Follow TV Tropes

Following

Law And Order SVU / Tropes A to F

Go To

A - F | G - P | Q - Z

Back to Main.


    open/close all folders 
    A 
  • Abusive Offspring: "Dominance" - As if it wasn't bad enough that he raped his younger brother, Charlie is shown to be abusive and violent to his Alcoholic Parent, beating his father up and generally terrorizing him.
  • Abusive Parents: several victims have these but the worst was probably in "Sick"—the woman who was poisoning her granddaughter to make it appear she had cancer. She used the child's "illness" to bilk charities, and then convinced her to say she was molested by a celebrity so they can get money from him, telling her she would die if they didn't.
    • Elliot had a physically and emotionally abusive father and a mother with undiagnosed and untreated bipolar disorder, causing her to give her son emotional scars and (on her part) unintentional injuries from her manic episodes.
    • Olivia's mother was an alcoholic who (at least at times) resented Olivia for being a Child by Rape. Mostly it seems to have been emotional abuse and Parental Neglect (forcing Olivia to care for her instead of the other way around), but at one point Olivia recounts an incident when her mother came at her with a broken bottle when she learned that Olivia intended to marry an older man, forcing Olivia to kick her to get away.
    • As of "Padre Sandunguero", Amaro is revealed to have been physically abused by his father as a child, and in the present day both parents and his sister engage in some hardcore denial/gaslighting about how bad it was. In the same episode it's also implied that Rafael Barba's father was abusive as well.
    • "Hothouse" had a man put his two daughters through Training from Hell from a young age in order to make them into geniuses, forcing them to learn advanced mathematics in a freezing cold room for hours daily and viciously punishing them for mistakes with beatings and cigarette burns. He threw his elder daughter out of the house at 16 for supposedly not being as smart as her sister, because she had an IQ of 135 and her sister's was 165. She sees him again for the first time in years during the episode, and his first words to his wife are, "She is dead to us." Surprisingly, he actually turns out to be innocent when the detectives are investigating the death of his younger daughter.
    • "Institutional Fail" had a girl who was beaten, starved, and locked in a dog cage by her mother and stepfather for crying too much. The same episode briefly mentioned a four-year-old girl admitted to the ER for cigarette burns all over her body and an eight-year-old boy forced to drink bleach by his mother.
    • "Design" has a woman who conceived her daughter by purchasing a famous musician's semen in hopes of having a gifted musician for a child, then angrily asking her doctor, "Now what am I supposed to do with her?" when the daughter can't play Mozart, despite only being a toddler. Despite seeing very little of her, it is clear that she does not care about her daughter, only the fame and fortune she thinks will come from having her.
    • Marilyn in "Home" controls every aspect of her homeschooled sons' lives and doesn't give them enough to eat because she believes that processed food causes cancer. She gets investigated by SVU when her younger son, Jacob, is seen eating out of a trash can. When she hears that ACS is coming to do a check on the house, she forces her older son, Adam, to kill his little brother so he can't be put in foster care; Adam obeys because she's convinced him that foster care is a Fate Worse than Death. The episode later reveals that she had a third son, Daniel, who was removed from her care after she beat him, blaming him for her husband's death.
    • An abusive foster parent/grandparent duo shows up in the season 3 episode "Care," in which Dorothy Rudd abuses her own foster child and then forces her adult daughter (who is also implied to have been abused by Dorothy when she was a child, which is why she's so compliant to everything Dorothy wants) to take in more foster kids and help her "discipline" them (restraining them so Dorothy can beat them), leading to the death of one child.
  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality: In real life, suspects are under no obligation to talk to police if they are not under arrest, and can leave an interrogation at any time. Moreover, physical assault by a police officer during interrogation is a great way to get sued, and is also a great way to get the case thrown out of court due to police tampering.
  • Acquitted Too Late: The detectives of the SVU have a long and storied history when it comes to arresting the wrong person, making lots of public accusations regarding sex crimes, and then not even caring about the destruction they've caused to other people's lives.
    • Season 2's "Taken" starts off with a teenaged girl stumbling out of an elevator during a hotel opening. The staff shuttles her off to the side, and a suspect (who is on the sex offender registry as a pedophile) is later arrested. Turns out it's a scam to get money from the hotel, the supposedly under-age "victim" was in her 20s rather than her teens, the sex was consensual, and the "suspect" was a patsy set up by the girl and her family. Unfortunately, by the time anyone remembers that they have an innocent man in jail, the "suspect" had already been killed in prison (pedophiles being very unpopular in prison populations). Fortunately, that made the woman and her accomplices legally culpable for murder.
      • Disturbingly enough, Munch is the only one who is bothered by the suspect's death (as opposed to being glad the woman and her accomplices didn't get away) and takes the trouble of informing the dead man's ex-girlfriend (who, it turns out, was the same girl the suspect was arrested for raping — it was a clear statutory rape case, because he was 22 and she was only 15, but she loved him and continues to do so, and by this point she's well old enough to make that call).
    • In Season 3's "Repression", a young woman "recalls" that her father sexually abused her in her youth after a psychiatrist "recovers" memories of the abuse. In typical SVU fashion, it goes downhill from there, with the father being vilified as a monster by everyone, including the SVU department and his own family, culminating in the father being shot by his other daughter in a misguided attempt to protect her sister from him. Only then does the truth come to light, which is that the girl is actually a virgin, meaning no abuse could have taken place at all. They are able to use this to get the psychiatrist arrested for malpractice but two young girls have lost their father and the oldest will have to live with the guilt of framing then murdering her own innocent father.
    • A variation in "Unstable" where they find out a man was wrongfully imprisoned and arrest the right man. Unfortunately, the real criminal, the only person who could exonerate the wrongfully accused man, either commits suicide or is murdered by a hothead detective (we only see the aftermath), rendering them unable to free the innocent man. A similar scenario is very narrowly averted later that same season in "Confidential".
    • During "Contagious" where a young girl is found to have been sexually abused, she eventually points the finger at her soccer coach who is also a close friend of her family. The man is taken into custody and held responsible for his actions but it's soon revealed that the only reason the girl accused him is because she was scared by the amount of pressure placed on her by the detectives. The episode ends with a Downer Ending for the originally accused man, because in the course of the investigation it came out that he lied about a sex crime charge (dropped) from his past, so he lost his job and will also never be able to apply to be a teacher ever again and is moving upstate with his family to his in-laws.
  • Acquired Poison Immunity: In the episode "Wet", a suspect is believed to have committed murder by poisonous mushroom spores, which he built up an immunity to through years of exposure.
  • Action Girl: Olivia. And how. Rollins, too.
  • Activist-Fundamentalist Antics: In "Spectacle", a guy has tried for eight years to get his kidnapped brother back. The police and everyone else stopped caring many years ago, so now he resorted to kidnapping and raping a woman just to get the police's attention. Oh, and the woman is of course in on it. Pulling off a little Romanticized Abuse show to the audience as her "rape" gets broadcasted on the web.
  • Adam Westing: A rare non-comedic example with Jerry Lewis, whose Jerry-Lewis-like behavior is part of the manic episode "Uncle" that ends in murder.
  • An Aesop: If the murder investigation doesn't hammer it in hard enough, the B-plot with Elliot's family for that week will usually parallel the investigation in some way.
  • Aesop Amnesia:
    • Cragen and Elliot have had weeks where they've been forced to learn that railroading suspects can lead to wrongful convictions and they need to consider that the suspects they finger might be innocent after all before pushing it. But then continue to operate like that at least every other week.
      • This was subverted in the episode "Double Strands", where they look into the background of a seemingly-guilty suspect, and find the true culprit, the original suspect's twin brother.
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys: Many episodes feature a girl with a criminal boyfriend. It usually ends badly for her.
  • All There in the Manual: It's never explicitly stated on the show, but the reason Cragen had himself transferred to the SVU was because after his wife died in a plane crash, he started drinking again and soliciting prostitutes, so he joined to take control of his life again.
  • Always Female: Up until Barba, the ADA. There have been more than half a dozen recurring ADAs, all of whom lacked a Y-chromosome:
    • Abbie Carmichael, crossing over from the original Law & Order, was the de facto ADA for most of the first season; she appeared in five of the first ten episodes.
    • Alex Cabot became the first permanent ADA for SVU in the premiere of season two; she lasted into season five, when she made a sudden and dramatic departure in time for November Sweeps.
    • She was immediately replaced by Casey Novak, who served for five seasons (holding the franchise record for longest-serving ADA, beating Carver, Cabot and Rubirosa); she was fired and disbarred at the end of season nine.note 
    • She, too, was immediately replaced, by Kim Greylek, who lasted for the first half of the tenth season. After her rapid departure, she was replaced by:
    • Alex Cabot, for her second stint, lasting most of the tenth and eleventh seasons, interrupted by:
    • Sonia Paxton, an older and more senior ADA (her rank is explicitly given as EADA, the same as that of Jack McCoy before his election as DA).
    • After Cabot leaves yet again, she's replaced by Jo Marlowe, a former cop and partner of Stabler's, played in a four-episode stint by Sharon Stone.
    • Mikka Von was intended as the new ADA for season twelve, but the actress who played her left after one episode to film Mission Impossible IV. Her replacement was Gillian Hardwicke.
    • Starting in season 13, Alex Cabot and Casey Novak both return in (mostly) alternating episodes.
