sign up

Sign up now and get the first 2 chapters of The Last Good Girl

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

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

SVU Episode #22: Bang

by 13 Comments

Summary:  A baby is abandoned by a dumpster on a cold morning, and almost dies of hypothermia. Elliott and Olivia find the mother – a high-powered forty-something professional who recently adopted the baby. Mom is engaged to a suave lawyer – played by John Stamos – who set up the closed adoption for her. John is sleeping with Mom’s hot young nanny, which the detectives discover when they find a ripped condom in the nanny’s garbage can. The person who abandoned the baby, we learn, is Mom’s downstairs neighbor, who was appalled by John’s serial cheating and wanted the baby to have a better life. Mom forgives John for shagging the nanny – because Mom is pregnant with John’s baby. Hearing the news, John embraces her and whispers, “I’m so glad that condom broke.”

        “You’re a reproductive abuser!” Olivia says. (Wow, based on two broken condoms? She was positively clairvoyant tonight.) Turns out, John’s character likes to poke holes in condoms before sex in order to get women pregnant. A beautiful reproductive-abuse expert named Audrey is called in to educate the detectives. “Putting semen inside a woman without her consent should be rape,” Audrey declares. Olivia and Audrey discover that Mom’s adopted baby is actually John’s biological baby (with a junkie ice-rink janitor lady). He took this baby from its biological mother without filing the correct adoption papers. They arrest him on misdemeanor adoption-paperwork charges. The DA declines to prosecute, but the detectives get every women in NY with whom John has a child – all 20 of them! – to confront him as he’s being released. Although it’s clear that he’s ruined many lives, he’s nonchalant. In fact, he says, he has 47 kids if you count the rest of America and Europe.

        Later that night, John is gruesomely killed in the Mom’s garden. The killer was Audrey, the reproductive-abuse expert, who took personal offense at John’s manipulative ways. When he tried to seduce her, she grabbed a special SCUBA knife that blows CO2 into its victims, stabbed him with it, and exploded his intestines all over Mom’s sidewalk.

Verdict: B

What They Got Right: “Reproductive abuse” or “coerced reproduction” is a real phenomenon we’re just starting to learn about. It involves a man using verbal threats, physical aggression, or birth-control sabotage to pressure a woman to get pregnant. All the literature suggests the phenomenon is a one-way street in terms of gender – the phrase doesn’t cover women who manipulate men into getting them pregnant. Doesn’t seem fair, really. But maybe it’s because “coerced reproduction” often goes hand-in-hand with domestic abuse (which usually – although certainly not always – has a female victim of a male perpetrator). In fact, there are higher rates of unintended pregnancies in relationships with partner violence.

What They Got Wrong: Reproductive abuse doesn’t look like this. In real life, it’s more like one guy trying to control one girl. According to an article in Newsweek, “You have guys telling their partners, ‘I can do this because I’m in control’ or ‘I want to know that I can have you forever.’ ” The real scenario looks more like your average domestic abuse relationship than a charming international Lothario. 

This episode reminded me of that creepy doctor who secretly impregnated 75 of his patients at a fertility clinic with his own sperm. Remember him?  His name was Cecil Jacobson, and he looked more like John Goodman than John Stamos.

Shudder.

They called him the Sperminator.  (They didn’t have terms like “reproductive abuse” then.)  He was convicted in 1992 of 52 counts of fraud and perjury. Click here for the transcript of a Saturday Night Live skit about this (a throwback to the days before YouTube, when we had to rely on written transcripts to re-play funnies).  He was awarded a spoof prize, the IgNobel, for “devising a simple, single-handed method of quality control.”

