SVU recap Archives - Allison Leotta, novelist, former sex-crimes prosecutor, tv critic

SVU Episode #14-23: Brief Interlude

16 May, 2013 by Allison Leotta 8 Comments

What’s more dangerous: cheating on your husband or giving a sandwich to a homeless guy? SVU says: the sandwich.

Recap:

A pretty blond parties at a throbbing nightclub and grinds between a man and a woman with a suspiciously large Adam’s apple. Her battered body is found by a jogger the next day; she’s lying in a rowboat bobbing on the river behind the mayor’s mansion. The victim is in a coma, and has no ID.

First interview: the too-nervous jogger, still clutching her jogging stroller. “You were far from home. Were you going to meet your lover – with your baby?” Amanda asks, in a tone conveying that this would be pretty despicable, even by SVU standards.

But it turns out the jogger was going to buy Adderall from the two teens who were rifling through the victim’s pockets. The pimply teens are considered, then quickly dismissed as the rapists, but not before they turn over a hotel key card they found in the victim’s pockets.

The Medical Examiner makes a special guest appearance to declare: (1) the victim has scars from a hernia operation done by a surgeon who wasn’t American, (2) DNA on the victim’s body is from three different men, and (3) it would be more convenient if the victim were dead, because then we could better estimate when she’d been assaulted.

(Yikes. Many ME’s have a dark perspective, but, wow, Dr. Warner, that was cold.)

[Read more…]

SVU Episode #14-22: Poisoned Motive

9 May, 2013 by Allison Leotta 8 Comments

Prisoners fathering children with prison workers; rogue cops going on killing sprees targeting other cops: Tonight’s episode took several real cases of official misconduct and turned them into a fairly unrealistic but fast-moving story about mental illness, rage, and revenge.

Recap:

As Amanda leads a human trafficker on a perp-walk from police headquarters, she’s shot in the shoulder by a sniper hiding on a nearby rooftop! Finn rushes her to the hospital, where she recovers in a slurry morphine stupor. Finn promises to find the bad guy who hurt his partner.

Our detectives cycle through the requisite colorful suspects, including: (1) the “dragon lady” trafficker who was being perp-walked, (2) a hippie druggie friend of Amanda’s no-good sister who had a beef with Amanda for shooting the sister’s no-good boyfriend, and (3) “Escobar,” a notorious drug dealer who tried to kill Finn fifteen years earlier, but failed when Finn’s beloved partner, Luis (who we’ve never heard of before tonight), took the bullet.

Escobar fathered a child with a foxy prison nurse named Anna, who subsequently became an ex-prison-nurse. For a minute, we suspect that she’s helping Escobar plan the attacks. [Read more…]

SVU Episode #14-17: Undercover Blue

21 March, 2013 by Allison Leotta 11 Comments

Tonight’s episode finally answered the question Law & Order: SVU fans have been buzzing about for weeks: who is Olivia’s mystery man? It immediately transitioned to: how quickly can he be thrown the wolves for our amusement?

Recap:

New York’s biggest political sex scandal is about to go to trial, when a shady ex-prostitute-turned-pole-dancing-aerobics instructor named Heather accuses the prosecution’s star witness, lovable rogue cop Brian Cassidy, of raping her four years earlier. Nick and Munch go to Cassidy’s apartment to break the bad news . . . and find Olivia there, wearing only Cassidy’s nightshirt and a satisfied post-coital grin. At last! We know whose mystery hand Oliva was holding as she flew off to the Bahamas a few episodes ago.

Will Olivia finally get some well-deserved happiness? Of course not – where’s the drama in that?

Although this may be the weakest rape charge in the history of rape charges – for crying out loud, Heather’s boyfriend visited the sex-scandal defendant in jail two days earlier, obviously colluding to frame Cassidy – the DA promptly charges Cassidy with rape, and sets his trial for approximately seven minutes later.

Heather testifies that four years ago, she was a dog-collar-wearing “sex slave,” and [Read more…]

SVU Episode #13-21: Learning Curves

10 May, 2012 by Allison Leotta 23 Comments

Recap: This episode took a harrowing real-life case and gave it a twist, a double-backflip, and a roller-coaster ride. Hang on tight SVU fans. Curves ahead. (Learning Curves. Ba dum bum.)