    • Subverted in "Disabled" where the EADA, Garrett Blaine, is male. Given a lampshade in his first appearance in the episode:
      Cragen: You find me a replacement for Alex Cabot?
      Blaine: Still looking. Stuck with me for now.
    • Season 13 has recurring EADA David Haden and a couple of guest appearances by Law & Order's Mike Cutter, but neither appears often enough to be considered a regular (and Haden is only the prosecutor on SVU's cases in two of his four appearances; in the other two, he appears primarily as Benson's boyfriend).
    • Averted from Season 14 on. The recurring in Season 14 and then regular ADA, Rafael Barba, is male. However, there is another recurring ADA handling child cases who is female, Pippa Cox. As of Season 19 Barba is replaced by Peter Stone, Ben Stone's estranged son and recently arrived from Chicago, and Stone himself is replaced in Season 21 by Carisi, who moves from SVU to the DA's office.
  • Ambiguous Situation: SVU loves to leave stuff unresolved for the audience to ponder. Usually it's on the simple level whether the guy is guilty or not (such as in the episode "Doubt"), but sometimes they take it to a much deeper level. The detectives just keep spawning new theories, and none of them either gets verified. For example, the episode "Slaves" features a husband, his wife, and their nanny/girlfriend/Sex Slave, Ilena. They keep the relationship hidden...
    • Either because Ilena is in the country illegally, and also because her conservative aunt and other relatives would not approve of her living in a polyamorous relationship,
    • Or because they have kidnapped Ilena and held her against her will until Stockholm Syndrome set in.
    • So, it's Safe, Sane, and Consensual, polyamory and Casual Kink versus monster and A Match Made in Stockholm. The husband claims the first option, but that might just be Metaphorically True or even Blatant Lies. As for Elena, she never gets a voice in the matter. The kidnapping theory is implied to be the correct one, but if it's actually verified then that happens after the episode is over.
      • The only outright verification given for the monster viewpoint comes from the wife, and only AFTER she has been...
      • A. proven guilty of murdering Elena's aunt without her husband's knowledge or consent.
      • B. force-fed "oh, go ahead and blame it on your husband anyway" by the detectives as a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card.
      • The whole case was started by Ilena telling a fruit vendor she was "trapped in a situation she [couldn't] escape from" (in a phrasing that, according to said vendor, strongly implied abuse) and asking him to tell her aunt she needed help, so that suggests she was less than a willing participant. Not to mention she's clearly been starved long-term, that's not usually part of a consensual BDSM situation. It is true, though, that Ilena never expressly confirms as much to the detectives.
    • The verdict is left up to the audience to decide for the episode "Doubt".
  • And Starring: Before Christopher Meloni's departure, the credits had always started with "Starring Christopher Meloninote , Mariska Hargitay, Richard Belzer" and ended with "And Dann Florek". In the first season, Florek immediately followed Belzer; up to Season 12, there have been a total of eight people credited in between the two of them (at different times). As of Season 15, Belzer and Florek have both left the cast, and no one gets And Starring billing anymore.
  • Anticlimax: A good number of episodes end with them catching the bad guys and nothing else. The viewer doesn't get to see the trial, or, most satisfyingly, the guilty verdict. This kind of ending is even more infuriating if the suspect had been in court previously in the episode, but the case was foiled for some reason.
  • Anyone Can Die: While quite subdued in killing off main characters compared to other shows in the franchise, a few important characters have bit the dust, like Mike Dodds, Sonya Paxton, and longtime recurring character Ed Tucker.
  • Arch-Enemy: Averted with Lewis, for Benson, when he kills himself in front of (and all over) her in his fourth episode.
  • Armoured Closet Gay: In "Lowdown", a closeted gay Bronx D.A. is found murdered in his car. They exhaust the list of suspects until they land on his black male coworker. Fin then explains the phenomenon of being on the "down-low" in the African-American community. They investigate the coworker's poker group, and sure enough, they are all "on the down-low" and have sex with each other when they are supposedly playing poker. One of the friends, a former football player, actually refuses to testify after revealing this because he does not want to tarnish his image.
    • Inverted in "P.C.", where the leader of a lesbian rights group known for its hostility towards other members of the LGBT community is reverse outed as bisexual after being caught with her male lover.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Actually Rape, Murder, and Jaywalking — literally. In the episode "Avatar", the detectives are trying to find something to arrest a man for before he can flee the country. Said man is suspected of kidnapping, rape and murder. At the last possible second, when it seems that the detectives can't get him for anything, the suspect jaywalks at the airport, giving Detective Stabler an excuse to arrest him. This buys them time to pull together a case on the more serious charges.
  • Artistic License – Biology: In "Identity", the medical examiner shows a DNA sample to have XY chromosomes. However, as anyone who has actually seen a karyotype before will know, Y chromosomes are very small, in sharp contrast to the very large X-shaped X chromosome. This "Y chromosome" looks like a Y: It is really an X chromosome with one leg missing. This was possibly done because the crew didn't think most viewers would be able to identify a real Y chromosome.
    • There are at least two mentions in the series ("Repression", "Acceptable Loss") of a woman undergoing a medical exam that determines whether or not she's a virgin. One problem: there's no medical way to tell if a woman is a virgin or not. The "Acceptable Loss" mention might be excusable as a bluff to make the suspect think they could medically disprove her story, but it's a major plot twist in "Repression" that a medical exam supposedly shows that the girl is a virgin.
  • Artistic License – Gun Safety: On "Intimidation Game", one of the bad guys says (apparently being serious) that shooting a gun in a video game is exactly like in real life.
  • Artistic License – Law:
    • Insanity defenses are used very liberally by defense lawyers, and sentences of "not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect" are treated like "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards. In truth, Insanity defenses are rarely used, and on the rare occasion that they succeed, the defendant often ends up in a mental hospital for longer than if they were convicted.
    • Just about every show in the franchise has shown the cops barging into a doctor's office/exam room/operating room to arrest the doctor in question or their patient. This is grossly inappropriate behavior that would never happen in Real Life (possibly even lampshaded by the fact that there's always someone present yelling, "You can't go in there!"). These actions would not only violate patient privacy (very often, they are present when the cops walk in), they would compromise the sterility of the OR and cause a huge swath of problems for the hospital/clinic staff.
    • The detectives regularly threaten to arrest people for things that aren't actually crimes in order to get them to cooperate in their investigations. For example, they often threaten to charge witnesses and victims who don't want to talk with them with hindering the police. This isn't just an idle threat to trick people into helping them, they have arrested people for not talking to them, which is a violation of their rights.
    • It's not uncommon for the SVU team to threaten perps with the death penalty to get them to take a deal and confess to a crime. However, New York's last execution was in 1963 and capital punishment was ruled unconstitutional in 2004 (Season 6). For some context, Mariska Hargitay was one year old the last time New York State executed someone..
    • Like the mother ship suspense is often generated when judges allow patently absurd defenses or suppress crucial evidence on flimsy interpretations of the law. This forces the team and the DA's office to find a new way to find justice. These decisions are taken as final, even though in real life judges decisions can and are appealed by the State. Reversals disallow the defense or re-admit the evidence.
    • In "Imposter", Barba tries a guy who seduces women by pretending to be a college admissions director who can help the women's kids get into college. Barba acknowledges that rape by fraud is not a crime in New York, but then talks about getting the case to a jury. The problem: if someone has not broken a specific law, the case will never see a jury — because the judge will kick it out, and may put sanctions on the prosecutor. (Not to mention that the defendant may turn around and sue for malicious prosecution and wrongful arrest.) Later, the judge in the case hand waves his failure to dismiss the case by saying that no judge would kick out a rape case without hearing all the evidence. Except that's the judge's job when the prosecution has failed to articulate a crime in his indictment. The judge's failure to do this could subject him to "getting his pants pulled down and his reputation sullied in public" as he so put it. After all, his decision is subject to review by the appeals court and even the federal courts, given that the defendant's Fourteenth Amendment rights have been violated. Contrary to what the judge says, using the word "rape" doesn't get around that.
  • Artistic License – Traditional Christianity: In "The Undiscovered Country" Catholic teaching is referenced in discussing the morality of withdrawing life support from a baby. However, in the show, the baby is incapable of breathing on his own, and this condition is permanent. Under those circumstances, Catholic teaching defines a ventilator as "extraordinary treatment", and would counsel allowing the boy to die naturally.
  • Ascended Extra: M.E. Warner, Dr. Huang.
  • As Himself: Then-Vice President Joe Biden appeared at the beginning of "Making A Rapist", where he commends the team for their work in getting backlogged rape kits tested.
  • Asshole Victim:
    • In "Signature", a male victim is found alongside a female victim of a particularly sadistic Serial Killer. The detectives theorize that he had the bad luck to come across the dump site in the act. He was actually the killer, and was gunned down by The Profiler as revenge for the murders, and for driving her mentor to suicide.
    • A nonfatal (and literal) one is the Private Military Contractor CEO in "Official Story", who's sodomized instead of killed. It's Pay Evil unto Evil by the Papa Wolf dad of a girl the CEO himself had gang-raped before (and his Screw the Rules, I Have Connections! let him get away with it). But sadly overlaps with Revenge Before Reason for the dad—the CEO's survival consequently lets him use his PMC for his own payback, and the episode becomes a Race Against the Clock for the SVU to get him.
