Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Tenfold" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 14, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “Tenfold,” was also unusually good, mainly because of a quite interesting and multidimensional character, African-American street hooker Wallin Sipes (Ciarin Monique). Wallin prides herself on working without a pimp and when she’s not hooking is studying to get her G.E.D. so she can get a legitimate job. She’s also supporting her mother Yolanda (Tarra Riggs) and is raising a pre-pubescent son, Freddy, who presumably has no idea what his mom does for a living. Alas, she gets raped by a client who wanted anal sex and wasn’t going to take no for an answer. The rapist is Miguel Rivera (Miguel Cervantes), who had earlier attracted Wallin; she had got into his car but then got out again when he insisted on fucking her in the ass. So he came by later and took her in the ass anyway, strangling her from behind so she didn’t get to see his face that time around, though she recognized him from their previous encounter that night. Wallin also gave some of her earnings that night to Tiana Rivera (Stephanie Gomérez) so her pimp wouldn’t beat her up for coming up short that night. She’s fond of quoting the lines from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Cast your bread upon the waters, and it will come back to you tenfold.” Alas, Wallin doesn’t really trust the police even though two members of the Special Victims Unit squad, Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) and Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane), helped find the last john who raped her. There’s also a subplot involving Timothy Cottle (Ari Brand), a pathetic would-be pedophile (he admits he’s sexually attracted to young girls but has never actually seduced or raped one).

In a previous episode Cottle attracted the ire of assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) for cruising his nine-year-old daughter (or was she his stepdaughter? Carisi was married to former SVU detective Amanda Rollins, played by Kelli Giddish, even though she’d already had two daughters by two different fathers, and she and Carisi had another one themselves) on the street. Ultimately Cottle pleads with Carisi and Captain Olivla Benson (series star Mariska Hargitay, daughter of Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay, who’s been playing this part for 25 years now and looks it) for help, and much to Carisi’s distaste Benson actually finds him a slot in a rehab program that’s supposedly able to convert his sexual desires to more appropriate outlets. I’ve read some of the literature on pedophiles that takes a quite skeptical attitude towards the general efficacy of such programs; they use some of the same techniques that used to be used in “reparative therapy” programs that were supposed to turn Gay or Lesbian people straight. And while there aren’t that many people left who actually think being Gay is some sort of monstrous sin against humanity – today the political and social prejudices against Queer people are more likely to manifest as Transphobia instead of homophobia (let’s face it, commercial TV these days is full of ads for anti-HIV drugs featuring obviously open Gay male couples, and there are also all those skin-care products ads featuring Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia!) – most people would agree that the sexualization and sexual exploitation of underage children is reprehensible (though I’d argue for lowering the age of consent to about 14 or so on the ground that people ought to be allowed to do what their hormones are pushing them to do anyway). One thing I liked about this Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode is that one of the “women” prostitutes working the streets with Wallin and her friends, Delphine Magnifique, was obviously a man in drag, and played by Easton Michaels.