 

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

SVU’s “Lay List” Episode – featuring Guest Blogger Eric Gallun

by 8 Comments

I’m out of the country on vacation this week, but am excited to have former federal prosecutor Eric Gallun guest-blogging about tonight’s SVU episode.  Eric is one of my best friends from the U.S. Attorney’s Office — he started working there two weeks before I did (in 2003) and has been been lording it over me ever since.  He’s also one of the finest trial lawyers I’ve ever seen.  Before working as an AUSA, he served as a public defender and an Assistant Attorney General, and he currently works at the Department of Homeland Security, doing fascinating and important work he’ll never be able to talk about.  Additionally, he has the longest wingspan of any attorney in the District of Columbia.

Eric, thanks for staying up all night to blog about this, freeing me up to do some very important lounging on the beach!

Summary: Our SVU detectives solved the first murder in record time (10:13 pm according to the DVR counter), if only to set up an unlikely rape-of-a-dying girl scenario. The show opens with the standard twenty-something party scene, techno music and beer bongs, and transitions to a group of guys and girls writing with black marker on the forehead of a passed-out girl. The party’s hostess, seemingly concerned for the victim, tries to awaken her, only to discover an obscene amount of blood on the back of her head.

Before any of the party-goers can flee to their SOHO apartments, Detectives Stabler and Tutuola are on the scene. They discover a broken and bloodied mirror in the bedroom where the victim was found – strong evidence of a head-bashing (i.e. subdural hematoma). It turns out the victim, Caitlyn, was not well-liked after publishing a blog (hope that is not this author’s fate) rating all of her many sexual partners over the past three years. Caitlyn dies after being rushed to the ER; this being SVU, there is also some evidence of a sexual assault (the standard vaginal tearing and the not-so-standard blue substance in the vagina. Quick, interview all of the Smurfs in town!)

Again, in record time, the hostess, Jill, finds herself in an interrogation room with Stabler and Tutuola (who only knows one approach to interviewing a suspect – AGGRESSIVE AND IN YOUR FACE) and she confesses that she hated Caitlyn for sleeping with her boyfriend, only invited her to the party to humiliate her in front of others, and ultimately shoved her into the mirror. Jill, of course, did not want to kill Caitlyn, but also did not want to call an ambulance and break up the party.

All of this was a head-fake for the larger story, which was that the blue substance found in Caitlyn’s vagina could only have come from a latex medical glove, and thus A PARAMEDIC ASSAULTED CAITLYN as he transported her to the hospital.

Continuing at break-neck speed, Stabler and Tutuola (Benson was called away during the show’s first thirty minutes to deal with Calvin, a boy for whom she serves as legal guardian thanks to a strung-out mother who is on the run from a murder) discover that the paramedics who transported Caitlyn are co-conspirators in a series of heinous crimes. The older one robs the homes they enter, the younger one sexually assaults injured and defenseless women. The older one is brought in, confesses, and agrees to secretly tape his partner making admissions in a coffee shop. Stabler and Tutuola move in to effect the arrest, the suspect smashes a window, locks himself inside the back of the ambulance and commits suicide with a needle-to-the-neck air embolism. (Ali, how do you do this every week?! The episode was not only ripped-from-the-headlines, it was ripped-from-the-headlines in all 50 states! And the District of Columbia! Better give a shout-out or risk being considered insensitive to the unrepresented half-a-million.)

Now at 10:28 pm, we have the first murder solved, the sexual assault solved, the string of robberies solved, and one dead suspect. And not a trial in sight. (Good news for the prosecutors.) Then, the show really kicks into high gear. Honestly, I have had years of my life where less action has taken place than during this 54 minutes of melodrama.

The second half of the show had Jayne Mansfield’s daughter (Detective Benson) breaking all the rules to find her putative son’s junkie mother, which she did, of course, in direct contravention of her captain’s orders. (On TV crime dramas, every good detective “breaks the rules” and suffers no consequences. It is better, after all, to seek forgiveness as long as you lock up the villains.) The junkie mother is played beautifully by Maria Bello, always under-appreciated (See The Cooler, with William H. Macy.) In the span of twelve minutes, we witness two more confessions to murder, one real, one fabricated to save a lesbian partner. Oh, and Benson confessed to CAPT Cragen that she, and she alone, went after Maria Bello, whom they suspected killed her own abusive father. Good god, man, would the writers have us believe that everyone is so overcome with guilt that NYC was having a mass confessional?! Despite the temporal closeness to Easter, even this was a bit much to swallow.

