History YMMV / LawAndOrderSpecialVictimsUnit

** Dani Beck was this when Olivia went undercover. Her hot-headed nature rubbed some the wrong way, and her relationship with Elliot was a major thorn in the side who preferred Elliot/Olivia.

** "Responsible" was about a woman, Lillian, who supplied a group of underaged teens (including her own daughter) with alcohol, leading to a couple of deaths and her daughter Becca suffering health problems. In the end, Lillian is given five years prison for her crimes, and Becca is sent to rehab so she can recover from her drinking. Whilst it is good that Lillian will be delt justice and Becca will get the help she needs for a better future, problem is Lillian was a single mother and rehab only lasts a few months at best. There is no mention as to who's going to look after Becca once she leaves rehab.

** "Contagious" [[spoiler:is about a person wrongly being accused of rape by a 12 year old, who's actually too scared to name the real culprit. Before she recants her lie, the uncle she accused is arrested in public, and multiple parents accidentally pressure their kids into (falsely) testifying that they were raped by the guy. Eventually the SVU realize that they accidentally pressured the kid into naming the culprit because they were ''so sure'' it was him. They get the kid to testify who the culprit is and are easily able to prove he did it... but their main witness already lied, so why believe her now? (This is actually negated by the fact that the SVU can pin the guy for murder, but if the rape was his only crime, he'd walk.)]]

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: [[''UnintentionallyUnsympathetic/LawAndOrderSpecialVictimsUnit'' Has its own page.]]

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: [[UnintentionallyUnsympathetic/LawAndOrder:SpecialVictimsUnit Has its own page.]]

* DontShootTheMessage: The point of this series was to show the many ways victims of sex crimes can be mistreated by the criminal justice system and the world in general. The show brought attention to the way institutions and problematic people (including police) intimidate, slut-shame, and victim-blame rape victims into silence, as well as the DNA backlogs that keep easily prosecutible rapists from being brought to justice. Unfortunately, the stories are told from the point of view of protagonists who are {{Hypocrite}}s and {{Straw Feminist}}s that habitually abuse their power, enforce laws that don't exist, harass people whose sex lives they disapprove of, defend, and even cover up for guilty criminals if they are young, cute, and female (or at least two out of three), send innocent people to prison, get innocent people killed, have a horrifyingly permissive attitude towards PoliceBrutality, and are ultimately emblematic of societal problems that are as bad as the ones they rage against.

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: [[UnintentionallyUnsympathetic/LawAndOrder Has its own page.]]