    • Another non-fatal one is 12-year-old Sean Hamill in "Alien", who had been picking on and harassing a younger girl at his school for months because she had two mothers, to the point of sending her an instant message that strongly implied he was going to rape her. After he tried to forcefully kiss her and cut off her ponytail with scissors, to "make her look more like a dyke", she grabbed the scissors and stabbed him in the back, paralyzing him from the waist down.
    • One thing that comes up in SVU from time to time is that there can be an Asshole Victim without a Sympathetic Murderer. Assholes hang out with assholes, after all, and sometimes they turn on each other. For example:
      • "Mean": The victim was part of a clique of popular girls who were known to be bullies; the victim in particular singled out an overweight classmate and tormented her for years. She was killed by the clique's Alpha Bitch because she failed a Secret Test of Character the killer had set up for her.
      • The victim in "Angels" was a pedophile who kept two boys captive to rape and abuse them. He was killed by another pedophile who objected to the victim's physical abuse of his children, but he believed that having sex with children didn't necessarily qualify as abuse, and had been "loving" his own stepson in this way for some time.
  • The Atoner: In "Turmoil", a girl sells out her friend, a victim of rape by a boy at their school, and lies in court that the victim recanted her rape claim, putting a huge dent in the prosecution's credibility. She later retracts her statement and willingly goes to the witness stand (off-screen) to publicly state that she herself lied about the victim lying.
  • Attempted Rape: Has happened several times to Olivia. In "Undercover", she's nearly raped by a prison guard, but is saved by Fin. Then, in Season 15, Olivia is nearly raped in two different incidents by the same person, William Lewis.
    • Not to mention all the cases that have involved it.

    B 
  • Baby-Doll Baby:
    • They find a women walking around the park with a plastic baby doll. She says that after god took her real baby he gave her one who could never die. They take the baby from her and refuse to give it back until she says whether she kidnapped a real missing baby.
    • In "Bullseye", a woman who'd suffered brain damage in a bus accident lost the ability to recognize her real daughter's face, treating the girl as if she were an impostor. Instead, the woman became obsessed with an online video game, and fixated on the virtual "child" of her online avatar as her "son". When the police take her and her boyfriend into custody for neglecting her real daughter, she cries and yells because they'd hauled her away from the video screen when her "son" was in in-game danger.
  • Back for the Dead: Kathy Stabler, last seen in season 12, is the victim of a car bombing meant for her husband in season 22.
  • Backstab Backfire: At the end of "Criminal". One man has a gun to the head of another, intending to kill him, but is eventually convinced to spare his life and let the police take him into custody for a crime he committed. As he walks away, the guy he wanted to kill picks up the discarded gun and attempts to shoot him in the back—only to be gunned down by a police sniper.
  • Bad Boss: The abusive female boss of Luscious Grape wine, who's a cross between Leona Helmsley and R. Budd Dwyer in that her dog got all her money while her abused employees got nothing after she held a news conference to publicly blame everyone except herself for her misfortunes and then shot herself in the head.
    • Jolene Castille, a cooking show host, restaurateur, and barely-concealed racist. She disallows her black employees from using the restaurant's bathrooms or serving white diners, she gets visibly upset when Fin touches her arm, and she tries to guilt Rollins about putting a fellow Southerner in jail for what she did. "Down home, they'd be givin' me a medal." What did she do? Shoot a sixteen year old black boy who happened to fit the description of a rapist targeting white women her age. He didn't do it.
  • Bait-and-Switch: In "Granting Immunity", the defendant who is a mother who opposed vaccines and was responsible for the events of the episode is declared Not Guilty by the jury for child endangerment much to her delight and her supporters...only to then get jail time and probation by a second charge.
  • The Bad Guy Wins: Plenty of instances of this pepper the show, but notable ones that particularly affected the characters include:
  • The Bad Guys Are Cops: At least in "Bedtime". Who killed Cal Cutler? Oh look, it was the former patrol cop played by Jaclyn Smith! And another surprise! Cal Cutler isn't dead after all!
  • Bad People Abuse Animals: Likely to show up in an episode where the Villain of the Week is a sociopathic child or teenager.
    • Season 3 features a couple of animal abusers who, despite being hardcore sociopaths, are not the episode's Big Bad:
      • "Rooftop" has Leon Tate, a hebephilic/ephebophilic suspect in a series of rape-homicides, tortured his neighbors' dogs and even puppies when he was 7-years-old.
      • "Prodigy" has a 16-year-old Soft-Spoken Sadist named Harry Baker who tortured and/or killed dogs and cats. One incident for example was when he poured paint thinner on a cat's tail and set it on fire. Another is where he decapitated the dog of a girl he had a crush on because she rejected him.
    • In "Mean", a teenage girl named Brittany O'Malley poisoned her older boyfriend's cat because he was seeing a friend of hers.
    • In "Conscience", when investigating the claims of a 13-year-old boy named Jake O'Hara that he was abused at a wilderness survival camp, the other boys reveal that he was actually the one who bullied them. One of the things he did was kill a gopher and leave it in another boy's bed to silence him for something Jake did to him.
    • In "Torch", a 23-year-old pedophilic arsonist named Michael Parisi burned a cat to death to silence a 10-year-old girl he raped.
    • In "Born Psychopath", 10-year-old Henry Mesner drowns his neighbor's dog in the bathtub.
    • In "Glasgowman's Wrath", 13-year-old Perry Gilbert stabs a cat to death, claiming that Glasgowman (a parody of Slender Man) told her to do it.
  • Bait the Dog: In "Home Invasions", the tragic murder of a woman who fought for LGBT rights turns out to be not so tragic when it's revealed that she knew her husband was raping their teenage daughter, and let it happen.
  • Batman Gambit:
    • "Ace". D.A. Marlowe shows the team footage of one of the cases' important witness and evidence being destroyed by a car bomb. So the team focuses on a crooked doctor who goes on to (unintentionally) torpedo the entire case against the mafioso running the operation, by revealing something that was covered under privilege. Turns out, the Feds found the bomb and orchestrated the ruse to appear the witness was killed while Marlowe has everyone else focus elsewhere on the case. The ruse also manages to deceive the mafioso as he is unable to intimidate the witness, as her parents were brought to the USA to prevent his associates from killing them in revenge.
    • In “People vs Richard Wheatley”, Carisi puts Elliot on the stand for Wheatley’s trial. Barba uses Elliot’s PTSD and disciplinary history against him, causing Elliot to blow up at him despite Carisi’s premptive warning to remain calm on the stand. After an encounter in the bathroom in which Elliot pokes at Wheatley by insinuating he had sex with Wheatley’s ex-wife Angela, Wheatley takes the stand to argue his case before the jury against his lawyer’s advice. As it turns out, this was exactly what Elliot intended as Carisi’s relentless prodding causes Wheatley to snap and issue a subtle but very noticeable threat to him in front of witnesses.
  • Bavarian Fire Drill: "Authority".
  • Be Careful What You Say: In "Sugar", when Vance Shepard finally confesses that it was his daughter (and not himself) who murdered his girlfriend, he notes that at the time she looked as if she might kill him too. When SVU gives him a few moments to say goodbye to her before they arrest her, she buries a pair of scissors in his neck.
    • The detectives and ADAs often make mention of prison rape when interrogating suspects. This turns around and bites Liv in the ass in "Perverted" when one man that she interrogated and was later convicted was raped in prison: he believes Liv arranged for him to be raped, and in revenge, has her DNA fabricated when he gets out so he can frame her for murder.
  • Berserk Button: Don't threaten Stabler or Amaro's families, just don't. If you need a reason or a reminder regarding Stabler, just watch Season 22 Episode 9 and the series it spun off into. Stabler has also thrown temper tantrums as a result of getting an assignment he didn't want, adverse rulings from judges, people he arrested getting acquitted, people disagreeing with him, being at work instead of at home with his family (even when it's by his choice), a suspect not immediately confessing, basically Stabler will completely lose his mind anytime he doesn't get his way.
    • Don't mess with anyone in Carisi's family either.
    • Don't ask not-Chris Brown who's texting him, especially if you're his girlfriend.
    • Don't abuse Rollins' sister Kim. Kim uses this to her advantage and sets up her abusive boyfriend to be killed.
    • In Season 15 and earlier, don't mock Liv when it comes to the fact that she's not a mother. She may just find a reason to lock your ass up.
      • From the Season 15 finale (where she becomes the mother of a foster child) onwards, going after her son Noah is a surefire way to have the entire squad (including Barba), the entire New York Police Department, and damn near every other police department in the country hunting you down with all of the fury they can muster. When he's kidnapped in one episode, the normally gentle Carisi (who's a Friend to All Children, and Noah's Honorary Uncle) actually uses Jack Bauer Interrogation Techniques on one of the people responsible to get him to talk.
    • Do not under any circumstances abuse your powers as a judge to overturn a guilty verdict Rafael Barba has fought tooth and nail for.
    • In "Real Fake News", the team is dealing with a conspiracy theorist pushing stuff on his website like a Congressman using a Chinese restaurant as a sex slave ring. At first, they treat the guy's site as just an annoyance getting in the way. But then he pushes a story on how Benson and Rollins are both "mothers of children of unknown origin", blatantly hinting they stole their kids and are thus covering up a "sex scandal". Needless to say, the two women are now joined in taking this guy down.
