Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "The Accuser" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 10, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, ”The Accuser,” was more predictable than the Law and Order “Inherent Bias” episode but also a good deal more exciting. The show begins with a young man named Seth Carson (Caleb Maris, a young man of almost unearthly beauty) being goaded by his father Nate (Erik Palladino) to go into the garage owned by his former employer, Eddie Upshaw (Todd A. Horman), to whom he was apprenticed as a welder. Only when he enters the work space – which, even though it’s late at night, the door is unlocked – he finds Eddie chained to a railing and near death from assault by someone unknown, who also forcibly sodomized him with a metal rod. (For some reason the imdb.com Web page on this episode identifies Caleb Maris’s character as “Sam,” even though not only did the show itself call him “Seth,” I remembered reflecting that he had the same name as Adam’s and Eve’s third son, after Cain and Abel.) Eddie is found comatose and it’s a few days before the police can question him, but there are mysterious numbers, “6-11-01,” scratched across his back. The SVU cops deduce that these represent a date, and presume that Eddie somehow sexually molested someone on that date and thereafter. But Seth was clearly too young because he hadn’t even been born yet on June 11, 2001, so the cops look for another victim. Ultimately they find her in Angela Jones (Carolyn Fagerholm), whom Eddie had started molesting when she was just eight years old. She told her mother and mom called the police, but when the case finally came to trial in 2004 Eddie Upshaw was acquitted after his defense counsel managed to undermine her credibility. She spiraled downwards into alcoholism, drug abuse, and petty crime, and ultimately got arrested and imprisoned for years.

Angela was finally released on parole just one week before the attack on Eddie, and when the SVU cops finally take her into custody Carolyn Fagerholm delivers a stunning performance as a woman so traumatized by her past life that she’s stone-faced and implacable in her manner. She’s good enough that if anybody wants to do a remake of Detour, she’d be perfect for the Ann Savage role. While there’s a bit too much of the goody-two-shoes about Art Alamo’s script, as well as an over-reverence for therapy – once she finally realizes what’s really happened, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) gives Nate Carson a list of therapists Seth should see, and Nate duly enrolls him with one, which is supposed to reassure us that Seth will recover acceptably from his own molestation at Eddie’s hands and won’t go down the tragic route that Angela did – it’s also a tough moral tale. It’s true that once we saw the scars on Eddie’s back, we were clear not only that it was a date but it would turn out to be the date on which he first attacked whoever it was he molested, and I also had a bit of a problem with Alamo’s script. My understanding is that even pedophiles have a sexual orientation and gravitate to one or the other gender in picking their victims, though a previous Law and Order: Special Victims Unit script made the rather odd claim that what matters to a pedophile is the unspoiled youthful appearance of the victim and the gender really doesn’t matter. That’s not the impression I’ve got from the admittedly meager reading I’ve done into real true-crime stories involving pedophilia! Still, I quite liked “The Accuser” and I especially liked Carolyn Fagerholm’s performance; even in a quite short role (only two scenes), she dominates every scene she’s in and leaves an indelible impression. So does Kate Middleton (presumably not the same woman who’s married to the heir to the British throne) as Eddie Upshaw’s ex-wife Jenny, who’s working as a bartender in a seamy joint and is still repulsed by the fact that she was once married to such a monster and had three children by him.