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic:
** Sandra from "Pop". Lying to cover up for her abusive husband is one thing, actively trying to frame Stabler when he was trying to ''help'' her is another.
** Mary Ellen Abbott from "Lowdown". It might have been understandable for her to be in denial at first about her husband being secretly gay and a murderer, but after finding out it was all true and that she was HIV positive, she was never seen getting angry at her husband, but she did get angry at Casey. Even though her husband was entirely to blame, she told Casey that Casey had ruined her life, despite the fact that Casey probably saved her life by warning her she had been exposed to HIV (which Casey did [[ScrewTheRulesImDoingWhatsRight to her own detriment]]).
** Javier Vega from "[[{{Recap/LawAndOrderSpecialVictimsUnitS5E21Criminal}} Criminal]]". He's supposed to be sympathetic because he genuinely reformed and had his new life destroyed by a false murder accusation. But, he was sentenced to twenty-five to life for the murder he did commit and only served fifteen, so the small amount of time he spent in jail for the murder he didn't commit doesn't really feel like a colossal miscarriage of justice. There's also the fact that he was involved with his grad student, which he knew was an inappropriate relationship. Rather than refrain from the relationship, he kept it secret, which was why there was no evidence of it, and makes him losing his job not unjust either. Then when the cops figure out he had been framed, he immediately figures out who did it. Instead of telling the cops, who he knows made an honest mistake because he was expertly framed by someone who learned how to do it from him, he keeps the information to himself so he can perform a VigilanteExecution, and he files a FrivolousLawsuit against Cragen.
** Michele Osborne from "Birthright". Sure, what her doctor did to her was wrong, but her behavior throughout most of the episode alienates any possibility she had to being sympathetic. She acts very cold when discussing being reunited with her daughter and seems to view her as a trophy rather than a child she loves. Plus, there's the fact that she's either unaware that taking Patty from the only family she's ever known will destroy her or she just doesn't give a damn. [[spoiler: Luckily, in the end, she decides to let Patty stay with them.]]
** Melanie Tamkin's father in "Responsible". When Stabler tells him that his daughter died at a party three other teenagers threw, he cries "They murdered my little girl". Except they really didn't. The girl drank too much and choked on her own vomit. When the judge doesn't throw the book at them he screams "YOU CALL THIS JUSTICE. YOU'RE LETTING KILLERS WALK FREE." then screams at the kids "MURDERERS! YOU KILLED MY DAUGHTER". The show tries to portray him as a victim being disregarded by a callous system, but he just comes off as a pathetic man trying to make his daughter's death anyone else's fault because he thinks his grief entitles him to a pound of flesh.
** "Collateral Damages" centers on the SVU catching a city official in a child pornography sting, but the entire episode is about how sad it is that his family is ruined by his porn addiction and that he's really not such a bad guy; even Olivia says she feels bad for him, his wife is implied to stay with him, and Barba gets him the lightest possible sentence. Why? Because hey, he didn't rape his ''own'' children, he just traded in a mountain of kiddie porn for twenty hours a week and stashed it in the bottom of his underwear drawer, it's not like he really hurt anybody!
** Hailey in "Transitions" is meant to be seen as a struggling child fighting for the right to be herself, but while she's admittedly going through a tough situation (being transgender and having a parent who refuses to accept her as a girl, a refusal which carries potential major implications in the near future due to questions of medical intervention), she is confrontational, out of control, irrational, and violent against just about everyone in her life whether they mean her any harm or not (including her mother, who's come around to being supportive), and she's openly proud of it. After the god awful nightmare that Cheryl Avery went through, hearing a twelve-year-old brat congratulate herself for giving her mother a black eye for catching her sneaking into the house at two in the morning just doesn't work. Jackie Blaine is in a similar boat, since she basically tried to kill Hailey's father in revenge for an assault she suffered years ago that had absolutely nothing to do with him, with the excuse that she was protecting Hailey from him -- but while it's clear that he's hurting Hailey by refusing to accept her gender identity, it's still a long way from what Jackie went through.
** Eva Santiago in "Hardwired" is supposed to be sympathetic because she was abused by her first husband and then her second husband who rescued her from the unsafe shelter she was stuck in, put her on prescription drugs so he could molest her child, and it was emotionally difficult for her to help the police trap a bigger pedophile. But she intentionally crashed her car into another woman's car, while the other woman's child was in the car and punched the woman in the face and smashed her head into the steering wheel repeatedly. She did this because the other woman accused her son of sexual assault, which was true. Then she stabbed her husband, who did not get away with molesting her son, in fact he was being led away in handcuffs when she stabbed him. Then she got mad at the cops for arresting her for stabbing her husband, after they let her go. She received no punishment for any of her crimes and Olivia taught her how to walk away with all of her husband's money.
** Jennifer Banks from "Hothouse". Benson wants to go easy on her because she's only 14 and wasn't in her right mind when she committed her crime of murdering her roommate, Elsa, due to the drugs she was taking to improve her performance at her elite prep school. But the fact remains that she killed Elsa over a petty dispute, tried to cover up the murder by suggesting that Elsa's abusive father was responsible, and never once showed remorse for her actions, even flat-out stating that ''"I'm glad she's dead."''
*** While in the interrogation room, Jennifer brings up that no matter how hard she studied, Elsa's grades were always better than hers. She even tried begging Elsa to deliberately fail one exam for her, so that Jennifer's grades would be the highest in the school for once. Presumably, this was intended to show that she was under incredible amounts of pressure to succeed, which she was. But Jennifer also knew that Elsa's father physically abused her for not living up to his expectations, as evidenced when she tried to pin Elsa's death on him. This makes Jennifer look even worse, as she was essentially saying that she didn't care if Elsa was being abused as long as she, Jennifer, [[ItsAllAboutMe got to be the school's star student]]. Not helping matters is that Jennifer is already much more privileged than her victim, coming from a wealthy and loving family. She had a lot less to lose than Elsa, but decided to take everything from her anyway, just because she couldn't stand to be in "second place".
** Jamie Hoskins from "Influence". Because of her young age and her bipolar disorder, Novak tries to get her a relatively light sentence. She is presented as a vulnerable young woman led astray by her idol, a rock star with anti-psychiatry views, who convinced her that her medication was damaging her brain. But her actions throughout the episode make it difficult to sympathize with her. [[spoiler:When she stops taking her pills, she goes through a manic phase, having sex with two of her male friends, then falsely accusing them of rape, ruining their lives, costing one of them a college scholarship, and getting them (and herself) expelled from school. She then tries to commit suicide by deliberately causing a car accident, injuring six innocent people and killing another girl. Throughout the trial, she shows no remorse for her crimes and ''still'' refuses to take her medication. She even has the gall to [[NeverMyFault blame her parents]] for everything that she did while off her pills. After all that, house arrest, a court-ordered drug regimen, and a short sentence in a psychiatric facility seems very lenient, considering the devastation she caused. Near the end of the episode, [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone it finally hits her how badly she messed up]], but for many viewers, it's too little, too late.]]
