was injured or not. Swabs can be tested for the presence of semen, saliva, and blood. If found, a DNA profile can be built. Hair can be plucked, fingernails scraped. But – as seen in this case – a rape kit can’t say whether or not someone was sexually assaulted. Very often, the forensic evidence of a rape is exactly the same as the evidence of consensual sex.  A rape kit can support a claim of sexual assault, but does not, alone, prove it.

But perhaps the most unrealistic thing about the entire episode was how sweet and supportive this millionaire hedge fund manager was.

Well, SVU fans, what do you think? How likely is a real Upper East Side housewife to stage a rape while Skyping with her husband? Is Nick going to pretend he didn’t see his wife going to her F-pad , or will confront her about it? And, if the latter, will he be wise enough to check his gun at the police station first?  Leave your comments!

Comments

  1. Yeah, I don’t buy this. I expected some extra twist late in the show, but it never came. Disappointing outcome, otherwise wouldn’t be bad.

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  3. Why no commentary on the critical information coming out of the witness that neither counsel was aware of? It was hearsay, but how did they miss it in prepping the witness (or questioning before the case even started)?

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  4. Not a very realistic episode (I thought a B is very mild Allison), but it was a fun one anyway. Olivia’s “her reaction isn’t right” may be stupid. But I think a rape victim would never uses the word ‘sex’ to describe what happened right?

    And ten bucks says Nick’s wife is seeing a shrink, rather than a hubby on the side.

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    • A victim might say “had sex” — people fall back on awkward vocabulary sometimes to describe traumatic experiences. I love your idea that Nick’s wife was going to see a shrink. That would be a great twist!

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    • I thought Nick’s wife was having the affair with the friend in Iraq who requested to go right back after he had finished deployment? The one who’s kid was involved in something and complained he wasn’t staying. If this is the case, Nick’s wife had some nerve sending him to her husband!

      From what I’ve seen on the show, many of the victims clam up (shut down) initially. They don’t wanna talk about it or relive it. They seem to have to do a lot of convincing at times to open them up. And I mean, “having sex” implies something shared. That they both had something. As opposed to something being taken from them. At least from my perspective. I could see a traumatized victim stumbling with terms, but I feel like they would still use negative terms to describe all the things that happened.

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  5. Is there some law on SVU that says the ADA’s can no longer get a conviction these days?

    The one thing that bothered me was the jury nitpick in this episode. Now granted I only have experience with this one time, but when I was on a jury, the courts tried their damnedest to make sure that jury members DID NOT have a way to interact with the defendant’s or victims or their lawyers. So the idea that one of them could interact with the defendant like that, had me rolling my eyes. Again I don’t know how much different it is in other courts compared to the ones in Iowa, but I didn’t buy the way that scenario played out regardless of if the jury member knew her.
    Not to mention the fact that they had a meeting with ONE jury member to determine his validity, and one jury member kept them in dead lock. No way is THAT a coincidence.

    With one jury member stopping a conviction, that case was NOT a dog Casey. In fact I found it out of character for Casey Novak to say THAT trial wasn’t worth retrying. The Casey Novak I remember was a badass that wouldn’t have put up with that crap, and would’ve retried her to make a statement that IT IS NOT okay to lie to the police about something like rape happening.

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    • Novak is an ADA, and therefore has little choice in the matter of whether to retry the case. If her boss (still McCoy?) says to let it go, she lets it go.

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      • It’s not McCoy anymore. Not only do I know that because of the season premier saying they had a new da. But because Jack McCoy wouldn’t let a mistrial that hinged on one jury member slide that easily.

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    • I too thought the way the defendant and the juror made contact was entirely unrealistic but I have no experience at all in a court house. Was it realistic for the juror and the defendant to make contact like that?

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      • Jason, Josh,
        You’re right, the parties are supposed to have no contact with jurors. A good judge will sternly warn everybody about this at the outset of the trial, and often several times a day, before each break. Everyone knows that contact is forbidden. It can make for some very quiet, awkward elevator rides. But for every rule, there are people who break them. And Chloe’s character seemed like the sort who would flaunt any rule put before her. It’s risky — anyone might see her — but she didn’t seem to mind risks.

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  6. You gave this episode a B? That’s way too generous for me – I’d give it a C- or maybe even a D. The only mildly redeeming part (IMHO) was the section that had Casey Novak in the courtroom. I guess my tolerance for “false rape accusation” stories on SVU has reached it’s limit – this is the second week in a row they’ve had one. And they’ve done quite a few others over the years. I know false rape accusations do happen, but aren’t they a fairly small percent of the total cases? If the writers are looking for “Ripped from the Headlines” stories, what about all the recent stories of sex trafficking and gang rapes? Also don’t SVU units also handle cases of child abuse? We haven’t seen many of those over the years.

    Maybe I’m being overly sensitive, but it seems like we’ve had an overload of “bad women” SVU episodes this year. So far this season we’ve had 2 teenage girls murder a little boy (Lost Traveler), a jealous college woman set her roommate up to be raped (Theater Tricks), a young girl who plots with a housekeeper to kill her parents (Home Invasions), a beautiful Russian woman setting up men to extort money out of them (Russian Brides), a woman who fakes her baby being kidnapped (Missing Pieces) and several female co-conspirators to murder. Has the crime rate for women suddenly gone up drastically? Or are we all (us women) just evil? Even poor Nick is being cheated on by his wife 🙂

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    • I hear ya, Alenna! You could write a guest blog. 🙂 I’ve been railing about this all season. We’ve had an epidemic of female perps in season 13. This particular episode had such strong roots in real-life stories, I didn’t feel like it was implausible. But the overall trend of this female crime wave is silly and not authentic. I guess man-bites-dog will always be the more interesting story. .. or in this case, woman-bites-man.

