Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “One More Tale of Two Victims” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired October 7, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

NBC is doing weird things with their Thursday night schedule: the last two weeks they did special three-hour events crossing over between Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime, and this week for the 8 p.m. time slot they re-ran a recent but still previously shown SVU about a young man who was arrested at age 12, declared a psychopath, put in a juvenile facility until he was 18, successfully fooled the psychiatrists and other authorities into thinking he was “cured,” and went right back to killing people, (If he’d been from a wealthy family he could have grown up to be President some day!) Then they showed the new SVU they’d been promoting all week, “One More Tale of Two Victims,” in which Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi (Peter Scanavino) butted heads with the new overall chief of all New York’s SVU’s, Tommy McGrath (Terry Serpico), over whether to prosecute the rapist of Crystal Ortiz (Jade Fernandez). We meet her at a wild party where she gets the hots for a young fellow Latino she’s dancing with and does him on the roof of the building where the party is being held, and it turns out that she’s later raped by someone else, a white guy who got into her apartment by pretending to be a Consolidated Edison gas inspector. He forced her three-year-old son Manny to watch his mom being raped, and threatened her by saying, “If the kid cries, he dies.”

Among the people the cops interview in investigating Crystal’s rape is Arlo James (Joseph Cannon), who runs a truck selling “soft” ice cream cones from which Crystal frequently bought decorated cones for Manny, who in an early scene drops the ice cream from the cone (sort of like that current Allstate Insurance commercial) and Arlo gives her another one for free. The moment he was introduced as a character, I knew he was going to turn out to be her rapist – after 23 years the SVU formulae have become that obvious – but it takes the cops considerably longer to make the connection. Meanwhile McGrath orders Benson to “slow-walk” Crystal’s case on the ground that she’s had sex with so many men – including her ex-husband (Manny’s father, with whom she’s in a major custody battle), the guy at the party and a neighbor in her building she got acquainted with during the COVID-19 lockdown and she summoned to her apartment for quickies (she nicknamed him her “minute man”). The cops stripped and cut open her mattress and found DNA from all these three men but none from her rapist – he used a condom and presumably took it with him and disposed of it elsewhere (my own experience with condoms has been so dreadful I can’t see how anybody can maintain an erection with one even with a willing partner, let alone someone you’re trying to rape) – and the case goes cold until another woman gets raped with the same pattern.

This time the victim is a child of privilege – and a white one, at that – Gail Grogan (Liz Holton), daughter of deputy police inspector Dermott Grovan (Boris McGiver), and the cops are all heated up about finding the guy who victimized one of their own. New York’s police unions (which were recently in the news when one of their top officials was found on social media railing against the police force’s perceived enemies – which basically included anyone who actually think Black lives matter – while a “Q” mug, symbol of Qanon, was visible on his desk) offer a $10,000 reward for the rapist. Detective Velasco (Octavio Pisano), the new person McGrath ordered onto the squad and whom Benson and her long-timers Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) and Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) are convinced is McGrath’s “mole,” corners the ice-cream guy once the cops have realized he’s the only person who had contact with both victims and practically strangles him in the process of subduing him so the others can arrest him. ADA Carisi gets indictments against Arlo James for both rapes, but as the trial starts he announces in court that he’s been ordered by his superiors to drop the charge against him for Crystal’s rape and only prosecute Gail Grogan’s, apparently because the higher-ups in New York’s police and prosecution forces are concerned that if Crystal testifies it might encourage the jury to have “reasonable doubt” about Arlo’s guilt in either rape. Crystal is devastated that her rape will never be adjudicated even though Arlo is likely going to face a 15-year prison sentence for Gail Grogan’s.

The episode has a surprisingly progressive aura, especially when you remember that Dick Wolf’s original agenda for Law and Order was that the nation had turned Rightward and therefore would be more interested in a show about police and prosecutors putting away the guilty than heroic defense attorneys like Perry Mason freeing the innocent. (The irony is that real criminal defense attorneys almost never deal with the genuinely innocent: usually their clients are guilty and the defense’s job is not to get them acquitted, but to find extenuating or mitigating circumstances that will reduce the length and severity of their punishment.) It’s a show that clearly exposes the underlying hypocrisy of a criminal justice system in a heavily class-stratified society, in which certain victims (because they’re white, affluent and/or relatively well connected) are considered “important” and others aren’t. Throughout America’s criminal justice system there’s a bias that Black or Brown lives don’t matter – or at least don’t matter as much – and specifically where rape is concerned, that women who are sexually active, especially with multiple partners, are “asking for it” and therefore much less likely to be raped because the stereotype is that they’ll “do it with anybody.” This bias also makes it easier for someone accused of raping a woman with multiple sex partners to claim consensuality as a defense. For a show that’s been on this long, SVU’s writers and show runners are coming up with surprisingly good plot lines – and though I’m going to miss the characters played by Jamie Gray Hyder and Demore Barnes,m bringing on Terry Serpico and drawing him as an old-time male-chauvinist pig who clearly believes some rape victims are more “deserving” of protection than others is certainly showing how those old stereotypes die hard and are still very much a part of American law enforcement, not only in cop shows but even more so in real life.