** Laura Collett from "Imposter" tried to get her son into an Ivy League university by having sex with the Director of Admissions. Her willingness to do this meant that she didn't care that she was stealing a slot from a student who earned it by merit. She said she did this because she wanted her son to have opportunities, which meant that the opportunities her son would have as a rich male WASP with a degree from a slightly less prestigious college wouldn't have been enough for her. When she finds out the man she had sex with was only pretending to be the Director of Admissions, she tried to help Benson and Barba prosecute him for breaking a law that they all knew didn't really exist.
** Benson and Stabler are supposed to be sympathetic because of their AbusiveParents and the fact that their drive to get justice for the victims comes at a constant cost to their personal lives. But they act like petulant children whenever they don't get exactly what they want, they never take responsibility for their own wrongdoing, and their choice to put work ahead of everything would come off as much more noble if they hadn't destroyed so many innocent lives in the course of doing their jobs.
** Trish, one of Ken Turner's reproductive abuse victims from "Bang". When Ken refused to let her or his son move in with him, she killed herself in the car with carbon monoxide, along with her son. The episode tries to paint her as an innocent victim of Ken's. However, the fact that there are at least 46 other women who weren't DrivenToSuicide and Ken fully intended to support his child her committing MurderSuicide because the man she loved didn't want to be with her made her actions come across as {{Wangst}}.
** Councilwoman Nasar from "Assumptions" was supposed to be sympathetic because halfway through the episode she was revealed to be secretly gay and living in fear of how her constituents and her devout Muslim family would react if they found out. Apparently this was supposed to make the audience forget that she was a rabid anti-Semite and that she manipulated Jewish teenagers into making themselves look like Islamophobes in an out-of-context video.
** Nick Amaro. When he thinks his wife is cheating, he assaults the guy he thinks she is sleeping with ([[SarcasmMode always a productive solution]]). He joins Benson in [[DirtyCop covering up for the killer]] of Dia Nobile. When Cassidy finds out about his undercover affair, he acts as if Cassidy is the one [[NeverMyFault responsible for his newfound problems]]. And he never showed a hint of remorse for beating an acquitted man into a coma.
** Holden's mother from "Holden's Manifesto". Yes, she's a grieving mother, and no matter how much evil her son had caused [[EvenEvilCanBeLoved she's still going to love him]]. However, when he's killed after holding up a high school class full of people he'd never met (including one that he'd murdered) and holding two police detectives at gunpoint, she proceeds to blame literally everyone except for the people responsible for the situation; first, she points the finger at Olivia for "breaking her promise" to save Holden's life (even though she really did do everything she could to stop the sniper and ultimately had next to no say in the situation) and then yells at the "whore" Amanda for getting her son killed (even though she spent several minutes trying to peacefully talk him down). By blaming everyone except for the man who ordered the shot, the man who fired, or her own son's horrific actions (in the process blaming all of the women while never once blaming the men), she goes from being a grieving mother to the apparent source of [[StrawMisogynist Holden's]] [[MoralMyopia many]] [[NeverMyFault issues]].
** Gloria Montero of "Poisoned Motives". Okay, her and her father's life went down quickly after he was injured in the line of duty and she ''does'' have some right to feel angry. However, to vent her anger she decides to go on a killing spree involving the attempted murder of Rollins, murders of four innocent people, and kidnapping/attempted murder of two more. Of the aforementioned four people, two of them were cops like her doing her job but she killed them to not leave witnesses; the other was the son of her father's former boss; and the last was (relatively) innocent girlfriend of the man who shot her father, which left their child in foster care. And those two people she held hostage? A ''pregnant'' woman and her ''child''. Their "offense"? Being in her childhood home. And Gloria [[NeverMyFault blames]] all of this on everyone else and doesn't care about how she has needlessly hurt innocents. At the end of the day, she's nothing more than an egotistical, cold, heartless monster who doesn't deserve sympathy.
** Amanda Rollins. Amanda always forgives and takes care of her AbusiveParents and AddledAddict sister no matter how miserable they make her life. When Benson berates Amanda in "Gambler's Fallacy" and "[[NotMeThisTime Star-Struck Victims]]" she never stands up for herself by pointing out that Benson is a total hypocrite that Cragen has let off the hook for things she [[KarmaHoudini should have gone to prison for]] (even after Benson admitted that firing Amanda wasn't an option). Meanwhile, in "Rapist Anonymous" when Amaro tries to warn her about her dirtbag sponsor/boyfriend, she accuses him of trying to sabotage her happiness. In "At Midnight in Manhattan" she yells at Carisi, for abandoning her to work at the DA's Office and calls him stupid for ever believing that she was genuinely supportive of his decision. Add it up, it's clear that Amanda chooses not to set boundaries with people who abuse her, and then [[MisdirectedOutburst takes it out]] on the people who genuinely care about her.
** In "The Five Hundredth Episode", when Olivia faces the fact that her ex-boyfriend was a predator who took advantage of her, she then comes to regard her mother sympathetically, as just trying to protect her. Except said mother threatened Olivia with a broken glass bottle, saying she would never let Olivia go. At best, Olivia's mother comes across as RightForTheWrongReasons.
** Carisi's niece in "In Loco Parentis" who falsely accuses a male classmate of raping her just to keep her roommate (who had a crush on the boy) from being mad at her for hooking up with him, resulting in the boy being expelled. When Carisi finds out about this he believes that expulsion is too good for the boy who raped his niece and launches a police investigation into the matter. However, the investigation exposes several inconsistencies in his niece's story and when he tells her that the investigation is likely to be dropped, she tells him that she lied about being raped and why. Carisi is understandably furious and demands her to make things right. It turns out, her way of making things right is to call the boy and ask him to come to her dorm so that she can apologize to him in person. He shows up and proceeds to rape her for real this time in retaliation for the false accusation. During the trial, Carisi forbids his niece from perjuring herself but instructs her not to admit making up the first rape if the defense doesn't specifically ask about it. The defense does not ask his niece about it, but Carisi takes the stand later on and is ultimately forced to admit that his niece lied about the first rape. The boy is ultimately convicted, but only after confessing on the stand.

