Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Anonymity" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 22, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 22) my husband Charles and I watched the next episodes in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise shows, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the flagship Law and Order itself. These days they’re showing SVU before Law and Order because at 8 p.m. they’re running a typical piece of so-called “reality” crap called Traitors, set in a Scottish castle and hosted by Alan Cumming (an actor I used to like until he took this awful job), so I watched SVU at 9 p.m. and Law and Order at 10. The SVU episode was called “Anonymity,” and it opened with the sudden appearance of John DeMarco (Alejandro Hernandez), a typical proletarian-type for national TV, at the Special Victims Manhattan squadroom with his son Michael (Sebastian Albuquerque) in tow. It seems that John was giving Michael (whose age is given at five but he looked more like eight to me) a bath, only while washing him between his asscheeks Michael cried out in pain. John immediately assumed that Michael had been sexually molested and anally raped, and dragged his kid along to SVU to demand immediate action to apprehend the perpetrator. In the manner of all too many previous parents of child sex abuse victims on SVU, John’s overbearing demeanor is counterproductive in Captain Olivia Benson’s (series star Mariska Hargitay) ability to interrogate Michael and find out just what did happen to him and who was responsible. It turns out that Michael’s abuser was his babysitter, Brandon Klein (Giuseppe DiDomenico), who realized he had pedophilic attractions and went on a “dark Web” site called “The Gate” catering specifically to pedophiles attracted to children five years old or younger. Klein had previously kept his hands off Michael until the previous evening, when he was effectively blackmailed by another “The Gate” member, a realtor, to bring Michael to a location (a condo the man was trying to sell as part of his job) so he could be stripped, photographed for child porn, and raped by the other man. The SVU detectives arrest the realtor while he’s in the middle of showing the condo that was the scene of the crime, and through his computer they’re able to hack into the site. They download all the sick images and, much to Captain Benson’s dismay, Detective Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane) goes through the entire file in an all-nighter.

Through this they’re able to track down 26 other victims, some of whom go to an exclusive private pre-school. Ultimately they’re able to set up a meeting with the elusive manager of the site, only when Bruno shows up the people he’s meeting with turn out to be two FBI agents, white man Craig Lynch (Jeremy Landon Hays) and Asian woman Lauren Fei (Nanrisa Lee). The FBI agents have known all along about “The Gate” but they’ve been letting it operate in search of the individuals behind it, who they say are part of an international human-trafficking ring that not only kidnaps kids but sells them into sexual slavery abroad. The most vividly intense parts of the show are the confrontations between Benson and Fei, two women who seem to have OD’d on testosterone in an attempt to out-butch each other. Fei insists that whatever collateral damage is being done by “The Gate”’s current users is acceptable if it helps them bust the trafficking ring. Benson, thundering back in Mariska Hargitay’s toughest tones, says she’s more concerned with the crimes that are happening now rather than ones that may (or may not) occur in the future. The SVU detectives manage to trace down the operator of “The Gate,” a typical nerd type named Sam Caldwell (Quinn Blades), who’s been running the site from the spare bedroom of his sister Bernadette (Clare Latham), whom he was staying with and who was aware that he spent hours on his laptop without any idea of what he was doing on that computer all that time. Without Sam around to give “the canary,” the signal to “The Gate”’s users that everything was still all clear, SVU detectives stage a series of raids and bust the users. This happens in a grim scene that reveals how pervasive the pedophile community is and in particular how these sickos come from all walks of life, from a man who runs a pizza place to a high-end financial services executive.

Ultimately Agent Fei shows up at SVU to denounce Benson and threaten her with retaliation for having blown their long-term sting, while Sam had already been transferred from state to federal custody, albeit only after the SVU detectives got all the information they needed out of him. This was a pretty somber SVU episode whose message that child sex abuse is ubiquitous (despite the inability of those of us who aren’t sexually attracted to kids to understand the why of this crime; as I’ve written before, many people who would never commit murder or robbery at least understand the impulses that led people to commit such crimes, but the sexual abuse of children is unfathomable to most of us, including most lesser criminals, which is why sexual abusers of children are referred to in prison slang as “short eyes” and are often in danger of being murdered by fellow inmates who are as disgusted by them and what they did as the rest of us) just got reinforced by the lead story on the local NBC affiliates. It was about a 35-year-old man who was just busted for allegedly molesting three girls whom his mother, whom he lived with, was taking care of in a day-care center she ran out of her home.