    Fin: (seeing Liv interrogate the guy) Think she's going to rip his head off?
    Rollins: If she doesn't, I will.
    • Don't use religious arguments to justify a crime around Carisi, and do not take advantage of your position as a religious authortity to abuse someone who trusts you.
  • Better to Die than Be Killed: Greedy Wine Business CEO Annette Cole goes out this way in "Bully".
  • Beware the Nice Ones: Dale Stuckey in the season 10 finale.
    • The COAP guy in the fall 2010 premiere.
    • A shy comic book guy who raped five women and created a vigilante group just to be with a woman who came to his store once.
  • Big Brother Instinct: Glenn from "Care" loves being a big brother, even if it's only to his foster siblings.
    • Greg from "Spectacle" also qualifies, given that he committed a big and elaborate crime just so the FBI would reopen the case and look for his missing brother.
    • "Parole Violations" shows Carisi to be incredibly protective of his family. First, he's furious when it appears that his sister's fiance cheated on her. When it comes out that her fiance was not cheating but was raped, he then extends this to said fiance; though he is initially very skeptical of the guy's story, once he realizes it's true and convinces the squad to take the case, he's the man's fiercest advocate. He is absolutely livid when it appears that the rapist will likely get away due to the belief that a woman cannot rape a man, and even defends Tommy (the fiance) to his sister when she doesn't believe that he's innocent. (Bonus points for the fact that he didn't much like or trust the guy prior to this.) He shows a similar level of protectiveness towards his niece in "In Loco Parentis".
  • Big Brother Is Watching: CCTV footage is very useful (though not to the extent of, say, Law & Order: UK (yet)).
  • Big Brother Bully:
    • In "Stranger", Nikki repeatedly mentions insulting her sister Heather about her weight and calling her a "heifer", most importantly on the day she ran away and was never seen again. In a twist, it turn out that Heather never ran away, nor was she kidnapped: Nikki pushed her down the chimney stack years ago so she wouldn't tell their parents about the latter's drug habit.
    • Teddy in "Web" is first seen pushing his little brother Jake away from a video game, and flat-out says to Stabler that he doesn't care if Jake gets molested by their father, who once did the same to him. It is later revealed that Teddy had been molesting Jake, as well as making child porn videos of him and selling them to pedophiles through his personal website.
  • Big, Screwed-Up Family: Many victims (and perps) come from messed-up families.
    • The Bernardis from "Babes". A psychotic mother who bullies her daughter's best friend into suicide (or so it seems), a daughter who deliberately gets herself pregnant by a homeless schizophrenic man, and a son who castrates said man and sets him on fire because he thought he raped his sister. The father is not present, but he got his wife pregnant when she was a teenager and is implied to have been a violent man, considering the son's claim that his dad would have been proud of him for brutally murdering his sister's baby-daddy.
    • The drug-dealing couple from "Blood". He makes his elderly mother stand outside in the cold for hours selling her prescription painkillers, she beats up junkies for money and throws another woman's baby out the window of a moving car. He ends up stabbing her to death.
    • Much of the main case has familial problems of their own, too, to say the least:
      • Olivia is a Child by Rape, had an alcoholic mother, and has a half-brother through her rapist father who perpetually finds himself in some kind of trouble.
      • Elliot's mother suffers from bipolar disorder, causing them to become estranged; his daughter, Kathleen, inherited this disorder, accounting for her misbehavior in early adulthood.
      • Munch's father committed suicide when Munch was in his teens, and his uncle also has severe depression; a bad reaction to the treatment for said depression leads to an uncontrolled manic episode in which he kills a man.
      • Amaro's father was abusive to him and his mother, and his mother and sister would later come to minimize the abuse and Gaslight Amaro for his refusal to do the same.
      • Rollins' father was a gambler and was abusive to her mother until he walked out on them completely, and is also revealed later to have developed a drug problem at some point. Her sister Kim is a drug addict who once tried to frame Rollins for murder, and her mother takes Kim's side and accuses Amanda of betraying the family when she won't cover for Kim.
      • Tutuola's undercover work caused his wife to leave him and caused a schism in his relationship with his son (though they later reconciled), but the really screwed up piece comes from the family he married into: his ex-wife was raped by her father and had a child, Darius, who went on to rape and murder a woman, then bury her baby alive.
    • The "family" in "Design" might be the worst one yet. April is a sociopathic Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who frames a man for rape and murder, cons the prospective adoptive parents of her baby out of thousands of dollars, and abandons her newborn daughter without a second thought after she's born. Her separated parents are little better: her mother kept her out of school, taught her how to con people out of their money, and molded her Social Darwinist views, while her father is a doctor who has his daughter drug wealthy men and steal their semen for him in an attempt to create a superior gene pool. Despite being a Well-Intentioned Extremist, he is still the least deranged of the three—when he tries to help his daughter, she asks him why. He says it's because he's her father and he loves her, and she coldly states, "Love is for suckers." At the end of the episode, the father is imprisoned, while April and her mother escape to Florida, having abandoned their newborn daughter/granddaughter as soon as she was no longer useful. Thankfully, the baby's father steps in to raise her.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Munch can speak or understand (at least) English, Russian, Greek, and Yiddish. This has come in handy on more than one occasion when a non-English-speaking witness has tried to pull a fast one on the detectives.
    • Ditto Huang with Chinese and Latin. Hilariously, he corrects the Latin translation of practicing Catholic Stabler.
    • Amaro and Barba are both native Spanish speakers. Amaro often speaks Spanish to suspects or victims, and Barba and Amaro have had an entire scene speaking Spanish to each other.
  • Bittersweet Ending:
    • "American Disgrace": Sweet because the real victim was exonerated, bitter because his reputation is ruined (he'll always be a serial philanderer at best and an accused rapist at worst), his sponsors have abandoned him, being accused of rape — even falsely — is not going to help him in his custody battle, and the woman he's in love with just revealed that she aborted his baby because she believed the rape allegations.
    • Really, most of the episodes are at least a little bittersweet. There's always some sort of hint at the end - something a victim or perpetrator says, a look shared between two characters, something - that says that the outcome is not quite as everyone would like it to be, or that they didn't get all the information exactly right.
      • This isn't even taking into account the fact that the victims have normally suffered horrible, heinous crimes and, assuming they're still alive (which they often are, as this is one of the crime dramas where it isn't Always Murder), the victims are going to need years of therapy to begin to approach a level of coping required to function. Even if the leads get their happy ending with the proper perpetrator convicted, there's no guarantee that the victim of the week is going to be able to work back into life; all they have is the promise of help, which those who have worked with or been through trauma know doesn't always take. There's also the possibility of the perp getting paroled in a few years for good behavior on the inside, or of them sneaking a retaliatory message out, which some episodes deal with.
  • Black-and-White Morality: Mostly displayed by Stabler, who said when asked if a criminal can be rehabilitated "Once a killer, always a killer", and Fin, who believes that criminals are scum no matter what the crime or how heinous it is.
  • Black Republican: Fin is a registered Republican who often times got into it with Detective John Munch, a Jewish Liberal. Over the course of the show, they became good friends.
  • Blaming the Victim: One particular episode has a victim who wrote a novel similar to Fifty Shades of Gray. The perpetrator tries to say that it was a completely consensual act based on her books, hoping the public, and thus the jury pool, will engage in Blaming The Victim and feel that she deserved it. A.D.A. Barba tricks the defendant into demonstrating with a belt how he choked the woman. The man responds, after some provocation, into pulling hard on the belt in front of the jury. Barba demonstrated that as hard as it had pulled on his throat, it had barely left a mark, then showed photographs of the deep bruising it had done on the woman's throat. The jury rejects the defendant's argument.
  • Bland-Name Product: In reality, the unit's called the Special Victims Division.
  • Bleak Abyss Retirement Home: An episode dealing with elder abuse was set in one of these.
  • Blond, Brunette, Redhead: The ADAs. Cabot, Donnelly and and Marlowe are the blondes, Paxton is the redhead, Greylek, Barba, and Stone are the brunettes. Novak is originally a redhead, then blonde, and later redhead again. Hardwicke straddles blond and redhead with stawberry blond hair.
  • Body Double: Featured in both fall 2010 season openers. In the first, a mom forces her foster daughter to become a duplicate of her missing real daughter to the point of giving the kid a nose job. In the second, a different mom believes her daughter to be this due to Capgras delusion; if she only hears her daughter, then she can recognize that it's her daughter, but the second she sees her, the delusion kicks in and she thinks it's an imposter.
  • Bondage Is Bad: The first season episode "Stocks and Bondage" is all about this trope, and many other episodes have featured it as well.
  • Book Ends: The season 18 premiere "Terrorized" deals with the ongoing concern of Islamic terrorism in the United States, referencing recent attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando. The season 18 two-hour finale "American Dream"/"Sanctuary" deals with the ongoing issue of Islamophobia in the United States, along with other social issues associated with the Trump administration.