** Hailey in "Transitions" is meant to be seen as a struggling child fighting for the right to be herself, but while she's admittedly going through a tough situation (being transgender and having a parent who refuses to accept her as a girl, a refusal which carries potential major implications in the near future due to questions of medical intervention), she is confrontational, out of control, irrational, and violent against just about everyone in her life whether they mean her any harm or not (including her mother, who's come around to being supportive), and she's openly proud of it. After the godawful nightmare that Cheryl Avery went through, hearing a twelve-year-old brat congratulate herself for giving her mother a black eye for catching her sneaking into the house at two in the morning just doesn't work. Jackie Blaine is in a similar boat, since she basically tried to kill Hailey's father in revenge for an assault she suffered years ago that had absolutely nothing to do with him, with the excuse that she was protecting Hailey from him -- but while it's clear that he's hurting Hailey by refusing to accept her gender identity, it's still a long way from what Jackie went through.

** Holden's mother from "Holden's Manifesto". Yes, she's a grieving mother, and no matter how much evil her son had caused [[EvenEvilCanBeLoved she's still going to love him]]. However, when he's killed after holding up a high school class full of people he'd never met (including one that he'd murdered) and holding two police detectives at gunpoint, she proceeds to blame literally everyone except for the people responsible for the situation; first, she points the finger at Olivia for "breaking her promise" to save Holden's life (even though she really did do everything she could to stop the sniper and ultimately had next to no say in the situation) and then yells at the "whore" Andrea for getting her son killed (even though she spent several minutes trying to peacefully talk him down). By blaming everyone except for the man who ordered the shot, the man who fired, or her own son's horrific actions (in the process blaming all of the women while never once blaming the men), she goes from being a grieving mother to the apparent source of [[StrawMisogynist Holden's]] [[MoralMyopia many]] [[NeverMyFault issues]].

