SVU Episode #13: Mask

Wow, SVU’s had some incredible guest stars this season, right? Joan Cusack, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and now Jeremy Irons. I thought this was a great episode, with tremendous acting and a smart plot.

Summary:

          A beautiful young woman is tied up and raped in her home by a masked stranger claiming he’s “curing her of Falmouth.” When the woman’s lesbian partner walks in, the rapist beats her so brutally, she ends up in a coma. The comatose woman’s estranged father – Jeremy Irons – rushes into the hospital. He’s a doctor specializing in sex addiction. The detectives soon discover that one of Irons’ sex-addict patients is a serial rapist who listens to confessions of rape at sex addiction treatment centers, then ritually re-rapes the victims while wearing the mask of a Hindu god to “cleanse” the victim of her first rape.

          At first, Irons won’t cooperate with the investigation, standing by the doctor-patient privilege. Elliott goes undercover pretending to be a sex addict in therapy (doing a hilarious job of restraining himself from punching other patients who confess to sex crimes).  We learn that Irons is hiding his own secret: he used to be a sex addict himself. One drunken, blurry night 20 years ago in Falmouth, MA, Irons thinks he raped his own daughter. He confessed this at a recent group therapy session, and now understands that one of his patients raped his daughter’s partner to “cure” the long-ago rape. Eventually, Irons discovers he actually had consensual sex with his daughter’s girlfriend, not his daughter. Irons then cooperates with the investigation, and the detectives find that the serial rapist is Irons’ assistant.

Verdict: A-

What they got right: 

           Ladies, your front door can be the most dangerous place you go all day. In this episode, the rape started when the woman arrived home and unlocked her apartment’s front door. The attacker was waiting for her in the hallway; he pushed her into her apartment then tied her up and assaulted her.

          As you know by now, most rapes aren’t committed by strangers.  They’re committed by someone the victim knows, often intimately: a stepfather or uncle, an ex-boyfriend or schoolmate, a doctor, minister or school coach.

          But when stranger rapes happen, this is one of the most common scenarios. A woman comes home to her apartment building; a man follows her into the lobby; she’s too polite to ask him if he lives there. He follows her up to her apartment, and when she unlocks her door, he pushes her inside and assaults her there. A variation on this method is the stranger who knocks on a woman’s front door and asks to use her phone or something; when she lets him in, he attacks here there.  Assisting with groceries is another way assailants get into the house.

          Many women fear the rapist lurking in the bushes, but that’s actually very rare. Rapists want to commit their crimes somewhere private, hidden and soundproof. Bushes don’t provide that. The woman’s apartment does. Most assailants won’t break in to your house – but they will wait for you to open the door.  Because women often feel safer in their own homes, their guard is down.  

          Ladies, if someone follows you into your building, ask him who he’s visiting. Notify your building manager or the police if he gives a suspicious answer. Don’t get on the elevator with him. Don’t open your front door if a strange guy is lurking nearby. Be aware of your surroundings.  Know that when you unlock your front door, you’re in a vulnerable spot. And don’t open the door to strangers.

          I know, your mom already told you that. Mine did too. But our moms also trained us to be polite, and sometimes our feminine training for politeness overshadows our instincts. When in doubt, trust your gut.

What they got wrong:

          Ice-T ran a CODIS search, and found that this rapist had attacked many women over many years. CODIS stands for Combined DNA Index System, a national database of the DNA profiles of convicted criminals.  It’s one of the most powerful real-life law-enforcement tools we have. Authorities use it to match DNA from a crime scene to a convicted criminal or to DNA from other crime scenes. What the episode got wrong was the speed at which this happens. Maybe Ice-T is sleeping with a bunch of DNA analysts, and they do his cases first.  Even so, the scientific process of determining the DNA profile would take several weeks to complete, and then there’d be even more paperwork and waiting for the search to be run through CODIS. In reality, the whole process would take many months, not the 2-minute turnaround that Ice-T manages.

          And, yeah, you guessed it, in ten years as a prosecutor, I’ve never heard of a serial rapist who wears the mask of a Hindu god and systematically re-rapes victims of past rapes. Most crime is much more random, spur-of-the-moment and careless than that.  But what the heck. It made for an interesting episode.

All views expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.