Just when I thought I had a handle on the plot, the lesbian junkie who killed Maria Bello’s rapist father was herself gunned down after making bail on the charge of 2nd Degree Murder. Honestly, at this point, you are just going to have to watch the episode– after three dead bodies, and countless other crimes, and too many suspects to count, the whole thing is a hot mess. Fifty-seven persons earned writing credits for this episode, including the key grip who wandered through an early party scene and muttered, “You got a marker?”

 Verdict:  On the Ali Leotta bell curve: B- 

                       On the Eric P. Gallun “Am I getting paid for this?!” Scale: D

What they got wrong:  Cab drivers do not remember every fare! They do not remember what their passengers looked like, what they said (verbatim!) and where exactly they dropped their charge. They also do not remember how much they tipped. This is known as the hot dog cart vendor syndrome, where every criminal case can be solved with a spot-on description from the hot dog cart guy. “Oh, yes, two weeks ago Thursday? He was light-complected with reddish hair, a strange laugh and he bought one with mustard and relish.” “Thank you sir, I knew the killer was a clown.”

Police detectives who ignore direct commands find themselves in hot water. Whether it’s a reassignment or a terrible shift, there are consequences.

Detectives cannot work on cases where there is a conflict of interest, even a perceived one.

The SVU solved more crimes in an hour than most detectives do in a year. (Ali has blogged in the past about the amazing technology. Let’s just say that most of the detectives I worked with did their best work with a notepad and some people skills.) Just once, I would like to see them NOT solve a crime. No leads, no suspects, no arrest. Just a random street crime with no resolution. Not good TV, but real.

No one gets bail on 2nd Degree Murder charges, especially not transient junkies. Excuse me, displaced formerly-healthful persons.

What they got right:  Crime scenes can be chaotic upon arrival. A greedy police officer or EMT could easily steal money and other valuables and go undetected.

Police officers’ private lives often interfere with police work. When these dedicated civil servants work 20-hour days, six days a week, something’s gotta give. I’ve had more than my fair share of officer or detective leave court to go take care of urgent family matters. When they did it without communicating with me, we had a problem. As long as they informed me, gave me good contact information and stayed in touch, we were cool. Family first. Sadly, many officers’ marriages end in divorce.

DNA can be a great and valuable investigative tool, and in this episode it freed one man who was falsely arrested for the murder of the avenging lesbian junkie. However, DNA test results can take weeks, even months, and are never returned in the span of a commercial break.

The Wrap-Up

Finally, a huge thank you to Ali who asked me to do this while she took some much-needed time off. This is way harder than it looks! The plot summary alone for this blog requires too many mental gymnastics and too much caffeine to truly appreciate. Not being a regular SVU-watcher, I must say the actors are generally excellent; the writers, however, should lay off the Red Bull for a spell. Oh, and if I got any of the details wrong, I may have been watching CSI, hard to know for sure.

All views expressed on this website are the author’s alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of the the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or any other government agency.

SVU Episode #21: Reparations

by 8 Comments

Summary: 

             This was an interesting exploration of what can grow from seeds of hate sown decades ago. A young white woman is raped in her bedroom. At first she says it was her black neighbor – but her ID is shaky, and the evidence quickly proves the neighbor innocent. Then she remembers that another black man, who delivers vegetables to the school where she’s a teacher, cursed at her a few weeks earlier. Liquid on male shoeprints left in her room is from a cleaning solution used only in NY’s public schools. Armed with this information, Elliot and Ice-T arrest the veggie guy, in one of the flimsiest arrests in the history of TV crime drama.