  • Born Lucky: William Lewis, the villain of season 14's finale and part of season 15, is this. Almost his entire criminal career hinges on this (that and a large number of Batman Gambits). He's got shades of Magnificent Bastard to him, but he seems to rely more on the fact that everything (usually) seems to go wrong for the police and the DA while they're after him. For example, in the season 14 finale and season 15 premiere, he refuses to take a plea for indecent exposure and the charges end up dropped when the witnesses go back to their home country. He then tortures and rapes an old woman, but before she can testify against him, she dies. What little evidence they have turns out to possibly be contaminated by the lab tech, which results in a mistrial. He then somehow finds Olivia's address, catches her when no one expects to hear from her for two days, breaks in without leaving any signs of a break-in, catches a seasoned detective off-guard and causes her to freeze instead of reaching for her gun like she had every other time someone broke into her home, manages to subdue her and drag her down the fire escape without anyone noticing, and doesn't get caught for days. It dips into Contrived Coincidence.
    • Lewis' lucky streak is extended later on in the season 15 premiere "Surrender Benson": After kidnapping Olivia Benson, he brings her to a (seemly abandoned) beach house, where he handcuffs her to an old-fashioned iron-framed bed with the intent of continuing to torture her, rape her and finally kill her. After his first attempt at raping her is interrupted by the house maid knocking on the front door, Olivia is able to break the bedpost that she is handcuffed to and is able to subdue Lewis long enough to handcuff him to the bed while he's unconscious. After he wakes up, he proceeds to verbally taunt Olivia; she wants to kill him but he knows she won't go through with it because she "doesn't have the balls". Olivia is finally pushed over the edge and she picks up the broken bedpost and proceeds to beat William Lewis almost to death. Lewis is lucky in that despite the fact that he receives permanent physical damage, he is still alive. (He is even more lucky when it is explained later on in the season that during the ride to the hospital, he literally died and came back to life a total of 4 times in the ambulance.)
  • Bound and Gagged: More than a few victims are restrained this way.
    • Stuckey does this to Stabler in "Zebras".
    • Benson when she's captured by William Lewis.
    • One infamous Hudson University fraternity had Pledge Week shirts with an illustrated hogtied and gagged woman with "We Don't Take No For An Answer" written on the front.
  • Brains and Bondage: "Stocks & Bondage" focuses on a group of intelligent business people, almost all of whom are into S&M.
  • Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: As the "Reasonable Doubt" episode starts, a television producer threatens to kill off the character of an actor who starts bothering him with questions about his motivation.
    PA: I'm not sure we can kill him, Frank.
    Frank : Why? It's cable. Macho characters die or experiment with their sexuality, or die experimenting with their sexuality.
  • Brick Joke: In a dark way. Where an Arab-hating teen kills a Middle Eastern fellow prisoner in a holding cell. It isn't brought back up again until the very last second of the episode, where Captain Cragen gets a phone call informing them the friends of said inmate just killed him in jail.
  • Broken Bird: Olivia, Alex, Casey, Amanda. In fact, pretty much every female character to ever appear on the show. If she isn't one the first time we see her, it's bound to happen eventually.
  • Broken Pedestal: In "Lunacy", Dick Finley becomes this to Elliot when he finds out that he murdered an astronaut because of his ambition.
  • Brother–Sister Incest:
    • An accidental case occures in "Families" as a teenage murder victim turns out to be the product of an affair between her mom and her boyfriend's father. The boy is horrified and even throws up when he learns of this.
    • In "Identity", a pair of adolescent twins are forced to enact incestuous sex (no penetration, but otherwise going through the motions) by their therapist, who claims it will help encourage the girl twin to think, respond and behave like a female, because she was born a male and had a sex reassignment in infancy after a surgical accident. This, of course, really happened to the late David (Brenda) Reimer and his twin brother. The twins are emotionally close, but not that close, and in fact are sickened and humiliated by these sessions.
    • The criminal couple in "Bombshell" are incestuous twins.
    • Discussed as a possibility in "Patrimonial Burden" when the brother of a pregnant thirteen-year-old is caught on tape non-consensually groping a teenage girl (the friend/piano teacher of another sister), but DNA ultimately rules him out.
  • The Bully: Annette Cole, literally. Guess what the title of the episode is that she appears in?
  • But Not Too Gay: A big deal is made about Fin's son being gay, with Fin having to deal with the news on top of the poor relationship he and Ken have already. But in spite of all the mentioning it gets, it's not until "Learning Curve" (a full six seasons after Ken was revealed to be gay) that any mention is made of an actual relationship.
    • As of Season 18, this trope is thoroughly subverted, with Ken and Alejandro not only married but also expecting their first child (via surrogate).
    • Doctor Huang as well. His coming out was teased to be a big deal, but it was only brought up in one more episode and he has never been seen in a relationship or mentioning a past one.
  • Butt-Monkey: Dale Stuckey, the overeager, inexperienced Crime Scene Unit technician. Although he is initially incompetent (and extremely annoying) the other characters act like he's being a babbling, annoying moron no matter what. When he does contribute something valid, though, it's generally presented in such an annoying manner they snap at him anyway.

    C 
  • Call-Back: Season 13's "Justice Denied" harkens back to the opening scene of Season 6's "Quarry", where Olivia is telling Cragen she got a confession after a nine-hour interrogation, with no further details given regarding the nature of the case (a completely different case drives that episode). Seven years later, the viewer is finally given the context for that scene.
  • Canon Discontinuity: Barba's father: either he's been dead for fifteen years, as he tells Amaro in "Padre Sandunguero", or he went into a diabetic coma seven years ago and lingered on life support.
  • Car Cushion: The ending of "Trade".
    • The victim in "A Single Life" also dies this way.
  • Cassandra Truth: The mother in "Locum" insists that her daughter was lured away by an older girl with red hair who was wearing green shorts and an orange top, but the sheriff couldn't find a girl matching that description and was convinced the mother was making the whole thing up to cover for an Offing the Offspring situation. Ten years later, SVU realizes she was telling the truth when they find that the initial suspect, a photographer, had a photo taken a few days later of a girl who fit the description right down to the clothes. The sheriff had asked him if he was traveling with a girl, but didn't ask if he'd seen a girl matching the mother's description, nor did he think to look through the photos taken around that time in case they contained any evidence.
    • Also in "Justice Denied", a man SVU put away eight years ago has continued to insist that his (recanted) confession was coerced and that he didn't commit a particularly brutal rape/assault, but no one believes him, in part because he knew a detail that was never made public; namely, that the scarf used to gag the victim was green. In the course of the episode, the victim mentions casually that the scarf was actually red, and subsequent investigation reveals that the officer who vouchered it was colorblind and wrote the wrong color into the report. At the end of the episode, the real culprit is found and the man who had served eight years for a crime he never committed is set free.
    • In "Dissonant Voices", a gay music teacher was accused of molesting several boys and girls. It turns out he was being set up by the sisters of the first two victims after he dropped them from his private coaching. The charges are dropped, but he'll still never be able to teach again.
  • Catchphrase:
    Elliot Stabler: I Did What I Had to Do!
    Kathy: Well, that's refreshing.
    SVU Portable, we need a bus at ...
    • If you made a video of every time a suspect says "Do you have children, detective?" it be as long as a whole episode.
    • Stuckey has a particularly annoying one for when he figures something out: "Bing, bang, bong".
    • Every member of the team, but especially Benson and Rollins, replies with "Okay," when someone delivers some horrible news. You could almost make it a Drinking Game.
    • “My office. Now.” for Cragen.
  • Categorism as a Phobia: In "Anchor", the villain of the week had killed a lot of immigrant children. The killer was overtly racist with his serial killing being an obvious hate-crime. But the defense lawyer somehow managed to convince the jury that the man couldn't help it - that his racism should be regarded as a mental illness. The defense lawyer took the case because he had seen his father "swept by evil forces" (his father was a Klansman) and believed the same thing happened to his client, but he murdered the client after learning that he fully intended to kill again.
  • Celebrity Paradox: Combined with Product Placement; several episodes have had posters for the "No More" campaign against rape and abuse in the background. The campaign is endorsed by several celebrities, including some who looks suspiciously like the detectives of SVU.
  • Chewing the Scenery: Sharon Stone does this in damn near every scene she has as ADA Jo Marlowe. It's particularly egregious in "Shattered".
  • Chemically-Induced Insanity:
    • One episode has a Villain of the Week who has a girl she was abusing (who witnessed her murder another child in her care) committed and drugged (she managed to convince the staff that the girl was legitimately insane, but the trope was otherwise in effect).
    • "Coerced" inverts it, by having a corrupt psychiatric facility take a patient off his meds to prevent him from telling anyone about a patient who died due to negligence.
    • In another episode, a psychiatrist drugged her teenage patient up to fake a schizophrenia diagnosis in order to cover up the fact that she was sleeping with him. Huang realizes something is off because the boy had been off his meds for months but was fully lucid and showing no signs of the disorder.
  • Child by Rape: Detective Olivia Benson was conceived by rape. There was a moment when it seemed like it was not the case, but then it was made clear that her father raped her mother and her mother was not lying about it.
    • A more villainous example is Darius Parker, whose mother (Fin's ex-wife) was raped by her father. While he may not have known at the time, the fact that this is the reason why his mother hated him so much that it's implied that she threatened him could explain what he became. Darius refused to believe her.
    • Benson eventually adopts another child who was conceived by rape. Noah Benson's biological mother was raped by the sex trafficker who was holding her hostage at the time.
    • Also, a good few cases deal with children conceived by rape:
      • Season 18's "Genes" featured a guy conceived through rape who started committing crimes similar to his father's. His lawyer used this as evidence for an Insanity Defense, arguing he became a rapist because of some inherited genetic defect.
