Recap: A young couple from Buffalo comes to Manhattan and claims that their 3-month-old baby was stolen along with their car. Soon mom and dad’s stories start to conflict and fall apart. Things look even more suspicious when the baby’s fecal matter is found inside a cooler.  Eventually, the detectives find the baby buried in a beach. The father then confesses that he shook the baby to death, while the mother confesses that she drowned the baby in a tub. But, it turns out, both parents were lying. The ME discovers that the baby died of SIDS. The parents staged the abduction to cover the unexpected death, and then confessed to protect each other. At the end, the detectives let the sobbing couple go home.

Verdict: B

What they got right: This is such a tragic scenario, but one I had to deal with all the time. A couple times a month, we’d get the case of a baby who died from or suffered catastrophic injuries. Of course, the infant can’t tell us what happened, so investigators are left to figure it out as best we can. It’s very difficult, as an emotional and evidentiary matter. Often, the cause of the injuries is Shaken Baby Syndrome, where the child suffers severe brain damage from being shaken. Shaken babies’ brains show a particular pattern of brain injuries, but that pattern can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from a baby who merely fell off a tall bed onto a wood floor. Investigators rely heavily on the stories given by the parents, but must take these stories with a grain of salt, as the parents are often the ones who inflicted the injuries. The long, drawn-out questioning in this episode – with the detectives agonizing over the case, trying to figure out what the hell actually happened, all the while losing time with their own kids – was very realistic.

What they got wrong: There have been plenty of cases in the last decade of parents falsely claiming that their children were abducted. Never has there been a case where SIDS was the actual culprit. And it didn’t make much sense. Why would the parents confess to a much worse story than what actually happened? Yes, people occasionally make false confessions. But saying you drowned your kid when you know that he died in his sleep seems not only unwise, but unbelievable.

At the end of the episode, SVU decides to let the parents go free. “They’ll be paying for this for the rest of their lives,” Nick says, and everyone nods sadly. Not in the real world. They’d be facing obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, and lying to the police charges. At the very least, the mom’s statement that “everyone knows bad things happen in New York City” would get her some charges from this crew.

Finally, I was underwhelmed with their “poop in the cooler” evidence. Not to be totally gross, but . . . I have two pre-school-aged boys, and a small layer of their poop probably coats every item in my house. I doubt any of it would have much evidentiary value.

On a side note, did anyone else notice that the DA is looking paler and paler, and her hair getting more maroon, every episode? My theory is that she’s turning into a vampire. Hey, that might be a hot show these days: vampires solving sex crimes! What do you think?

Recap: This storyline was an imaginative twist on the Arnold Schwarzenegger situation. In real life, Arnold had an affair with his housekeeper, who got pregnant and had his baby.  Neither of them mentioned that to Arnold’s beautiful and politically-connected wife, Maria Shriver. Housekeeper and child lived in the mansion with Arnold, Maria, and their kids for over a decade. Maria finally learned the truth when The Enquirer broke the story. The fact that no crime was committed then says a lot about Maria’s self-control.

In this episode, a shy 13-year-old girl is pregnant but her hymen is still intact. SVU is called to find out who the father is. The girl won’t disclose at first, claiming that she was impregnated miraculously by God. That might work on another network, but SVU isn’t that kind of TV show. The detectives go looking for a human culprit. After dispensing with the usual suspects (a priest, a teacher who’s on the sex-offender registry), the detectives hone in on Arturo, the girl’s schoolmate and best friend. Arturo denies having sex with her, but points to Tripp Raines, the 13-year-old son of a wealthy and powerful Ambassador. Arturo’s mom used to work for Tripp’s family; Arturo introduced the girl and Tripp. Tripp cockily admits to taking the girl’s “cherry,” but doesn’t care that he’s messed up her life.

The girl finally admits she had sex with Tripp, once, in his bedroom, during a party at his house. Tripp said she was pretty, they kissed, then he pushed her down on the bed and had sex with her. She said “no,” but Tripp asked if she wanted him to like her; she said yes, and he continued. Afterward he sent her roses and a note that said, “Still dreaming about you.” She loved him, thought they were going to be married, and dreamed he would make her a princess.

The detectives go to the Raines family mansion and try to talk to Tripp’s father, the Ambassador, without his wife. “We have no secrets from each other,” the Ambassador’s wife sniffs. Uh oh, start the scary music, because you know what that statement means. This episode won’t end until the wife’s still-beating heart has been torn from her chest by some colossal secret her husband is harboring.

