Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "False Idols" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 13, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed “Guardian” on November 13 was called “False Idols,” and its central characters are best-selling author Claire Morgan (Jemima Kirke, the first white person I’ve ever heard of named “Jemima”) and her husband, Stuart Morgan (Christopher Ryan Grant), who seems to have little or nothing to do. When the event runs out of copies of her latest novel – it’s not specified just what sort of books she writes, but judging from the covers we see and the attraction of fans with nicknames like “Ethereal 1” (Alyssa Nasca), “Faerie Fan” (Fey Soetan), “Goth Woman” (Jade Spear), and “Witchy Woman” (Rose Badiru – when I saw her character name on the cast list I thought, “So that’s who The Eagles wrote that song about!”), I’m assuming she writes Gothic fantasies with romantic themes – he’s the one sent outside to bring up another box of them. She’s already established as a heroine to put-upon women and a feminist icon who brings meaning to the lives of young women in bad relationships, so it’s a shock when her former assistant, Leah Henning (Aria Taylor), brings a knife to her book event, stabs Stuart Morgan in the chest with it, and then tells the police who arrest her, two uniformed officers, that the reason she did it was because he had repeatedly raped her. That gets the case bounced to the Special Victims Unit, where Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) takes Leah’s side and tries to find out whether Stuart indeed raped her (he did) and whether it was a one-off or a recurring pattern (it was a recurring pattern).

Ultimately the police and prosecutors negotiate a deal with Leah in which she’ll serve one year of house arrest and four years on probation for her assault, and she’ll be a witness against not only Stuart in his rape trial but against Claire for aiding and abetting. The cops find another victim of Stuart Morgan’s, chef Nicole Sandoval (Cassandra Cruz), who confirms that not only did Stuart rape Claire’s assistants repeatedly, but that Claire herself helped the process by picking out young women who would appeal to him as targets for his attacks. Both my husband Charles and I were reminded of the real-life case of Marion Zimmer Bradley, the fantasy and science-fiction writer who was a role model for feminists until she was accused of sexual molestation along with her second husband. The main difference between Bradley’s case and the fictional Claire Morgan’s is that Claire targeted outsiders whom she put on her payroll so her husband could assault them, while Bradley’s accusers were her adult children from her first marriage, who said she and her second husband actively colluded in molesting them. Charles is very much of the opinion that “cancel culture” should stop when the alleged abuser is dead and therefore no longer in a position to victimize anyone else; as it was, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s children, like Michael Jackson’s alleged victims, waited until after she was dead and therefore no longer able to defend herself before leveling their attacks. Charles was also struck by how old Ice-T looks; he was born Tracy Lauren Marrow in Newark, New Jersey on February 16, 1958 and is therefore 4 ½ years older than Charles, and through much of the show, especially once he made his abrupt reappearance (he’s been sidelined for a few episodes after an altercation in which he lost his gun to one of the bad guys), Charles was joking that it was time he retired.