** Darius from "Transgender Bridge". True, he didn't mean to kill the victim, and he was genuinely remorseful afterward, but the fact that, for whatever reason, he deliberately set out to assault a transgender kid for being transgender doesn't win him a lot of sympathy. In the end, the judge's ruling, finding him guilty of a hate crime and sentencing him to seven years in prison, is correct given that even the defense expert's testimony ultimately supports the finding that Darius assaulted the victim out of transphobic bias.

** Due to the show running for [[LongRunners twenty-five years]], a ''lot'' has changed regarding how society views things like gender and sexual orientation. Nowadays, it can be jarring to hear how freely the detectives threw around the word "tranny", "he-shes", and descriptions like "boys pretending to be girls who are really boys" in earlier seasons regarding trans people. The season 3 finale "Silence" is probably the worst offender, particularly as the episode also specifically makes it clear that the murder victim wanted to undergo gender reassignment, albeit using the slightly antiquated term "sex change operation". The ship starts to get righted as soon as season 4's "Fallacy" -- while the trans character in that episode is referred to as "really a man" and "a tranny" once each, it's a shocked reaction to getting the initial news, and thereafter the character is consistently referred to with correct pronouns. Other notable instances from the first season alone include Munch cracking a joke that a former rapist out on parole was "too gay to rape a DA" now that he was in a relationship with a man, BDSM practitioners being seen as sexual perverts and deviants, and bisexuality being the target of many a "lol look at 'em, they're [[DepravedBisexual depraved]], sick weirdos who go for just anyone and ReallyGetsAround!" style jokes.

** Due to the show running for [[LongRunners twenty-five years]], a ''lot'' has changed regarding how society views things like gender and sexual orientation. Nowadays, it can be jarring to hear how freely the detectives threw around the word "tranny", "he-shes", and descriptions like "boys pretending to be girls who are really boys" in earlier seasons regarding trans people (the season 3 finale "Silence" is the worst offender, particularly as the episode also specifically makes it clear that the murder victim wanted to undergo gender reassignment, albeit using the slightly antiquated term "sex change operation"). Other notable instances from the first season alone include Munch cracking a joke that a former rapist out on parole was "too gay to rape a DA" now that he was in a relationship with a man, BDSM practitioners being seen as sexual perverts and deviants, and bisexuality being the target of many a "lol look at 'em, they're [[DepravedBisexual depraved]], sick weirdos who go for just anyone and ReallyGetsAround!" style jokes.

** Due to the show running for [[LongRunners twenty-five years]], a ''lot'' has changed regarding how society views things like gender and sexual orientation. Nowadays, it can be jarring to hear how freely the detectives threw around the word "tranny", "he-shes", and descriptions like "boys pretending to be girls who are really boys" in earlier seasons regarding trans people. Other notable instances from the first season alone include Munch cracking a joke that a former rapist out on parole was "too gay to rape a DA" now that he was in a relationship with a man, BDSM practitioners being seen as sexual perverts and deviants, and bisexuality being the target of many a "lol look at 'em, they're [[DepravedBisexual depraved]], sick weirdos who go for just anyone and ReallyGetsAround!" style jokes.