Meanwhile, the detectives find Tripp bludgeoned to death in Central Park. Turns out Arturo did it. He had figured out that he was the Ambassador’s son – which got him and his mom kicked out of the Raines house (with a hefty payoff). And Arturo was deeply in love with the girl, and offended by his half-brother’s cavalier attempt to make her get an abortion.  You can’t solve every problem with money, Arturo sobs. With all the emotions swirling around his adorable little head, Arturo beat Tripp to death with a rock. (Is it just me, or was that cute little actor the furthest thing from a homicidal maniac you could imagine?)

Verdict: B+

What they got right: Let’s handle the most uncomfortable physical fact first. Yes, a girl who’s had sex could still have an intact hymen. It doesn’t mean a virgin birth is about to happen, just that that piece of anatomy is stretchy and tough. This doesn’t actually come up in many sex offense cases.

There is no florist-client privilege. These days, a lot of people believe in privileges that don’t actually exist. I’ve had people argue that information they told their hotel, their postman, or their yoga instructor was privileged. Nope. Basically, you have a privilege for things you tell your doctor, spouse, attorney, or  religious leader.   That’s all. And in certain circumstances, even those can be circumvented.

Sex-crime victims often don’t want to identify their assailant. I’ve actually seen remarkably similar cases – usually involving teenage girls – many times. Often, the victim is in love with her assailant and her allegiance is with him, not the police.

The sex crime in this episode was a tough call. Olivia thought they had a good forcible-rape case against Tripp, but the ADA disagreed. I saw the ADA’s point. It’s hard to try a case where the victim initially lied about who raped her, even before you get to the muddled issue of consent here. But reasonable minds could disagree. I can see the debate between the ADA and Olivia happening exactly that way in real life.

What they got wrong: After they determined that the possible assailant was a 13-year-old boy, the case would no longer be handled by a sex-offense DA. It would go to the unit that handles juvenile cases. If Tripp was charged, it would be as a juvenile. In D.C., the case would go from the U.S. Attorney’s Office to the Office of the Attorney General, next door.

Hurry up – and wait. After Tripp admitted having sex with the girl, the detectives kept running around trying to confirm that actually happened. In most cases involving 13-year-olds, the detective would simply wait until the girl had the baby, and then run DNA testing to confirm that the suspected father was the biological father.

Finally, in most cases of a pregnant 13-year-old girl, no authorities would be called at all. There are countless teenage girls who give birth and no police officer is ever notified. The idea that the girl’s school would call the police is a nice one – but not always the case in real life, where schools see so many underage pregnancies they become numb to them. Often, I would meet girls who’d given birth to babies a year or two ago – and who’d just recently found the courage to come forward and identify their adult assailant. No reports had been made by anyone at the time of the girl’s pregnancy or birth.

I loved tonight’s show. It was realistic, interesting, and shone a light on an important and taboo subject. I liked the raw, stripped-down feel of this episode. The writers got rid of the unbelievable technology and DA cleavage that’s cluttered recent shows and focused on the issue of male sex-assault victims in a true and gut-wrenching way. I actually teared up at the ending. This is the SVU that made so many loyal fans fall in love with it.

Verdict: A+

Recap: A youth basketball coach is being honored for his work with young boys. During the award ceremony, a man named Stevie busts in and shouts that Coach deserves to be in jail, not the hall of fame. Our SVU detectives learn that Stevie was molested by the coach when he was a kid. The coach paid him off for many years to keep the secret – and he did it to others. The detectives interview other young men who’ve received payments from the coach, but all of them deny being sexually assaulted. We see their different reactions. Some are afraid of being considered gay. Some seem to pause and consider talking, but can’t get past the shame. One man freaks out and says he’d stab anyone who touched him like that.

Finally, our detectives track down Prince, the most famous basketball player the coach ever taught. Prince is a Michael Jordan-like NBA star with his own brand of shoes, fragrance, and clothing. It’s clear that Coach sexually abused him as a child, but the arrogant Prince can’t bring himself to admit it.

In the meantime, we see the destruction that Coach’s sexual assaults have wrought, from a boy who committed suicide decades ago, to Stevie himself, who’s a junkie. Stevie ends up murdered by Prince’s second-in-command, who wants to protect the superstar’s “brand.”

The detectives struggle with how to make the Prince talk to them. The consider using a wire or forcing him to talk in the Grand Jury. But they realize they need his cooperation. Finally, they convince him by showing him a boy who’s about to go on a road trip with the coach. Prince sees a bit of himself in the talented young athlete who’s in the precarious position. Prince finally agrees to testify truthfully in the Grand Jury.