Tonight’s show started with a brutal crime landing right on Ice-T’s doorstep. His son, Ken, announces that he’s engaged to marry a hot young hunk name Alejandro. Before Ice-T even finishes his hilarious scowl of surprise, Alejandro is abducted by a bunch of thugs who stuff him into a van, take him to a dingy apartment, and beat and sodomize him with a baseball bat while yelling gay-bashing insults.

Ice-T is outraged, but the top brass take him off the case. (Good call, top brass). Of course, Ice-T goes rogue and keeps investigating. Amanda (who apparently has a considerable bad-girl streak of her own) goes with him to a suspect’s apartment. Although they don’t have a warrant, they barge into the house. The hugely pregnant resident demands that they leave – but Amanda blocks the woman into the kitchen while Ice-T goes to her bedroom and rifles through underwear drawers. Bad cops! No donut! Ice-T finds an unregistered gun, which Nick then uses to strong-arm the pregnant woman’s boyfriend into confessing that he and a bunch of his gang friends assaulted Alejandro. SVU arrests all of the gang members involved.

Case closed, right? Of course not. We’re not even at the second commercial break.

Another man is soon abducted, pulled into a van, assaulted and gay-bashed. Our second victim is played by Tony Hale, the actor known for his hilarious portrayal of Buster Bluth on Arrested Development. (Hale tweeted: “Going to be on Law & Order tonite. I’ve heard it’s my best comedic performance to date.”)

Our detectives scratch their collective heads. With all the gang-bangers locked up, who assaulted Buster? We soon learn it was the pugnacious grocer father of a student at the school where Buster taught. But why? Well, that gets complicated. The grocer’s teenage son, Luca, reported that Buster molested him. But Luca can’t keep his story straight. Soon, he’s saying a different, mousy brunette female teacher was the one who molested him. But it’s not her either. After a quick chat with Martha Stewart (convincing as a prim and proper headmistress), our detectives learn that Luca was having sex with his curvaceous blond biology teacher. He made up the other allegations to cover for their illicit relationship.

Luca doesn’t want to file charges against this blond teacher — he wants to run away with her. But the biology teacher doesn’t. So Luca goes to her classroom and slits her throat with the least-frightening weapon of the season, a tiny frog-dissecting scalpel. We close with Nick convincing the blood-soaked boy to drop the scalpel rather than commit suicide with it.

Verdict: B

What they got right:

I find it remarkable that SVU ran this episode about gay marriage and hate crimes on the same day that President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage. This season, SVU has had a near-psychic ability to run episodes at exactly the right time — sometimes even scooping the real news. (Like the Joe Paterno/ Jerry Sandusky case, where the fictional SVU episode aired before the real-life case broke.) It’s a little spooky. SVU creators, what kind of dark magic are you working over there in the writers room?

There really was a case involving a man who was allegedly kidnapped, tortured, and sodomized by a gang of young men in Brooklyn. In real life, the 30-year-old man was apparently targeted by the “Latin King Goonies” because he was gay and had sex with some 17-year-olds who were known to the gang members. The man was invited to a “party,” but when he showed up, the thugs allegedly beat him, sodomized him with a toilet plunger, and made one of his lovers burn him with cigarettes on his genitals.

Hate crimes against members of the lesbian, gay, bi and transgender community are on the rise – and tend to spike in response to gay marriage initiatives. Hate crimes were up 13% in 2010 – and 50% of hate-crime victims don’t even make police reports. Minorities and transgender victims are the least likely to come forward. In response to the President’s announcement tonight, we will unfortunately probably see an uptick in violent crimes against the LGBT community.

What they got wrong:

My favorite line tonight was the pregnant girl who said, “I’ve seen TV – I know my rights!”’ Oh sister, you need to check out this blog. Any semi-competent lawyer would’ve gotten that gun suppressed, and there would have been no leverage to elicit her boyfriend’s confession. Ice-T and Amanda violated that woman’s Fourth Amendment rights, which guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, by barging into her home and searching without a warrant. And the boyfriend’s resulting confession was “fruit of the poisonous tree” – meaning, the cops never would have gotten the confession without the bad search in the first place. Everything would have been suppressed.

I like a good confession as much as the next prosecutor. But this wasn’t a good one. Ice-T’s actions could have torpedoed the entire case, and the guy could have walked … if he or his girlfriend actually did know their rights. That’s what happens when you get your legal advice from TV shows!