** Due to the show running for [[LongRunners twenty-five years]], a ''lot'' has changed regarding how society views things like gender and sexual orientation. Nowadays, it can be jarring to hear how freely the detectives threw around the word "tranny", "he-shes", and descriptions like "boys pretending to be girls who are really boys" in earlier seasons regarding trans people. Other notable instances from the first season alone include Munch cracking a joke that a former rapist out on parole was "too gay to rape a DA" now that he was in a relationship with a man, BDSM practitioners being seen as sexual perverts and deviants, and bisexuality being the target of many a "lol look at 'em, they're [[DepravedBisexual depraved]], sick weirdos who go for AnythingThatMoves and ReallyGetsAround!" style jokes.

** Nowadays, it can be jarring to hear how freely the detectives threw around the word "tranny" in earlier seasons.
** Earlier seasons had the police regularly abuse and torment witnesses and violate the law by inviting themselves into house (claiming to hear noise) and seek protection behind a blue line of silence. Elliot Stabler in particular not only reached for the JackBauerInterrogationTechnique every chance he got, but would casually discuss methods of torture with his coworkers and even admitted that he fantasized about murdering the suspects he arrests. Shortly after Christopher Meloni left the show police officers across the country were the subject of one abuse scandal after another, with real-world police officiers behaving in this manner in such cases. While the show responded by toning down the violence and having its detectives stop using such methods, it's hard to watch the older episodes without wondering how long Stabler would last in a world where the people he arrests have camera phones.

%%** In "Imposter" a man was pretending to be the Dean of Admissions at an elite university to get women to have sex with him in exchange for admitting their kids. Benson's insistence that the women were rape victims who deserved justice became even harder to get on board with (see UnintentionallyUnsympathetic below) after the RealLife college admissions scandal came out a few years later.

%%** Tom Metcalf from "[[{{Recap/LawAndOrderSpecialVictimsUnitS18E3Imposter}} Imposter]]". It's not that he isn't a giant sleazebag, it's just that he's the least evil person in this entire episode, but gets treated like the only evil person in the episode. He [[BedTrick tricks women into having sex with him]] by pretending he can get their kids into a prestigious university, which is a rotten thing to do, but it's not a crime. Meanwhile, the women he tricks are trying to use sex to get a college admission slot, which not only evinces an appalling sense of entitlement, it's an actual crime (a few years after this episode aired dozens of people were arrested in RealLife for defrauding the admissions process). None of the women are arrested, but Benson and Barba arrest and prosecute Metcalf knowing full well he hasn't broken an actual law, which is an abuse of state power, another actual crime. The detectives then learn that Metcalf's friend, Gary Bell, secretly recorded Metcalf having sex with the women without Metcalf's knowledge, which is another actual crime, in which the women and Metcalf himself were victims, but Barba and the cops made a deal with Bell to prosecute Metcalf. To clarify, they made a deal with a real sex offender to prosecute one of his victims for a not-real crime. In the end, Metcalf, who hadn't actually committed a crime, caves to pressure, pleads guilty, and accepts a year in jail, while every other character, all of whom had committed crimes, face [[KarmaHoudini no punishment whatsoever]]. The DisproportionateRetribution from the [[DesignatedHero protagonists]] combined with the lack of punishment for everyone else makes Metcalf seem more victim than villain.

%%** Laura Collett from "Imposter" tried to get her son into an Ivy League university by having sex with the Director of Admissions. Her willingness to do this meant that she didn't care that she was stealing a slot from a student who earned it by merit. She said she did this because she wanted her son to have opportunities, which meant that the opportunities her son would have as a rich male WASP with a degree from a slightly less prestigious college wouldn't have been enough for her. When she finds out the man she had sex with was only pretending to be the Director of Admissions, she tried to help Benson and Barba prosecute him for breaking a law that they all knew didn't really exist.

** Olivia. Does her backstory of being a ChildByRape grant her a deeper insight into the psyche of the victims, allowing her to empathize with them to the point that she's willing to risk her job to get them justice? Or has it made her an emotional basket case who can't maintain the emotional detachment and impartiality needed to do her job properly, seeking revenge on the rapist father she can never punish in real life? "Devastating Story" further complicates this as the rape advocacy professor specifically went to Olivia in order to try and railroad three innocent men. She even did things like tell the victim even though they were both drunk it was still rape because she wasn’t capable of consenting.

