Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "First Light" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 16, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “First Light,” seems to have been based by writers David Graziano and Julie Martin (both old Law and Order hands) on the truly bizarre rape trial of Dominique Pelicot in France last September. Pelicot was accused of repeatedly drugging his wife Gisèle and inviting as many as 50 other men to rape her while he watched and video-recorded the incidents. In the SVU version, the victim is New York book editor Katharine Vernon (Amy Landecker) and the perpetrator is her husband, literature professor Harris Vernon (Leland Orser). The two seem to have a happy marriage even though they sleep in separate bedrooms – which Harris says is because he’s a light sleeper and any disturbance, however minor, will wake him up. Only they wake up one morning to find the word “WHORE,” in all caps, spray-painted in red on their white garage door. They also receive flash drives labeled “WHORE” showing Katharine apparently willingly having sex with a man named Tommy Gallagher (Alex Morf), only she can’t recall having seen him before and certainly didn’t want to have an affair with him. Eventually we learn that Harris Vernon had secretly enrolled her on a Web site devoted to the idea that long-term married people have lost their sex drive for each other and become merely “roommates.” The site provides both men and women who feel that’s happened to them an opportunity to hook up with other partners and have affairs. Harris creates a fake account for his wife and advertises for people to sneak into her bedroom and “dominate” her, claiming that this is her big fantasy. He also sneaks higher doses of her sleeping pills into the same capsules so she’ll be totally out of it and won’t resist having sex with strange men who enter her unlocked bedroom door on her husband’s invitation, not hers. On a previous trip out of town to a literary conference in Boston, Harris hooked up with an assistant professor he was mentoring, Derek Poole (James M. Reilly), and literally invited him to have sex with Katharine while Harris watched. Derek started the sex act with Katharine but broke it off when he realized she was not responding, indicating she’d been drugged.

Apparently Tommy Gallagher was the first and only person who answered “Katharine’s” account on the site and actually came over and had sex with her. Tommy’s wife Annette (Kirsten Scoles) realized he was having extra-relational activity and hired a private investigator secretly to film them in flagrante delicto, though it’s not clear just what she intended to do with the evidence. When the cops finally bust Tommy and charge him with rape, Annette is furious and asks them, “I have four kids! How am I going to support them without him?” Katharine also is furious, less about what her husband had been doing to her but at the police in general, and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) in particular, for having made her aware of it. She literally throws them out of her home, and she’s still testy about it when the police return with a search warrant. Ultimately both Harris Vernon and Tommy Gallagher draw prison sentences, but not before prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) freezes up in court after a brutal cross-examination of Katharine by Harris’s defense attorney, Jasmine Gaffney (Selena Anduze). Haunted by the robbery he witnessed and tried to stop in a coffeehouse in the last SVU episode before they took their holiday hiatus, he announces prematurely, “The prosecution rests,” then has to drag up another witness to persuade Harris to short-circuit a verdict against him by pleading guilty. “First Light” is an unusually good SVU episode, especially for something this late in the show’s lifetime. It’s thought-provoking, and one of the issues it provokes thought on is how can a man be a rapist when a) he’s been told that the victim genuinely wants him and is just play-acting a fantasy, and b) he shows up on what he believes to be her invitation? (That was an issue in the real-life French trial, too, as shown on the coverage of it at https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/dominique-pelicot-frenchman-accused-mass-rape-wife-admits-charges-media-2024-09-17/ and https://www.npr.org/2024/10/23/nx-s1-5162340/rape-france-wife-pelicot.)