                    DA Casey Novak is back, after having her law license revoked for three years. She’s now in a probationary period at work and desperate to win this case. Representing the defendant is hunky Terrence Howard, taking a break from being a DA on Law & Order: LA to defend his cousin the veggie guy.

                   At trial, Terrence eviscerates this victim, calling her a racist and arguing she’d accuse any black guy who crossed her path. The trial breaks down when the victim’s grandfather yells at veggie guy’s mother. Turns out, Grampa was a Klan member who raped Mom 45 years ago, to impede her work as a civil-rights activist. She told the police but no one believed her. Novak subpoenas Mom to testify, to prove veggie guy’s motive for raping the girl. To save Mom from this indignity, veggie guy admits he broke into the girl’s house and pulled her clothes off, as revenge for what her grandfather did to his mother. But he couldn’t go through with the rape. The girl made that last part up at Grampa’s urging. Veggie guy goes away for 15 years, the girl is arrested for perjury, and the two lawyers give each other a respectful nod.

Verdict:  B-

What they got wrong: 

                      The detectives had more probable cause to arrest the cilantro in veggie’s guy’s basket than veggie guy himself. What was their evidence? (1) Veggie guy once cursed at the victim, and (2) a liquid from the public schools (where thousands of people go every day) was in the shoeprint in her bedroom. Basically, it came down to him dropping the F bomb – which would make most D.C. residents eligible for immediate arrest. Not only do I think his case wouldn’t make it past a preliminary hearing, I think veggie guy would have a decent lawsuit against NYPD for wrongful arrest. (Until he confessed.)
                      
                   The DA’s decision to force veggie guy’s mom to testify about her long-ago rape was wrong – not only because it was heartless, but because it was legally insupportable. Criminal trials are about the crime charged. Evidence of a 40-year-old rape would be irrelevant, and therefore inadmissible, unless the DA could prove that the defendant knew about it. Then she might arguably have evidence of motive. But she didn’t have that here.

                      And, crime shows love to depict how worried prosecutors are about their win-loss record. “Want to know how good I am? Look at my conviction record,” Terrence huffed. “If I lose this case, I’m done,” Novak sobbed. That’s not how it works in real life. No one in my office ever asks about win-loss stats. It’s not important. Doing the right thing is. Being a prosecutor gives you the duty (and the luxury) of always trying to do justice. That’s what I love about the job. If you think a guy is innocent, you don’t keep hammering away to get another “W” in your column —  you dismiss the charges. A prosecutor’s job is to search for the truth and then do the right thing based on what she finds. Statistic-crazy TV prosecutors give me the willies.

What they got right: 

                        Ladies, lock your windows! In this case, the assailant climbed in through the girl’s unlocked fire escape window. In reality, predators do look for weak links like this. The real-life East Coast Rapist would scope out apartment buildings, checking every unit until he found one with an unlocked window or open door. That’s the woman he’d rape.

                   Yes, a prosecutor from L.A. can act as a defense attorney for his cousin in New York. I’ve had to look this one up myself, when friends have asked if I could write a will for them or help them fight a traffic ticket. Generally, I can’t. I work for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the United States can be my only client. There’s an exception, however, for immediate family members involved in a case where the U.S. isn’t a party. I could theoretically get approval to defend my sisters if they were prosecuted by the city of New York. My sisters are pretty good citizens, though, and I hope I won’t have to take advantage of this rule.

 Neither right nor wrong, but interesting:

              These days, the majority of sexual assaults are intra-racial, that is, the victim and the perpetrator have the same racial background.  

                    For a provocative exploration of some of the themes in tonight’s show, check out my friend Chris Kuzneski’s novel, “The Plantation,” about “an army of militant black men who kidnap the white descendants of slave owners and transport them to a secret island compound. There, the women are raped and the men tortured before being shipped to Africa to serve as slaves to black families.” This novel won Chris a devoted following and catapulted him into international bestsellerdom.

