Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Under the Influence" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 30, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that was shown Thursday, October 30 immediately after the “Brotherly Love” episode of Law and Order was called “Under the Influence” and was a quite good tale of spoiled, pampered 1-percenters who actually get called to account for their crimes – unlike what usually happens in the real world. At first I thought from the promos that they were doing yet another offtake on the Jeffrey Epstein case, but in this case the three principal bad guys come off as more like the Trumps. Super-rich venture capitalist Raymond Ellis (Randall Newsome) and his two sons (by different mothers), real-estate developers Nathan (Chris Webster) and Paul (Drew Garrett), have worked out a plan. The Ellis brothers build a new high-end building and recruit young women who’ve established themselves online as “influencers.” When they’ve picked out someone they especially like, Paul, who’s more comfortable interacting with women than Nathan, seduces her and gets her into a bedroom in the unit where they’re doing the open house – and then Nathan crashes the bedroom and literally rapes her. The Special Victims Unit gets involved when Grace (Audrey Trullinger), a hot-looking blonde influencer who later tells the SVU squad and us that she’s asexual (no doubt most of the horny straight guys watching this were thinking, “What a waste!”), spots a woman at the Ellis brother’s latest open house obviously under the influence of various substances being dragged into an open bedroom by a rather nasty-looking guy. The woman is Skylar Wright (Shereen Ahmed), and though the nasty-looking guy was not one of the Ellises, she reports being raped to the SVU and issues a rather confused description of the assault that suggests her assailant had the ability to be in two places at once. A DNA search of the remains from the apartment’s bathroom drain reveals that three people were present: Skylar and two men whose DNA had a 25 percent overlap, meaning they were half-brothers. No sooner have the SVU detectives arrest the Ellises that their father comes storming into the precinct room, threatening Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) with the destruction of her police career if she dares proceed against his sons. He even demands her badge number, and she gives it to him.

Later the cops run down a previous victim of the Ellises, Carly Wilson (Harley Renault), who was working as a bartender when Paul Ellis chatted her up and took her home with him, only to get subjected to the same rapist double-teaming that Skylar went through: Nathan doing the dirty deed while forcing Paul to watch. Still later the cops find out about a previous case in Newark, New Jersey in which the victim was actually killed, though the Ellises covered it up by putting her dead body in a car, deliberately crashing it, and claiming she died of the injuries sustained in the accident. This happened eight years previously, and the African-American police detective who investigated the case, Mike Feldman (Benjamin Brown), got stripped of his detective status, put back in uniform and assigned parking enforcement because he got too close to the truth for the Ellises’ comfort. When Nathan and Paul Ellis go on trial, prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) notes that Paul keeps looking over at Nathan for signals as to what to do and what to say on the witness stand. Carisi decides that Paul is so totally under Nathan’s influence that he will ask the judge in the case to appoint a so-called “shadow counsel,” an attorney who will secretly represent Paul and his interests and will sit in the courtroom with no apparent connection to the case. He makes this request after the woman attorney representing both Nathan and Paul makes an offer to plead Paul guilty on all counts if Nathan is allowed to go free. Carisi uses that piece of information – which the attorney never bothered to tell Paul before she approached Carisi with the offer – to get Paul to turn against both his brother and his father at long last, including telling the police and prosecution that it was actually the father who killed the woman in New Jersey. Eventually we get to see the wish-fulfillment fantasy of seeing all three Ellises – father Raymond as well as brothers Nathan and Paul (who gets a lighter sentence in exchange for his evidence) – either already convicted or in handcuffs being led away to that probable fate, when of course in real life the prototype for Raymond Ellis got elected President of the United States twice and put his business in the hands of his scapegrace sons.