Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Aperture" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 8, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed was called “Aperture” and was one of their more bizarre family-dysfunction stories. A young couple are touring a fancy New York apartment that’s for rent, and the supercilious real-estate agent is going on and on and on about the spectacular views the place offers. It later turns out that the couple can’t afford the place they’re looking at but they like to attend open-houses and pretend they can. Midway through their tour, the man spots a telescope in one of the windows and starts looking at the apartment building across the street à la Rear Window when he sees a young Black man holding a white girl at gunpoint and forcing her to put her clothes on after presumably raping her. He reports this to the police and the case gets referred to the Special Victims Unit. The police investigate the scene of the crime and find that it was an apartment being subletted by its usual tenant, who was out of town on vacation. The Black man was a native of Texas who rented it by stealing the credit-card information of a customer at a store in Houston where he worked. The police on the scene realize that whatever happened in that apartment was filmed by a camera on a tripod. The cops also have a hard time identifying the woman in the scene, though she turns out to be 18-year-old Josephine “Josie” DeWinn, who lives with her mother Natalie (Kate McCluggage) and stepfather Gordon, Jr. (Christian Campbell) in a luxury apartment with a long spiral staircase and a maid (Mila Milosevic) who leads the cops up the stairs when they come to question the DeWinns. Gordon, Jr. and Natalie met as co-workers when they were both married to other people, with whom they had children – Natalie had Josie and Gordon had a 17-year-old son named Atlas (Tristan Spohn) – but even though they were both married, they fell in love, started dating and ultimately divorced their previous partners and married each other.

The Black man who filmed the whole thing turns out to be Jaden Thomas (Mickey Nixon), a Houston native whom Atlas met online as partners in a multi-player video game even though they’d never seen each other in person. It turns out Atlas had formed a crush on Josie and hatched this whole scheme to get together with her: his friend Jaden would steal someone else’s credit card information and use it to rent an apartment in New York City. Then Jaden would pose as a kidnapper, hold a gun on both Atlas and Josie, and force them to have sex with each other – which he wanted (rationalizing it on the basis that they really weren’t biological relatives) and she didn’t. There’s a brief red-herring suspect in Josie’s biological father, who’s eking out a living renting tour boats in the Bahamas and was busted there when Atlas, visiting him along with Josie, dropped his phone in the water. After Atlas got a new phone and left the old one behind, Josie’s dad took Atlas’s original phone to be repaired and to get the data off it. The techs at the service company he used discovered a secret file of pictures of Josie wearing a bikini and nothing else and busted dad for child porn until he was able to prove that he didn’t have anything to do with those images. Ultimately Atlas gets arrested for rape and kidnapping after Jaden decided he wants more money than the $2,000 Atlas offered him and hits up the DeWinns for $5 million, sending them the film and threatening to post it to social media if they don’t pay. SVU has done similar stories before, including one from the Christopher Meloni years (“Families,” season five, episode 15, first aired February 10, 2004) in which a young man unwittingly has sex with a young woman who turns out to be his half-sister, but this one was SVU at its kinkiest and most dysfunctional in terms of the family relationships as well as an object lesson in the possibly adverse consequences of divorce and remarriage, especially when children are involved.