Many of the so-called victims of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit fall under this.
- 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 to her own detriment).
- Javier Vega from "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 Vigilante Execution, and he files a Frivolous Lawsuit 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. 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, 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. 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 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, 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 Abusive Parents 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 Driven to Suicide and Ken fully intended to support his child her committing Murder-Suicide 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 (always a productive solution). He joins Benson in covering up for the killer of Dia Nobile. When Cassidy finds out about his undercover affair, he acts as if Cassidy is the one 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 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 Holden's many 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 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 Abusive Parents and Addled Addict sister no matter how miserable they make her life. When Benson berates Amanda in "Gambler's Fallacy" and "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 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 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 Right for the Wrong Reasons.
- 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.
- Sophie Simmons a.k.a. Grace Walker from "Exile". She was raped, and the raped caused her mind to fracture and she spent years living on the streets with no memory of her identity. However, her mental condition didn't make her any less responsible for trying to rob an innocent man and letting the police think he raped her after he fought her off. Olivia promised to get justice for her rape (the one that actually happened) only to subsequently learn that the rapist died months earlier. Sophie told Benson that making this promise made her worse than her abusive boyfriend.
