Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Promising Young Gentlemen" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired March 10, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode after that, “Promising Young Gentlemen,” was if anything even more chilling: a typical exposé from Dick Wolf and his crew in which spoiled rich brats get their comeuppance, which almost never happens in real life. (In real life Brett Kavanaugh went from virtually raping a young woman at a college frat party to being on the U.S. Supreme Court.) In this case, the élite boys who think the normal rules of society don’t apply to them because of their (or their families’) wealth and privilege are the members of a secret club at Hudson University, and they’re all what I like to call “heterosexual homophiles” – guys who are sexually straight but have a thinly (or not so thinly) veiled contempt for women and a disinclination to see them as anything but “ho’s” and “meat.” Nine campus girls have the misfortune to be invited to one of their parties, and at least one of them comes to in an upstairs bedroom and realizes she’s being raped. One of the rules of the place is that the girls all had to leave their cell phones behind on the bus that brought them there, and the men make them go through humiliating rituals to be able to recover them.

The actual rapist was Austin Drake (Trey Fitts) and the people who helped him by holding down his victim are Brad Calloway (Colin Trudell) and Jacob Hoffman (Eric Wiegand). It just so happens that a hate-crimes detective named Andy Pariato Goldstein (Jason Biggs) was a member of that secret club during his own days at Hudson 20 years or so earlier, and he created a drinking game that the current members still play – though the implication is that he’s been sober for years. Andy asks why the prosecutors never attach hate-crimes charges to rape cases, and Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) says we’ve never done that – and Lt. Olivia Benson (series star Mariska Hargitay) says, “Well, maybe it’s time to start.” There’s plenty of evidence that the members of the club are motivated by a generalized hatred and contempt for women: they are sending each other photos of the women they plied with drink, on whose bodies they wrote sexist slogans, and they’ve also rewritten the club’s song so virtually every line in the new version is an attack on women.

Andy agrees to file hate-crime enhancements on top of the original rape charges, and this triggers a break in the case: Jacob Hoffman’s father gets upset that anyone is accusing his son of a hate crime (from their name one would guess that they have been on the receiving end of a great deal of bigotry), and he gets Jacob to testify against his club “brothers.” There’s also the character of Rosa Freeman (LaChanze), the Black woman who’s been appointed the new president of Hudson and who’s upset with Benson for prosecuting the case as law enforcement instead of letting the college handle it internally. Benson fires back that internal college processes are “where rape cases go to die,” and in the end not only are the student rapists held to account, the club itself is closed down and there’s a grimly funny scene of the old paintings (all of which are artistic garbage) the rape victim recalled seeing beiing removed from the building.