(Editor’s note: this blog is for fun and does not give legal advice.)

The gruesome ending, where the boy killed his seductive blond biology teacher, was just a thin excuse to close with the requisite SVU gore. There have been plenty teenagers who declared their love and eternal devotion for the teacher who committed statutory rape by having sex with them. Those students never end up killing the teacher.

One of the most notorious cases of teacher/student statutory rape was that of Mary Kay Letourneau, the 35-year-old teacher who had an affair with her 13-year-old student, Vili Fualaau. She was prosecuted and jailed, but every time she got out, she returned to Fualaau. She had two of his babies while in jail. After her sentence was served, she married him, took the name Mary Kay Fualaau, and now seems to spend a fair amount of time giving interviews to glossy magazines.

Unlike the kid in tonight's SVU, Fili Fualauu responded with an engagement ring and People magazine interviews rather than killing his teacher/sexual assailant

One final “wrong” – I hear Martha Stewart didn’t bring home-baked cookies for the cast and crew when she guest-starred. Boo!

What do you think, SVU fans? Is the world actually being run by a cabal of SVU writers who are orchestrating real-life events to coincide with their episodes? Should Ice-T be punished for going off the rails or commended for being such a caring dad? And when a lifestyle guru shows up for her TV cameo, shouldn’t she bring some tasty treats for the crew? Leave your comments!

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SVU Episode #13-20: Father Dearest

3 May, 2012 by Allison Leotta 35 Comments

Recap: In terms of creepiness and watchability this episode scored high. In terms of realism, believabilty, or anything approaching how an actual crime would occur or a real investigation would unfold, tonight’s episode was the lowest point of the season.

We start with a four-year-old boy calling 911 because Mommy is asleep and won’t wake up. The operator uses cell-phone tracking technology to pinpoint his location. Moments later, Olivia and Nick bust through the boy’s door. They find his mother, bloody and unconscious, on the floor.

After a commercial break, we learn that mom just had too much to drink and slipped and fell. And here, folks, is where the case would have ended in real life.

But we know the show isn’t over because no pretty 16-year-old girls have yet made their appearances. Not to worry; they soon do. In droves.

Turns out, mom fell after fighting with her 16-year-old daughter about the man the girl was seeing. The girl then left and spent the night out. SVU launches into a full-scale investigation of the girl. We’re talking ATM records, credit-card tracking, cell phone tracing, and library searches justified by the Patriot Act and a FISA warrant.

After unleashing the full force of the criminal-justice arsenal to locate one rebellious teenager who’s been out of contact with her mom for eight hours, the detectives learn that the girl went to visit her biological father – mom’s sperm donor.

[Read more…]

SVU Episode #13-19: Street Justice

26 April, 2012 by Allison Leotta 23 Comments

Recap: Holy lycra tights, Batman! There’s a masked man taking on a serial rapist in New York. And NYPD is not delighted to receive the assistance of the caped vigilante.

Tonight’s episode opened with the fifth victim of the SOHO Rapist being bundled into an ambulance. The requisite twist? The crime was interrupted by a man in a superhero costume. Both men fled.

A British journalist taunts NYPD for its inability to catch the perp, and a community group expresses its collective outrage. The naysayers get even louder when a 6th victim is targeted. The masked man again comes to the rescue before dashing off into the night.

Olivia tracks down the suspect, and beats him up after he tries to hit her. Bam! Pow! Nice moves, Olivia. And she didn’t even have to get bitten by a spider.

A few odd things about the rapist: he hasn’t left a shred of DNA at any of the 6 scenes. The taunting journalist claims he has a taunting letter written by the rapist, which includes details that only the rapist would know. Oh, and the rapist keeps getting into fights with a guy dressed like Batman. My Spidey sense says something is off here.

Meanwhile, Nick ignores the case and trails his wife to charming sidewalk cafes where she sips white zinfandel and giggles with her apparent lover. Instead of bringing evidence to the crime lab, Nick drives to Philly to punch the guy in the face. Wham! Ka-pow! (I could picture several real cops doing exactly the same thing under similar circumstances.)

