Summary: A rich businesswoman is found dead in her apartment above an art gallery. Her neck has been slit by a glass shard, she has a blood alcohol level of 1.6, her panties are around her ankles, and she has anal trauma. Elliott and Olivia soon focus on the luxury wine company where the victim worked as a bookkeeper. The company marketed itself as a happy wine-making family, but the CEO was actually a terrible boss who berated and slapped her employees. The employees put up with the abuse because the company was about to be sold, and if they hung in there, they’d get rich. But the victim took videos of the CEO slapping her, and the other employees feared she’d leak them and ruin their deal. Elliott and Olivia ultimately discover that a handsome wine salesman went to the victim’s house and tried to seduce her into handing over the videos. When she declined his advances, he pushed her into the coffee table, where the broken glass lodged in her neck. Hoping to make it look like an accident, the salesman inserted a bottle of champagne into her anus to intoxicate her and make it look like she stumbled into the table while drunk.

Verdict: B

What they got right and wrong:  A person can get drunk by “ingesting” alcohol through their vagina or anus. This has been a trend in recent years: college girls soaking tampons with vodka and inserting them in their nether regions. The girls say they like getting drunk without the calories or beer breath (that last part is wrong, since the body gives off alcohol fumes through the lungs regardless of where it’s ingested). Medical experts say doing this can cause terrible damage to the vagina:

Back to the crime. The key to intoxication through the anus or vagina is the bloodstream. The alcohol makes its way across the thin epithelial barrier and is carried directly into the blood, which then travels around the body intoxicating the person. So – this method of intoxication wouldn’t work for a person who’s already dead. If you insert a champagne bottle into a corpse’s anus, you won’t intoxicate the corpse – there’s no bloodstream to carry the alcohol around the body.

Maybe the killer inserted the champagne bottle while the woman was in the process of dying, but not yet dead? It’s hard to imagine there’d be enough time, with the carotid artery cut and the woman bleeding out, to get her blood-alcohol level all the way to 1.6. Even if there was, can you imagine the mess that would make? As she’s spurting blood from her neck, the killer lifts her off the broken glass table, turns her over, undresses her bottom half, manages to get the bottle in the right place and hold it there … He would be soaked in blood and champagne and likely leaving bloody fingerprints and footprints all over the place. The Medical Examiner said that there was no DNA or fingerprints, and speculated that the killer wore gloves, suggesting a meticulously executed murder. But it turned out this crime was an accident covered with improvisation, which would be much messier than that.

Sorry to stray from my usual legal analysis, but there wasn’t much law on tonight’s show, and as a mystery writer, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how to kill people in unique ways. I appreciated SVU’s creativity tonight but (as usual) had to do some nitpicking.  After blogging about this, I really need a beer . . . via the traditional route, thankyouverymuch.

If you’re interested in seeing how they filmed some of these scenes, click here.

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