      • The same premise was used in Season 3's "Inheritence".
      • Season 12's "Trophy" involved the team trailing a rapist some thirty years after his attacks. When Olivia talks to the daughter of one of the victims, the daughter — who previously had no idea — realizes she was the product of her mother's rape. As she and Olivia continuing talking and the investigation continues, Olivia realizes that the rapist they're tailing has similar patterns to her own mother's rapist, leading her to believe that the woman she's been talking to may be her half-sister. She's not, which disappoints Olivia a little bit.
      • Season 14's "Legitimate Rape" involves a victim who became pregnant from rape and a rapist claiming that that can't actually happen. Unfortunately, at least one juror buys the junk science.
  • Children Are Innocent: Zigzagged in "Unorthodox". The perp who molested and eventually raped a schoolboy is a boy of a similar age whose father is so neglectful he sends his free time watching porn. Unfortunately, while the videos taught him the mechanics of sex, they didn't teach him anything about consent. He assaulted his classmate to simulate prison rape, taking for a show of dominance that would stop him from getting bullied at school.
  • Coffin Contraband: In "Brotherhood", A victim's fraternity brother places the fraternity paddle that he used to sexually assault an initiate in the coffin of his murdered friend. Luckily for the detectives, the coffin is ceremonial only as the victim is cremated, and the personal items from the coffin are removed and stored until the next-of-kin instructs the funeral home on what to do with them, giving Benson and Stabler time to find the item before it can be destroyed.
  • Cold Opening: There is the "In the criminal justice system..." narration over the logo, the premise of the episode is introduced, and the opening credits.
  • Cold Reading: Done to the cops by the villain in "Pure".
  • Comically Missing the Point: A very dark example at the end of "Pure". The female half of a husband and wife pair of rapist/murderers asks with complete sincerity if their "son" will be allowed to visit her if she goes to prison. Even apart from the idea that that there's an "if" — aside from being an accomplice to her husband, she murdered the boy's real mother — she's completely shocked at the idea that a grieving widower whose wife she killed to steal their baby would never allow said baby anywhere near her again, whining, "But I'm the only mother he knows!"
  • Comically Small Bribe: Played for drama in "Turmoil". A teenage girl is raped by a popular boy, who bribes her friend to sell her out in court by giving her some clothes, an iPod, and an invitation to a popular kids' party.
  • Commuting on a Bus: Many former cast members, most notably Cabot and Novak, became Recurring Characters.
  • Conspiracy Theorist: Munch. Hearing a police officer rant about the nefarious machinations of The Man make them sound all the more ridiculous.
    • On the rare occasion an episode will hilariously turn it into a case of Chekhov's Hobby whenever the case involves needing to worm through a layer of paranoid conspiracy nuts. Then, Munch becomes an effective means of getting through to them.
    • "Zebras" deals with a schizophrenic man who became a conspiracy theorist after the 9/11 attacks.
  • Content Warnings: Even though a show about sexually-based offenses is already shocking enough, there are several episodes that have these displayed before it begins. It could be a formal one issued on episodes aired on USA Network or a crude white-lettering of "Viewer Discretion Advised" on black background on local stations.
  • Continuity Nod: Munch listing the former partners who have left him? Cassidy, Jeffries, and even Bolander from Homicide: Life on the Street.
  • Corpse Temperature Tampering: In "Baggage" a serial killer uses a kiln in his victim's house to make it look like she died a day later than she actually did, then provides himself with an alibi for that day. Later, because the prosecution has already linked the murders as having the same perpetrator, his lawyer argues that if he has an alibi for one murder, he's not guilty of others as well.
  • Crapsaccharine World: On a smaller scale, the seemingly-ordinary elite academy in "Hothouse" that deliberately instructed its students on how to obtain prescription ADD pills in order to improve their performance, leading to one girl staying up for six days, going insane, and subsequently murdering her roommate. Even before that, it was obvious that the school cared more about its reputation than the well-being of its students, when Benson asked the headmistress if she knew about the victim's broken wrist and cigarette burns, and the headmistress's first response was not "Oh no, that's terrible", but "Are you insinuating that happened at Morewood?" The headmistress also lied to Benson and Stabler that the two roommates were best friends, when in fact they despised each other to the point of one of them asking to be moved to a new dorm.
  • Create Your Own Villain: "Making A Rapist", where Shawn Roberts was mistakenly identified as having raped Melanie 16 years prior and imprisoned and was raped while in prison. He was exonerated but found himself ill-adjusted. While he got along with Melanie's daughter Ashley, he ended up raping and killing her in a drunken rage after trying to confess his love for her. Melanie even agonizes over testifying as if she were right this time, it would acknowledge that she held a bit of responsibility in setting off the chain of events that turned a once-innocent man into a killer and led to the demise of her daughter.
  • Crime of Passion: "Babes" has a pregnant teenage girl named Fidelia found hanging from the ceiling fan in her house. Her boyfriend Max (not the father of her baby) turns out to be her killer. He had gotten upset because they had made a religious commitment to abstain from sex before marriage, and they had argued over it. She taunted him that she never would have married him and that he was only still a virgin because he was afraid to have sex. He accidentally strangled her in a fit of rage, then hung her corpse to make it look like a suicide.
  • Crime Time Soap: Big time.
  • Critical Psychoanalysis Failure:
  • Crossover: Cragen and ADA Cutter came from the original Law and Order, and they got Connie Rubirosa for one episode. Alexandra Eames appeared in two episodes in season 14.
    • The first season was practically an expansion of season 10 of Law And Order, with Lenny Brisco, Abby Carmichael, and other mains from the mother ship making several appearances.
    • One episode in Season 16, aptly titled "Chicago Crossover," was part 2 of a crossover starting with Chicago Fire and ending in Chicago P.D..
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: "Fight" had a gang leader get crushed in a garbage truck. "Wildlife" had a man get eaten by hyenas.
  • Curse Cut Short: in "Penetration", Dana Lewis shoots a warning shot at the man who raped her, and calls him "mother...!" before Olivia interrupts to tell her that her warning shot ricocheted and hit Elliot.
    • Elliot also calls Paxton a "walking cluster..." when Paxton walks in and tells him she agrees, but "wouldn't have censored herself".
    • A milder version; temporary captain Harris is talking about ADA Rafael Barba in "Twenty-Five Acts". Talking about his reputation, he says "guy's got big brass..." and then cuts himself off and says "ego".
    • In "Amaro's One-Eighty," the defense lawyer triumphantly declares her opponents will be "tripping all over their...ties," looking as if it is a mighty struggle not to say "dicks".
  • Cycle of Revenge: The main theme of "Baby Killer". Elliot even compares it to the Gaza Strip.

    D 
  • Danger Room Cold Open: In season 14, episode 15, "Deadly Ambition", the episode begins with Rollins and Tutuola interrupting what looks like a man assaulting a woman. They back the man up against the wall and warn him not to resist—but the woman unexpectedly stands up and fires a gun at Rollins. It turns out this was just a police exercise, and as the man explains, the woman was able to catch Rollins off guard because people tend to see women as victims.
  • Darker and Edgier: Than the parent series by a good margin. Both have Crapsack World on display in earnest but this series lands much further on the cynical side. While Law & Order had criminals facing justice one way or another, this series has Laser-Guided Karma as naught but a wistful dream at times and the possibility of becoming a Karma Houdini is always present. Similarly, while the main characters on Law & Order weren't free of vice they were saints compared to the ones here who practically live by Protagonist-Centered Morality and arguably cause more problems than they ultimately solve with their actions.
  • Dark Secret: Too many to count:
    • Darius, Fin's stepson, was born from Fin's ex-wife being raped by her father, and her neglect turned him into a monster
    • Stabler's mother's bipolar disorder
    • Olivia being born from her mother's rape (also the Awful Truth to her half-brother), although she does share it with the people she's close to.
    • FBI Agent Dana "Star" Lewis murdered her ex-boyfriend's fiancee 30 years ago and "unconsciously" pinned it on the serial rapist/murderer she was chasing at the time; things unravel when the rapist is finally caught and his "last victim" has nothing in common with the others.
    • Munch's father committed suicide when Munch was a teenager, and he's been wracked with guilt ever since because his last words to him were that he hated his guts.
    • After several seasons of hints, it's revealed that Amanda was raped by her deputy chief in Atlanta. He first coerced her to have sex with him in exchange for getting her sister out of trouble, and then physically forced her when she tried to back out.
  • Dawn of an Era:
    • Season 2 saw the departure of original cast member Monique Jeffries but introduced four of the show's prominent main characters;: Alexandra Cabot, Fin Tutuola, Melinda Warner, and George Huang.
    • The appropriately named Season 5 episode "Serendipity" introduces Casey Novak, who would turn out to be the show's longest-serving ADA (and second-longest in the franchise history) to date.
    • Season 9 saw John Munch's promotion to sergeant, making him the official Number Two of the The Squad.
    • Season 13 saw the arrival of main cast members Amanda Rollins and Nick Amaro after the departures of original cast member Elliot Stabler and Season 2 additions George Huang and Melinda Warner. It's also the point where the show became the only active series of the Law & Order franchise.
    • Season 14 introduces Rafael Barba, the show's first male ADA and the second-longest serving one in the role (third overall in the franchise) after Novak.