In the final scene, Prince musters up the courage to hold a press conference telling the world what Coach did to him. We see how much this means to the other victims, from the mother of the boy who committed suicide, to the young athlete who’s currently being molested by the coach. The boy silently reaches for his mother’s arms as Prince says, “The shame is not ours, it his.” That’s when I had to grab my Kleenex.

What they got right: Sexual assaults are the most under-reported crimes in America, and assaults against male victims are the most under-reported of all. It’s estimated that 1 in 4 American women and 1 in 6 American men will be the victim of a sexual assault in their lifetime. But hardly any of the male survivors come forward. This is a real problem. As a prosecutor, I saw the fraction of sexual assault cases that were reported. Although men make up a significant portion of the survivors, the vast majority of my cases involved female complainants. The stigma attached to sexual assault is even worse for male victims, and they are much less likely to report it or even talk about it. Detective Amanda Rollins got it right when she said, “Male victims today are where female victims were 40 years ago. It’s the dark ages.” Kudos to SVU for getting people to talk about this subject. I hope the episode will help survivors realize that they’re not alone, and encourage some to seek out counseling or even come forward.

The show also got right how the police struggled to get the testimony they needed from the victims. Often, the real challenge in these cases isn’t solving the crime but helping the survivor find his voice. I’ve never seen a wire used on a victim (rather than a suspect), but it was a creative twist. And it was good that they ultimately decided that they needed to get Prince to want to testify. That’s very real. It’s almost impossible (and inadvisable) to bring a sex offense case unless you have a victim who’s found the strength to want to talk about what happened.

If you’re interested in this topic, a great novel dealing with it is Bryan Gruley‘s Edgar-nominated “Starvation Lake,” about the secrets kept in a small northern Michigan hockey town.

On a different note, I liked the new detective, Nick Amaro. We just got a few hints about his character. He took out a picture of his little girl for his desk, then looked around the precinct and put it away. Maybe he doesn’t want sex offenders to see his kid?  There was also a quick reference to a wife serving in Iraq. No sexual tension yet between him and the new female detective, but the season is still young.

What they got wrong: Believe it or not, I didn’t see anything to nitpick tonight. I was too riveted by the story. Sorry for falling down on the job. If you saw some nits that I missed, please leave a comment!

Recap: I’m sure SVU’s writers would disagree, but it seems this episode practically wrote itself. If you followed the DSK case, you know that SVU’s season premiere paralleled the most notorious sex-offense case of this summer. In real life, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF and likely next president of France, was accused of rape by a maid at his posh NY hotel. In the SVU episode, the politician was Italian, and lecherous mercie’s were simply replaced with lecherous grazie’s (as when the Berlusconi-wannabe accepted a glass of champagne from a callipygian flight attendant).

In the real DSK case, the prosecution fell apart when the Manhattan DA’s Office discovered serious credibility problems with the victim (there were reports that she’d lied about being raped in her home country of Guinea in order to get asylum in the U.S., that she falsified tax returns, that she’d accepted large sums of money from a drug dealer, that she made phone calls to that drug dealer (recorded because he was in jail) talking about how much money she could get from DSK, and, perhaps most damningly, that she repeatedly changed her story of how the sexual assault actually happened). In real life, it was clear that the Manhattan DA’s office couldn’t go forward with the case.  The charges against DSK were dropped in August, before a trial ever went forward. (Check out my analysis here.)

In the SVU episode, the victim’s fall from grace wasn’t quite as steep, and the case actually went to trial. The SVU facts were almost like a law professor’s hypothetical, where the weight on each side of the scale is almost precisely even, and when the professor polls the class, the students are evenly split. That’s what happened with the SVU jury, which returned a compromise verdict rejecting the sex assault charges but finding the Italian bigwig guilty of wrongful imprisonment.

Verdict: A-

What they got right: Many sexual assault victims lie about something – often something even more significant than what was portrayed on this episode. That doesn’t mean they weren’t sexually assaulted. Often, sexual assaults happen to very vulnerable victims: prostitutes, children, inebriated people. They might not tell police or prosecutors the full story at first. Many details are embarrassing or painful. Every sex-offense prosecutor becomes intimately familiar with the term “rolling disclosures.” The whole story might not come out in the first telling. You have to gain the trust of your witness before she tells you everything.

You also have to do your due diligence as the prosecutor. You have a duty to be fair to everyone – including the defendant. Your job isn’t just to win, but to make sure justice is done. That means investigating what the victim says and seeing if external evidence corroborates or disproves her story – and then turning over any discrepancies to the defense. One interesting difference between the SVU storyline and the real DSK case was that in the SVU episode, the defense attorney was the one who found out about the victim’s credibility problems. In real life, the DA’s office itself discovered the victim’s problems. The DA’s office might’ve been too quick to arrest DSK, but they did the right thing by discovering the problems with their witness and promptly informing the defense.