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

SVU Episode #20: Totem

by 11 Comments

Summary: Jeremy Irons returned to guest star in his role a sex-addiction psychiatrist – who’s no longer under investigation by SVU but is now helping them investigate their cases. He’s called in to help profile a killer when a seven-year-old girl is found dead and sexually assaulted, her body stuffed in a suitcase. At first, the detectives think the killer is the girl’s mother’s new boyfriend, who’s been accused of sexually assaulting a girl before. But Dr. Irons thinks the killer must be a woman, because the little corpse was wrapped in sheets with a doll tucked in the suitcase with her. These are hallmarks, he says, of a feminine killer. The detectives soon close in on the girl’s pretty piano teacher. While they’re in her house, they find some evidence of the crime, but the house has been scrubbed with bleach. Dr. Irons goes on a charm offensive, and soon the piano teacher confesses to killing the girl and placing her body in the suitcase. The teacher says she herself was a victim of sexual abuse as child, at the hands of her own mother. But then Elliott and Olivia suspect the piano teacher didn’t do it. They go to question her mother, and discover mom’s living with another younger daughter, who she’s still sexually abusing (there’s only one bed in their posh apartment). The younger sister is seriously messed up from the mother’s abuse. The younger sister ultimately confesses that she killed and sexually assaulted the little girl. The piano teacher confessed to the murder in order to protect her younger sister.

Verdict: B+

What they got right: As horrific and outlandish as it sounds, this was based on the real case of Sandra Cantu, an eight-year-old girl whose body was found stuffed in a suitcase and dumped in an irrigation ditch in California. Medical examination revealed that she had been sexually assaulted with a rolling pin before she was killed. The assailant turned out to be a female Sunday-school teacher named Melissa Huckaby.


Female sexual predators are uncommon, but real. Most child sexual abuse is committed by men; but studies show that women commit 14% to 40% of offenses reported against boys and 6% of offenses reported against girls. Some experts speculate that there is much more female-on-female abuse, but it goes unreported because of the stigma. If you’re interested in reading more, here’s a good article called “Female Sexual Abuse: the untold story of society’s last taboo.”

What they got wrong: In the vast majority of cases with this fact pattern, the assailant would have been the girl’s mother’s new boyfriend. That’s so often the case. From my perspective, the most dangerous person in any kid’s life is the new boyfriend that mom brings into the home. Uncles, stepfathers, fathers, and male cousins are also responsible for a lot of sexual violence against children. But an unrelated male, who has no biological or emotional connection to the child but who lives in the same house with them, is the perpetrator in the bulk of child sex cases. In this case, where mom’s boyfriend had been previously convicted of molesting children – forget it. It would’ve been him.                
                  Was anyone else bothered by the fact that Elliott and Olivia were all buddy-buddy with the piano teacher by the end of the episode? The woman was still guilty of serious crimes: obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting a homicide. She didn’t kill the girl, but when she discovered that her sister had, she stuffed the body in a suitcase and dumped it on the sidewalk. She used bleach to sanitize the crime scene. She threw out evidence of the crime, then lied to the police. You can’t do that. If you find a corpse in your house, call the police. Tell them everything you know. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. This piano teacher should be facing a long stint in Rikers.
                   And I have to raise an eyebrow at their choice of Jeremy Irons as a police psychiatrist. Don’t get me wrong; I love him as an actor. Everything he says in that British accent sounds smart and sexy. He could tell me, “I’d like some ketchup with my fries,” and I’d probably faint. But I wouldn’t suggest using a guy you were once investigating for sexual assault as your police psychiatrist for new cases. Hey Doc, good news: you’re not under arrest, so … uh … can you help us with this new case? It’s not illegal, but it doesn’t exactly have the foundations of a great team.