    • With Munch and Capt. Cragen's departures in Season 15, the newly promoted Olivia becomes the commanding officer of SVU. It's also the first year the she show had crossovers with the Chicago franchise.
    • Season 16 saw Olivia's promotion to lieutenant and her adoption of Noah, along with the introduction of Sonny Carisi.
    • Season 18 saw Fin's promotion to sergeant, making him the official Number Two of The Squad.
    • Season 21 saw Olivia's promotion as captain, officially making her Da Chief of SVU, as well as Carisi becoming the ADA. It's also the year the show surpassed both the parent series and Gunsmoke as the longest TV show in American history.
    • Season 22 marks the return of Elliot Stabler after a decade-long absence to headline Law & Order: Organized Crime, officially revitalizing the Law & Order franchise.
  • A Day in the Limelight: Munch and/or Fin, occasionally. Munch got to shine when his uncle Andy (played by none other than Jerry Lewis) got involved in a crime; the same happened with Fin and the episodes involving his gay son Ken, his ex-wife Theresa, and his evil stepson Darius.
    • Warner gets one in Season 7 ("Blast"), and Huang gets a few over the course of the series.
    • "Criminal", "Russian Brides", and the "Lost Reputation"/"Above Suspicion" duo are this for Cragen, who, while important to the squad's work, wasn't the focus of very many episodes.
    • "Web" for recurring character Morales.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Back when Munch had actual lines. Fin gets a few of these as well. Cragen too, occasionally. Once he came on in season 14, Barba became the team's main snarker.
    • Even Olivia has a moment. In "Liberties" After a stalker is bitten by his victim's guard dog and arrested without seeing a doctor first, he demands the dog be tested for rabies. Cue "I highly doubt you gave the dog rabies."
    • The RDK copycat in "Scavenger" was pretty good at this:
    RDK: She got away from him, but not me.
    Elliot: Well, she's a sixty-five year old woman.
    RDK: Not looking good for sixty-six. note 
  • Death of Personality: Season 8's "Uncle" ends with Munch's clinically depressed uncle coming off his medication to "kill" himself as penance for murdering a suspect while in a mania caused as a side effect of his (different) medication.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: In "The Five-Hundredth Episode", Olivia has to confront her relationship with a college student when she was only sixteen. At the time (The '80s), gaining the attention of an attractive twentysomething of one's preferred gender was viewed as the fulfilment of a teenage fantasy, with contemporary works portraying such relationships in a positive light. Nowadays, the twentysomething in question would be regarded as a predator. While early episodes of SVU portrayed Olivia's relationship in a positive light, in this episode, she is forced to confront the fact that her ex-boyfriend was a predator, and he is still preying on younger women.
  • Depraved Bisexual: Flirted with in Season 4's "Dominance" about a series of murders in which the victims were forced to have sex with/rape each other. The perps are a pair of brothers. In an interview with the dominant brother's ex-girlfriend the squad learns that her threesome with the two turns into a twosome which doesn't include her. The girlfriend indicates that the dominant brother forced the other, and the boys' father concurs that it was a rape, but it's not clear that the submissive brother agrees.
  • Destructive Romance: The show has portrayed many of these over the years. In "Persona", Olivia tries in vain to convince a woman to report her husband for Domestic Abuse. Of course, she refuses to betray her beloved like that and eventually ends up dying in Olivia's arms, stabbed to death by her husband.
    • There's the unfortunate singer in "Funny Valentine" who loves her abusive boyfriend even after he beats her face in and killed her producer/father-figure; after she lies for him to the grand jury they go to the Bahamas where he kills her a few days later over the same thing that caused him to beat her the first time years earlier: she asked who was texting him. She was from a dysfunctional family ruled by her mother's boyfriend; her boyfriend's father was a pimp; one person commented they were, unfortunately, "made for each other".
  • Did Not Think This Through: In "Execution", Matthew Brodus deliberately attacks Stabler and Huang mid-interrogation to provoke the guards into beating him, as he knows about the law stating that an injured inmate can't be executed. But while the episode treats this as him getting some sort of last laugh over his victims' families, he's now in an indefinite coma, having to breathe via life-support, and still eligible for execution when/if he ever wakes up — so it's exceedingly difficult to see him as a Karma Houdini or anything.
  • Dirty Harriet: Olivia does this twice, albeit briefly, in Season 10. She goes undercover as a prostitute in "Wildlife", and a madam in "Hothouse".
  • Dirty Old Man: Julian Cooper in "Avatar" is one; he looks to be in his sixties and his victim is 21. Not only that, but he's basically pretending she's a teenager. He's a particularly destructive version of this trope, as his victim dies as a result of the drugs given to her. He also had a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old 25 years earlier, which would still put him in his late thirties at the youngest, and although she was convinced they were truly in love, it quickly becomes clear that the major attraction for him was her age.
  • Dirty Old Woman: Rita Wills in "Bedtime"
    Rita Wills: For you, I'll even say ahh.
  • Disposable Sex Worker: Averted strongly. Any character who expresses the attitude that prostitutes don't matter as much as other victims is almost always immediately in Hate Sink territory if not an outright villain.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: The episode "Juvenile" centers around two young teenagers who broke into a woman's apartment, during which the younger one raped and repeatedly stabbed her. Due mainly to the ages of the two perpetrators, the younger assailant, who was the primary actor, is given the relatively light treatment of family court, while the older but less mature boy is tried in adult court, found guilty of felony murder, and is facing a possible life sentence.
    • The main villains of "Intimidation Game" torture and rape a female game-developer over the Internet; force her to falsely admit onscreen that she's only using her lover to get ahead in her career; and ultimately — despite her being saved in the end — send her over the Despair Event Horizon and cause her to quit her passion. Why? Because they don't believe in Gamer Chicks.
    • The perp in "Father Dearest" turns out to have been framing a former colleague who exposed him for cheating on an exam and later stole his girlfriend. Apparently, this warrants trying to destroy the man's life 20-something years later by trying to frame him for rape and kidnapping and seducing his teenage daughter.
    • In the episode “Swimming with the Sharks,” a scheming secretary frames her best friend for two rapes, embezzlement, destroys her hard earned career & private business, and drives her to the brink of insanity...all because her friend may or may not have stolen her pendant decades ago when they were children at a summer camp.
  • The Dissenter Is Always Right: Whenever the majority of the detectives are convinced they have an Open-and-Shut Case, except for one person who thinks something doesn't quite add up, you can almost always bet hard money that person will be proven right before the episode is out.
  • Distressed Dude: Stabler in "Zebras".
  • Donut Mess with a Cop: From "Personal Fouls":
    Benson (to Amaro): "A cop who doesn't eat donuts? How can I trust you?"
    • In a later episode, Benson's love interest David Haden arranges to meet her in a donut shop. She quips that he really knows how to "woo a cop".
  • Double-Meaning Title: At least seven, possibly more.
    • "Swing", about Stabler's daughter's bipolar issues (and her mood swings). When he and Benson find her, she's playing on a playground swing.
    • "Beef", about the death of a young reporter investigating a shady meatpacking plant. To have "beef" with someone also means to have a grudge against them.
    • "Lunacy", about the murder of an astronaut, is also a word that means "insanity".
    • "Babes", about four pregnant teenage girls and their unborn babies.
    • "Bang", about a man who is a serial reproductive abuser and intentionally impregnates several women. When the man is murdered, his neighbors say that they heard a "wet bang" when it happened.
    • "Betrayal's Climax", about a girl whose boyfriend sets her up to be gang-raped, and to her horror, she experiences an orgasm during her ordeal.
    • "Shaken", about a toddler who suffers brain damage from shaken baby syndrome. Stabler is shaken by the severity of her injuries and her young age, recalling an incident when he nearly lost his temper with his own daughter when she was that age.
  • Double Standard: While there are exceptions, female offenders on the whole are more likely to be portrayed in a relatively sympathetic light (usually by means of some kind of Freudian Excuse) than male offenders (who even if they have traumatic pasts will usually be hit with Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse).
    • There's also a racial disparity in how the detectives are treated. Benson and Stabler (both white) never face any punishment, regardless of how stupid, illegal, unconstitutional, or just plain wrong their actions are. Meanwhile Jeffries (black), Amaro (Hispanic), and Lake (Native American) are not so lucky. Munch (Jewish) and Fin (black) are something of a middle ground as they have never been punished, but haven't done nearly as much as Benson and Stabler to deserve it.
  • Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: The show sometimes tries to avert or subvert this, but more often than not it winds up supporting it.
    • The general belief for the majority of the episode "Ridicule" was that men can't be raped by women. This belief was partially due to the victim Peter Smith being a stripper and male actor. Many people also thought he was lying about being raped because he was a man.
    • Defied and deconstructed in "Parole Violations". Carisi's sister's fiancé is raped at gunpoint by his parole officer. The trope does come into play when the officer's supervisor treats it like a joke and the victim's girlfriend blames him for "cheating" on her (until Olivia sets her straight). However, the police take the case seriously (with no Idiot of the Week unlike the above episode), it's clear that the victim's life is being ruined by the experience, and when the officer tries to explain herself in the end, she gives obviously lame excuses and comes across as wholly unsympathetic to the audience. The double standard is invoked here to show that the case is a hard sell, but it is clear that the writers intend the viewers to reject it.