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      • Part of putting on a dramatic presentation is making sure that the outcome isn’t obvious. Sure, we all know that TV and real life are vastly different. In real life, the first guy you’d suspect often turns out to be the guy who did it. On TV, the first guy you’d suspect is almost guaranteed not to be the guy who did it… because they don’t want you to change the channel ten minutes in. The effort to avoid being formulaic must be incredible for L&O (and CSI) series, because they’ve already mined just about every interesting real-life story any of the writers/researchers has any knowledge of, having relocated stories that are distributed all over the country to all happen to one police precinct. (OK, three each for CSI and 5 for L&O (although the L&O UK stories are all recycled L&O plots.))

        The reality is boring. There’s a reason we have to pay prosecutors (though not much) to do the work.

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        • Yes, but it is amazing how many new stories crop up every day, each with a new twist. As long as they’re doing “ripped from the headlines,” they’ll have plenty to work with.

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          • Sure, new stories pop up every day… and most of them are all to predictable, and therefore boring. When you reflect on your work, the number of cases you handled (I’m assuming hundreds if not thousands)… how many were actually interesting stories. Now, I’m not saying that each and every case wasn’t deserving attention (many, I’m sure, deserving of more attention than was possible).
            The problem is that TV viewers don’t really want to see everyday real life; they don’t need a TV to see that. People turn on their TV’s to see stories that have something their everyday lives DON’T have. The writers have to provide that, and if reality is boring, they’re NOT going to give you the reality, they’re going to give you an unreality you’ll like better, or at least, that’s what they’re going to try for. Part of that means trying to make you guess who really did it for as long as possible, even if it means that the crime and resolution are, like testimonials in commercials for diet products, not typical of actual results.
            Drama is different from real life. For example, in drama, it is far more likely that the evil will be defeated, the good shall be triumphant, and wrongs will be righted. It offends our sense of the dramatic when this does not happen… as in this episode.

            I don’t mind having crimes that are not typical of real crimes… a show about investigating real sex crimes with truly realistic investigation methods, and plots that accurately mirrored typical offenses, would be starkly depressing as well as boring. I’d prefer accurate details of unusual crimes and investigations over the alternatives. (This is also the formula for Castle, and the first couple of seasons of CSI.)

        • James

          Have you ever seen the police shows The Wire or Prime Suspect or the old Hill Street Blues? They were all quite realistic AND interesting. They had surprises but no absurd twists. For shows about law and lawyers I always liked Perry Mason (hey, I’m old). I thought the first seasons of the original Law and Order were good and also I liked Judging Amy. But I have no idea how realistic they were (I defer to Ms. Leotta on that).

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  7. I’m responding to James Pollock’s statement, which is very true: “The problem is that TV viewers don’t really want to see everyday real life; they don’t need a TV to see that. People turn on their TV’s to see stories that have something their everyday lives DON’T have. The writers have to provide that, and if reality is boring, they’re NOT going to give you the reality, they’re going to give you an unreality you’ll like better, or at least, that’s what they’re going to try for….Drama is different from real life..”

    I love L&O and SVU, but I know very little about the reality of criminal justice. I have a few lawyers in my family and circle of friends, but they really don’t talk about work.

    I’m in the medical field, so I’ll comment on medical shows. Of all the shows out there, I’d say ER was the best comparison to L&O. They generally focused on extreme cases, such as accidents with mass fatalities rather than what most emergency departments see day-to-day, but they kept it fairly realistic. Most of the scenes that would make my eyes roll still weren’t terribly off base. They certainly over-dramatized certain things for the viewing audience, but they mostly got it right. And Scrubs probably captured reality better than any show in the last few decades. Sure, it was easier since it was character-driven, and based largely on slapstick comedy, but they did a fantastic job showing what hospital work really is. Most of their encounters with patients were just what you’d see in any normal day.

    I won’t bother talking about Grey’s Anatomy. House is the big thing now, anyway. It’s so popular that professors regularly incorporate slides about the show into lectures for medical students. What drives me nuts about House is that it’s so over-dramatized that it’s silly…and that EVERY case is one that most physicians will never encounter.

    I feel like that’s what SVU has become. Every case is ripped from the headlines, and then dressed up to be more exciting than the actual case was. I stopped watching for a while when Sharon Stone was on it,. She’s a terrible actress, but the writing and directing seemed to fall apart as well. I couldn’t even watch Benson and Stabler…their lines were so ridiculous. I haven’t been following SVU until this year. I didn’t think I could watch it without Stabler, but it’s actually been really good.

    But I agree with Alenna. There are suddenly a lot of evil women in this series, and it seems like they can’t get a conviction. I’m still watching, but I feel like every show is overdone and fairly predictable. In this episode, it was pretty obvious early on that the rape accusation was bogus, and it was clear ten minutes before it ended that she seduced that juror, and there wasn’t enough time left in the episode to prove it.

    I’ve been watching old L&O and SVU reruns, and I’m amazed that I’m still surprised by episodes I’ve seen before but don’t remember; I can’t predict the outcome within the first 15 minutes of the show. I hope SVU will revert to writing like they did early on. They finally have a great cast to deliver it once again, especially with Cabot and Novak back on board as believable attorneys.

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  8. Loved the episode watched till the end expecting a twist but only bad ending is their a continuation?

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