SVU Episode #19: Bombshell

by 8 Comments

Summary:  I feel like I have whiplash, there were so many twists in this episode.  I’m not sure I can sum them up in a paragraph.  Here goes . . .  A middle-aged guy is stabbed in the groin and falls into a coma.  The detectives meet his seemingly perfect family, but soon learn that he and the Mrs. frequented The Swing Set, a swingers club.  Olivia and Elliott go undercover as a married couple experimenting with sex (with some fun tension between the partners).  At the club, they learn that Mr. Mid-Life Crisis fell in love with a beautiful young woman (the “bombshell” of the title), and felt sorry for her because she had an abusive boyfriend.  While the detectives are at the club, Bombshell’s scruffy biker boyfriend shows up and growls menacingly until Elliott arrests him on suspicion of knifing the older guy.  But Mr. Mid-Life wakes from his coma and says that his wife is the one who stabbed him.  The wife confesses.  The cops still want to arrest the biker boyfriend, but the DA says they don’t have enough evidence (she’s right).  The cops are still worried Biker might beat up Bombshell, so they follow him – and find the two tangling tongues.  Turns out, Biker and Bombshell are not exes – they’re still together.  The cops arrest both of them for fraud.  But Mr. Mid-Life is in love.  He bails out Bombshell, quits his job and is ready to start a new life with her . . . until the cops analyze DNA evidence and reveal that Bombshell and Biker are brother/sister.  Gross.  They’re also suspects in a murder in Miami and possibly grifters who use the battered-girlfriend act as a way to get cash from married swingers. In a fit of jealous rage, Mr. Mid-Life murders Biker.

Verdict: B-

What they got wrong:  Getting a married guy to drain his daughter’s college fund for you is rotten, but it’s not a crime.  Olivia and Elliott arrested the Biker/Bombshell duo for defrauding and extorting Mr. Mid-Life, but I don’t think they had much of a case.  If they did, too many presents between lovers would be subject to some kind of fraud claim.  The judicial system would be overwhelmed.  Where would we even start to draw the line among all the little lies lovers tell each other? You appear buxom, but only because you’re wearing a Miracle Bra.  Fraud charges?  You still hook up occasionally with the guy you call your “ex”– are you guilty of extortion?  I don’t think so.  I thought this was a pretty weak arrest.
            Also, in real life, we wouldn’t see two cops so concerned for the safety of a domestic violence victim that they’d tail her boyfriend.  I wish we had a system that could afford that kind of resources.  I’m sure many cops would be concerned, but in the real world, Olivia and Elliott would have been handling two unrelated 911 calls rather than following Biker as he strolled through Manhattan.

What they got right:  Remember that big geyser-like blood-spurt at the beginning of the episode, when the bystander in the parking garage pulled the knife out of Mr. Mid-Life’s groin?  I was skeptical about that much blood, but my brother-in-law, Mike, is a physician’s assistant, and he assures me that this was realistic.  Mike says the femoral artery contains all the blood that flows through your entire body, and if that artery is punctured, the blood can spurt to the ceiling.  Mike suggests that if you ever get stabbed in the femoral artery, that you leave the knife in place until a doctor can get it out.  I hope that you will never have to use this tip.
                 It’s also true that “swinging” isn’t illegal.  But, as we saw tonight, it might get you stabbed in the groin. 

All views expressed on this blog are mine alone, and don’t necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Rerun of “Possessed”

by 1 Comment

Tonight, SVU ran reruns of “Possessed” and “Penetration” — you can see my blog on those episodes by clicking on the titles.

Meanwhile, here’s some fun stuff to sate your SVU appetite:

(1) An article announcing that John Stamos will guest star on SVU this spring, instead of replacing Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, as some TV execs had suggested. Stamos might not have Tiger Blood, but I think he’ll be Winning on SVU.

(2) A meticulous and goofy analysis of Law & Order’s conviction rate.  As a law geek myself, I liked this.  Thanks to a hip reader named John for emailing me about this one.

 

Enjoy and have a good week!

 

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