This episode also accurately portrayed the prosecutor’s struggle with how to handle a difficult case. “Prosecutorial discretion” means that the individual prosecutor can decide what to do with her case: like whether to bring charges, and what charges to bring. It’s a luxury most lawyers don’t have (a public defender, for example, can’t say he won’t take a case because he thinks his client is guilty). But this discretion can also be a burden. I empathized with the SVU lawyers as they struggled with each other, and within themselves, to figure out what to believe and how to steer the case accordingly.

What they got wrong: I laughed when our new detective foisted off her box of personal effects, hopped onto the elevator, and raced out to the crime scene on her first day. Anyone who’s worked a government job knows that your first day is spent getting fingerprinted, choosing a health care plan, and trying to stay awake during WordPerfect training – not swabbing blood at the scene of the biggest case of the year. But good for Detective Amanda Rollins, for being a go-getter.

And as much as I mourn Elliott’s leaving the show, it was time for him to go, as evidenced by this dialogue about his most recent shooting of a civilian (the girl who walked into the cellblock and shot several suspects in last season’s finale).

Captain Cragen:  IAB is going to be all over Elliott.

Olivia:  It was a good shooting!

Captain Cragen:  But it was his sixth.

Elliott’s shot six people! Holy cow. No wonder he’s being investigated by Internal Affairs. Most cops don’t fire their service weapon during their entire career.

I also appreciated these lines:

Captain Cragen:  If Elliott wants to stay, they’ll make him take anger management classes.

Olivia:  Then he’ll tell them to go to hell!

Generally, this isn’t a great response to your anger management instructors (but Elliott, and many real-life cops, may very well have said something like that). I felt sorry for Olivia as she sobbed for her partner in the back room, but I’m looking forward to meeting our new male detective on next week’s episode.

(Meanwhile, I loved that I nailed which ripped-from-the-headlines story would be first up on SVU’s docket.  Click here to see the rest of my guesses on which real-life news stories will become SVU storylines next.)

I’m in Venice, a fabulous city except for one thing: no access to NBC. Try as I might, I can’t find a way to watch the SVU season premiere here. So forgive me if I post my blog about the show a couple days late. In the meantime, here’s a primer on what to expect during the first episode of Season 13!

Boy Meets Girl. There’s a new cast of detectives lined up for Season 13. (Elliot is gone and Olivia is only appearing part-time.) So how will the new girl and boy be introduced? Will they hate each other or will it be love-at-first-sight? Is she a control freak, and he an uncontrollable slob? Perhaps she’s a gourmet cook, and he’s always on a diet? One thing’s for sure, there’ll be plenty of …

Sexual Tension. The requisite ingredient for any Law & Order franchise. With actors this attractive, it shouldn’t be hard to pull off.

Police Brutality. If our new male detective is anything like Elliott, we can expect at least one suspect every three episodes to be roughed up while in police custody. Some suspect will doubtless have his constitutional rights violated during the premiere.

A Dent in the Foster Care System. If our new female detective is anything like Olivia, she’ll want to adopt every kid she works with. (A lot of us working in the system have this instinct, but Olivia seems to act on it more often.) There probably won’t be any adoption in the premiere (too soon), but I put the odds at 1 in 3 that our new Lady Detective will lose her heart to an orphan at some point during the season.

Vigilante Justice. Most SVU episodes seem to end with the rapist being killed by his victim. The manner of death varies– beating with a frying pan, stabbing with an exploding SCUBA knife, shooting in the central cellblock – but they all die. Personally, I’m hoping that the SVU writers will allow a few defendants to survive until trial, so we can actually see the justice system at work.

Amazing Technology. Our beloved SVU detectives seem to have an App to solve any crime. You guessed it – you can’t actually download any of those Apps today. Still, expect to see liberal use of an iPad on the premiere.

At Least One Catfight. I’m guessing the writers can’t resist at least one blowup between Olivia and the new woman. They probably have the self-restraint to stay away from mud wrestling and jello pools, but the rest of the world is fair game.

Have fun watching in real time, and I’ll catch up with you soon!

With the season premiere of SVU just two weeks away, I’ve been busy preparing.  Stretching my fingers so I can type up all the inaccuracies with ninja-quick speed. Practicing my math skills so I’ll be able to tally the body count in an instant.  And watching L&O spoofs.  I liked this mashup of L&O and Shrek, particularly the fact that, even in the cartoon version of the crime drama, the female DA showcases her impressive cleavage.

See you on September 21st for the Season 13 premiere!