Image Credit: Will Hart/NBCJennifer Love Hewitt guest-starred on last night’s episode of SVU as a multiple rape victim who’d been attacked four times over the course of fifteen years by the same mysterious man. Hewitt gave a good performance (or, anyhow, a good enough performance to indicate that she deserves better than the Tori Spelling purgatory of Lifetime movies and vanity reality shows). Early in the episode, her character delivered a lengthy soliloquy of terror — one of the rapes occurred the night before her wedding, because SVU specializes in subtlety — while a doctor examined her body for evidence. It was a long, slow, artful sequence. It was also the precise point before the episode started going bananas.
Detective Benson took a special interest in Hewitt’s case, because cops always take special interest in every victim’s case. (At one point, she said, “If I have to live with you for twenty years, he’ll never touch you again.”) The number one/only suspect was James LeGros, who spent half the episode twiddling his invisible mustache. He got off on a technicality. But SVU hates technicalities. Technicalities make SVU angry. The madder SVU gets, the stronger SVU gets! READ FULL STORY »