Rape #6 turns out to be a copycat rapist, who’s only guilty of the single crime. Nevertheless, the copycat is beaten within an inch of his life and hung from a basketball court fence. The culprits? A bunch of caped crusaders who call themselves the New York Justice League. They’ve decided the justice system is too slow, and they want revenge on a much quicker schedule. (Quicker even than SVU’s two-minute evidence processing system? Imagine how peeved they’d be by the wait in real life!)

Moving on to rape #7. The victim is Fantastica, a woman from … the Justice League itself! Holy coincidence, Batman! Wearing a mask and thigh-high patent-leather boots, Fantastica was staking out a rooftop with a stuttering comic store clerk in a rayon cape, when the SOHO rapist attacked her. The stuttering-clerk-turned-vigilante claims he fended off the rapist.

After a commercial break, Nick’s wife storms into the police station and berates our handsome young detective (because, hey, he’s not really doing any police work anyhow, right?) for punching her platonic friend. Also, that house she’s been going to? It’s not her lover’s – it’s her shrink’s. (Nice call, Tokobali!)

Nick’s remorse established, SVU barrels through some suspects for the SOHO rapist: the prime one being the randy restauranteur whose alibis include half the sous chefs in Manhattan. Personally, I suspected the taunting reporter. How’d he know those were details “only the rapist” would know? But no, it was the stuttering comic-book clerk – the very founder of the Justice League. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Like so many superheroes before him, he did it all to impress a girl. A beautiful woman had stopped by his comic-book store and scoffed at the notion that NY was dangerous. To prove to her that it was, the clerk began the string of SOHO rapes. Convinced by the attacks, she shopped at BuyCostumes.com, joined the stutterer’s nascent Justice League, took up the Fantastica persona, and went out with him to beat up other civilians. Riiiight.

Verdict: B-

What they got right:

Believe it or not, there have been a bunch of real-life full-grown men dressing up as superheroes and walking city streets hoping to fight crime. Things didn’t turn out so well for them, either. A caped crusader calling himself Phoenix Jones of the Rain City Superheroes was arrested in Seattle after allegedly pepper-spraying a crowd of innocent club-goers in the mistaken belief that he was breaking up a fight. Folks, leave the police work to the police, and the molded plastic breast-plates to Val Kilmer.

I thought it was interesting that the SOHO rapist “started things he couldn’t finish.” As a sex-crimes prosecutor, I was astonished by how many rapists became impotent during the sexual assault itself.

I also liked that Nick’s wife said, “I’m your wife! You can’t treat me like one of your suspects.” My husband and I are both lawyers, and, during fights, often accuse each other of cross-examining.

What they got wrong:

Ice-T said they’d get the rapist’s note from the British reporter’s “cold dead hands.” True, it would probably take a while. But no one has to die. The Department of Justice is very careful about issuing subpoenas to journalists. Per the U.S. Attorney’s Manual, before any prosecutor issues such a subpoena, she must get a series of approvals within DOJ. Might take a while for the politicals mull it over. If the top brass agrees, the prosecutor can then issue a subpoena compelling the evidence.

The journalist would probably move to quash the subpoena, citing First Amendment freedom of the press, and the court would hold a hearing. If the journalist had direct evidence of a crime, the government would probably win, and the reporter would be in contempt of court and possibly jailed if she still refused to turn the evidence over. Journalist Judith Miller spent 12 weeks in nasty old D.C. Jail while she refused to turn over her sources in the Scooter Libby case. Eventually, she gave in, testified under government subpoena, and then probably went home and took the longest shower of her life. So – cold dead hands? No. A few months later? Yes. Certainly long enough to enrage the masked men of the Justice League.

Will they stop continually sending Amanda out as bait for rapists? I know she looks great in a short skirt and stilletos. But this is just silly, and not something real police officers do. Real crime is way too random and sporadic for this technique.

Ice-T grumbled that it was a “nice change” that the stop-and-frisks would be of white males this time. Oh, come on. That may be a valid point in real life. But the vast majority of victims and suspects on SVU are white. And good looking. And endowed with a trust fund.

Also, Ice-T, please snap on a pair of gloves and stop fondling the rapist’s knife with your bare hands. Jeez Louise, we’re never going to get any usable prints that way. That said, I laugh at every one of your awesome one-liners. Although the best one tonight was Munch’s, after Nick’s wife stormed into the precinct: “That’s why I stopped marrying Italian women.”

SVU Episode #13-18: Valentine’s Day

19 April, 2012 by Allison Leotta 24 Comments

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!