** Olivia. Does her backstory of being a ChildByRape grant her a deeper insight into the psyche of the victims, allowing her to empathize with them to the point that she's willing to risk her job to get them justice? Or has it made her an emotional basket case who can't maintain the emotional detachment and impartiality needed to do her job properly? "Devastating Story" further complicates this as the rape advocacy professor specifically went to Olivia in order to try and railroad three innocent men. She even did things like tell the victim even though they were both drunk it was still rape because she wasn’t capable of consenting.

** In "Imposter" a man was pretending to be the Dean of Admissions at an elite university to get women to have sex with him in exchange for admitting their kids. Benson's insistence that the women were rape victims who deserved justice became even harder to get on board with (see UnintentionallyUnsympathetic below) after the RealLife college admissions scandal came out a few years later.

** Tom Metcalf from "[[{{Recap/LawAndOrderSpecialVictimsUnitS18E3Imposter}} Imposter]]". It's not that he isn't a giant sleazebag, it's just that he's the least evil person in this entire episode, but gets treated like the only evil person in the episode. He [[BedTrick tricks women into having sex with him]] by pretending he can get their kids into a prestigious university, which is a rotten thing to do, but it's not a crime. Meanwhile, the women he tricks are trying to use sex to get a college admission slot, which not only evinces an appalling sense of entitlement, it's an actual crime (a few years after this episode aired dozens of people were arrested in RealLife for defrauding the admissions process). None of the women are arrested, but Benson and Barba arrest and prosecute Metcalf knowing full well he hasn't broken an actual law, which is an abuse of state power, another actual crime. The detectives then learn that Metcalf's friend, Gary Bell, secretly recorded Metcalf having sex with the women without Metcalf's knowledge, which is another actual crime, in which the women and Metcalf himself were victims, but Barba and the cops made a deal with Bell to prosecute Metcalf. To clarify, they made a deal with a real sex offender to prosecute one of his victims for a not-real crime. In the end, Metcalf, who hadn't actually committed a crime, caves to pressure, pleads guilty, and accepts a year in jail, while every other character, all of whom had committed crimes, face [[KarmaHoudini no punishment whatsoever]]. The DisproportionateRetribution from the [[DesignatedHero protagonists]] combined with the lack of punishment for everyone else makes Metcalf seem more victim than villain.

** Laura Collett from "Imposter" tried to get her son into an Ivy League university by having sex with the Director of Admissions. Her willingness to do this meant that she didn't care that she was stealing a slot from a student who earned it by merit. She said she did this because she wanted her son to have opportunities, which meant that the opportunities her son would have as a rich male WASP with a degree from a slightly less prestigious college wouldn't have been enough for her. When she finds out the man she had sex with was only pretending to be the Director of Admissions, she tried to help Benson and Barba prosecute him for breaking a law that they all knew didn't really exist.

** In a season 10 episode "Lead", Alex questions trying a sexual abuse victim for a pediatrician's murder due to his intellectual delay by using the word "retarded". Ironically the episode aired in ''2009'', the same year as the signing of Rosa's Law, which ended the use of the term "mental retardation" as a medical and educational term.

* WhatTheHellCastingAgency:
** ''Gilbert Gottfried'', of all people, as a one-off lab tech in "Lost Traveler". He basically analyzes and traces cell phone evidence, and doesn't speak in his usual voice.
** Given the show's premise, the decision to include a guest appearance in "Monster's Legacy" by convicted rapist Mike Tyson was controversial to say the least. Thousands of fans signed petitions asking showrunners to reconsider. It's made even worse because Tyson's character isn't even the villain of the episode (which would still be problematic that they hired him, but would at least be consistent with how people think of Tyson), but rather is a sympathetic character that Benson is helping. (While Tyson's character, Reggie Rhodes, is a convicted murderer, he was [[FreudianExcuse made that way]] by the episode's true baddie played by Creator/EdAsner, and the [[AssholeVictim man he killed had been abusing him too]]. Rhodes even gets a happy ending, a retrial with the possibility of a lighter sentence, after it's discovered the the prosecutor at his original trial deliberately concealed evidence of the abuse.)

* TrueArtIsAngsty: The darkest of all the ''Franchise/LawAndOrder'' shows, it's the only one to win an award and is eventually the longest running.