Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Feed the Craving" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aored October 23, 2025)

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

The next Law and Order show on October 23, a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode called “Feed the Craving,” also – like the “Bend the Knee” episode of Law and Order that preceded it – ends in a plea deal that provides a modicum of justice even though it doesn’t satisfy the victims. The protagonist is a heavy-set 30-something woman named Natalie Tanzillo (Danielle Macdonald) who at the start of the show is living with another woman. Natalie claims to be pregnant as the result of a rape, and the woman, Andrea Vargas (Lindsay Mendez), is not her Lesbian partner, as I’d initially assumed, but her doula – a term quite frankly I’d never heard before. According to Wikipedia, a doula is “a non-medical professional who provides guidance for the service of others and who supports another person (the doula's client) through a significant health-related experience, such as childbirth, miscarriage, induced abortion or stillbirth, as well as non-reproductive experiences such as dying.” Ironically, the term derives from the Greek for “female slave.” At first we’re led to believe that Natalie is a) pregnant and b) a victim, and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) tries to get her to report the assailant and go on the record with her assault. Benson also tries to get Natalie to go to a hospital and have her upcoming childbirth seen to professionally – we’re told that she’s been in labor for three days when the episode opens. Midway through the show writer Roxanne Paredes and director Brenna Malloy pull the big switcheroo on us: Natalie isn’t a victim at all, but a predator. She’s never actually been pregnant, either through rape or consensual sex. Instead she’s had a series of self-induced hysterical pregnancies (ones in which you get all the symptoms of pregnancy without an actual embryo or fetus inside you), and her twisted goal in all this has been not only to win the affections of her doulas but literally to be sexually gratified by them. She even scored an ultrasound image from somewhere to bolster her illusion that she’s actually pregnant.

We learn this when the SVU squad room is suddenly inundated by a number of women – at least 20 – who all claim to be Natalie’s victims. This clip was shown on the promos for this episode and had led me to assume that SVU was doing yet another offtake on Jeffrey Epstein, and in particular the way his victims have been savaged yet again by the Trump administration and its clear favoritism towards Epstein’s surviving co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, and refusal to release Epstein’s files or client lists. The person I felt sorriest for in this show was Danielle Macdonald, who turns in a truly astonishing performance as Natalie – and the reason I felt sorry for her is that there aren’t going to be that many roles for a woman of her physique that will truly showcase her the way this one did. During Natalie’s trial, her attorney calls an expert witness named Dr. Damian Oshiro (Kurt Yue), who claims that Natalie is suffering from a mental illness, but prosecutor Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) is able to eviscerate her diminished-capacity defense during a blistering cross-examination. Ultimately Natalie’s attorney offers a plea deal through which Natalie will plead guilty to all the fraud charges against her in exchange for the sexual abuse charges being dropped – meaning she’ll draw a five- to seven-year sentence and won’t have to be listed on the national sex offenders’ registry when she’s released. As she’s taken away to serve her sentence, Benson is sure she’ll re-offend as soon as she’s released. “I’ll see you back here,” she says to Natalie. There’s also a nice plot twist in that one of the men Natalie accuses of having raped her and fathered her (nonexistent) child is her former supervisor at a nonprofit for which she used to volunteer – only this man, Eduardo Perreira (Marcus Raye Pérez), convinces the cops that he couldn’t have raped a woman because he’s Gay and married to a man.