    • In "Branded" two men are sodomized and mutilated in separate incidents. The detectives immediately treat them as perps rather than victims; when the detectives' assumptions are proven right, and it turns out the victims had raped their rapist years prior, the DA sets them up to be convicted of perjury (when they testify against their rapist in court but initially fail to admit their past crimes) while getting their rapist off on a trespassing charge. Huang gets off a single line early on about how easily the detectives are jumping to blame the victim, but otherwise the trope is played entirely straight; the serial rapist even gets a happy ending when the DA arranges for her to reunite with her daughter who she'd given up for adoption. Give the case a male serial rapist and it's hard to imagine SVU not only arranging for him to go free, but handing over a tween girl to him, just because the people he'd been caught raping had previously raped him. In a fully gender-flipped case one might expect the story-opening victims to be treated sympathetically at first, as apparent victims of a sexual predator; for the twist to come as a shock to everyone; and for the avenging rapist to get his revenge in court but only after accepting a deal for hard time, as punishment for his own crimes.
    • In "Trophy" a man is targetted by the SVU as an accomplice to rape and murder. The truth is the man, Jason, had been brutally beaten and violated by the real culprit who was his former cellmate for five years. The SVU shows no sympathy for Jason and act completely indifferent to the evidence of Jason's rape prompting his laywer to show the evidence again to argue Jason is not an accomplice but a victim. Jason is a nervous wreck through out the whole episode and the mere sight of his rapist nearly causes him to have a panic attack but all he receives from the SVU is Stabler threatening to deliver him back to his rapist. This stands out even more when a woman who was raped by the same criminal shows up and Benson goes the extra mile to show her support and offers therapy groups to the victim.
    • Discussed in "Learning Curve", in which a teenage boy who initially claims he was molested by a male teacher was actually having sex with a female teacher. The boy's father beat up the male teacher, but when the truth comes out, he thinks the kid is lucky for having sex with a hot older woman, even though it's still abuse due to the boy's age and the power differential. The detectives are clearly annoyed, though not surprised, by this disparate reaction, saying that the kid is still a victim but "instead of getting help, he's going to be getting high fives".
  • Downer Ending: A significant chunk of the episodes fall under this.
    • Starting with the events in "Venom", leading up to "Screwed". Everything goes downhill for the cast as their past mistakes come back to bite them in the ass like Stabler's daughter Kathleen's DUI and his subsequent cover up, Benson's supplying money for her brother to escape police supervision and Fin's mishandling of evidence from a narcotics case ten years ago. The results of those mistakes become the key reason why Darius Parker walks away scot-free.
    • Another big example is "Unstable". Basically, a serial rapist was caught, exonerating another man falsely imprisoned for his crime. However, either due to the actions of the Cowboy Cop or the perp escaping, the guy dies and is therefore unable to testify, meaning the wrongfully imprisoned man doesn't get released.
    • The ending of "Sick", as if the Abusive Parents factor weren't bad enough. The granddaughter has permanent internal damage from the poisoning. The boy who claimed to have been molested by Billy Tripoli recants — but it's likely his parents forced him to in order to keep getting millions in hush money, and they sent the dangerously disturbed kid out of the country. With Billy declared innocent and acquitted, possibly thousands more kids are at risk unless a new victim steps forward, doesn't recant, and hopefully has lots of evidence and support against Billy's legal team, which will use the previous cases as precedent to accuse him/her of lying. Thanks, Grandma.
    • The end of "Smoked". Despite the three men responsible for her mother's death being incarcerated (the rapist, the man the rapist hired to intimidate his victim but went one step further and murdered her, and an ATF agent who gave the murder weapon and then tried to cover it up), her daughter goes into the precinct, and after finding out from Benson who they all are, shoots all three and also several other innocent people for no good reason. What's more is that the murderer survives and eggs her on, saying that he should have killed her as well. She then tries to shoot him again, but Stabler fatally wounds her and she dies moments later. At the end, at least four people are dead (the girl, the rapist and the ATF agent, and the recurring character Sister Peg), while the psychopath who murdered her mother right in front of her survives. Shoot the Shaggy Dog, full stop. Not to mention this leads to Elliot Stabler leaving the force.
    • The end of "Funny Valentine": While the ads hinted at the abusive boyfriend getting killed what really happened was the abuser killed his girlfriend's producer/father-figure (the "he" in the "he's dead!" in the ads). After she lied to the grand jury and left the country to join him in the Bahamas the only thing the detectives could do was wait for the abusive boyfriend's next move — unfortunately it was to kill her after she dared to ask who was texting him, the very question that marked the beginning of his abuse.
    • "Surrender Benson": Benson is rescued from psychopath William Lewis before he can rape and kill her, but she has been tortured, forced to watch a rape and two murders, and is completely traumatized.
    • "American Tragedy": like in the real-life George Zimmerman verdict, Jolene Castille is acquitted of murdering an unarmed teenager.
    • "October Surprise": ADA Barba's childhood best friend is revealed to have been sexting and soliciting a teenage girl, which tanks his campaign for mayor. Barba's friendship with him is ruined because he was the one to press charges, and the mayoral candidate also threatens to end his political future. A reverend heckles Barba about choosing to prosecute him, which suggests that the citizens of NYC are turning against him, and he's made some enemies pretty high up.
    • "Mean": The three popular girls responsible for the murder of another teenager are convicted, but the outcast overweight girl they had been trying to pin the murder on is bullied to the point where she commits a shooting at school immediately after the verdict is decided - because having the real murderers arrested didn't make a difference to the students that worshiped the popular girls and students continued to bully her that badly. In other words, the three popular blonde students were able to corrupt the student body that badly that it ended up inadvertently leading to another murder.
    • "Dissonant Voices": The music teacher the squad was insisting had molested several boys and girls... isn't. He was set up by two girls he recently dropped from his private lessons. His reputation is ruined and he'll never be able to teach again.
    • "Rapist Anonymous": The guy Amanda is dating, who is also her Gamblers Anonymous sponsor, reveals that he cheated on her on the witness stand, publicly humiliating her. She ends up relapsing and the episode ends with her playing Blackjack in a casino.
    • December Solstice. Barba's abuelita dies.
    • The ending of "Baby Killer": Cabot drops the murder charges against 7-year-old Elias, after it comes out he witnessed a murder and was trying to shoot the killers he saw out of fear for his own safety - the events that lead to him accidentally killing a little black girl at his school. As Elias is Latino, there are fears that racial tensions could reach a breaking point, as one man yells that the charges dropped means letting the killers of black children walk away scot-free. The girl's mother even encourages the violence to end, asking the parents to go home and take care of their kids, not seek revenge. Elias is finally prepared to go home to his loving parents and hopefully put this nightmare behind him. As everyone congratulates Alex and prepares to go out for drinks, Cragen gets a call - a young black boy shot and killed Elias, yelling "You can't kill a sister and just walk!" as he's dragged off to the squad car.
    • Season 2 LOVES these. The ending of "Noncompliance" follows "Baby Killer": A paranoid schizophrenic witnesses a rape and murder, and attacks the perp, severely wounding him. The witness is then given a choice: Take his medication to make a lucid statement and return home to supervised treatment, or refuse his medication, unable to deliver his testimony, and stay in prison, with the prisoners abusing him. He consents to the medication - but shortly after being medicated and providing the testimony that helps the squad nail the rapist/murderer, the witness commits suicide by strangling himself, unable to deal with the side effects of his medication and the loneliness of his lucid reality. Olivia quietly apologizes to the mother, who coldly tells them to go to hell as she brushes past them to identify the body.
    • "Catfishing Teacher": Due to being pressured by the detectives to testify against a pedophile coach that everyone else is too afraid or ashamed to, one of his victims completely snaps and records himself brutally torturing the coach to give a confession (which legally would have meant nothing since it was coerced). The coach is beaten and stabbed so badly that he dies, leaving the victim to be charged with first-degree murder. And the kicker? He has no regrets and just calmly accepts his fate.
    • "Pornstar's Requiem:" A woman stars in fake rape porns (as the more grotesque/niche porns pay more for her expensive college education) gets actually raped. In return, she tries to report it and fight back. She wins the immediate case, but the judge overturns the appeal, based on some backwards beliefs that she had no respect for herself or her body and that somehow "no did not clearly mean no." Furthermore, she is expelled from said college she starred in the porn to pay for. The college headmistress claims it's a violation of school code, but a scene between Benson and the other gentleman indicate there was more of a political power play involved. After watching Barba (rightfully) claim in disbelief that "the judge has essentially given men the right to rape a woman based on her sexual history", Evie is broken after the events. The last scene of the episode is of Evie taking a drug (methaqualone, used as a muscle relaxant), voice clearly breaking up and nearly in tears, disrobing and walking into the middle of 10-12 half naked guys getting ready for a porn shoot. To her, "at least when I say stop, they stop."
    • "Heartfelt Passages" and "The Longest Night Of Rain" both end with the death of a major recurring character (Mike Dodds and Ed Tucker respectively).
  • Dressing as the Enemy: Undercover gigs are a staple of this show. One episode in particular, "Demons", had Elliot pretending to be a convicted sex offender in order to get close to a rapist who had just been released from prison. Not only does this challenge Elliot with his own issues, but at one point said sex offender orders Elliot to rape a teenage girl while he watches. It's as intense as it sounds.
    • Two iterations of this collide in "Undercover Mother", when the operation that SVU decides to bust via a sting turns out to be linked to the long-term case that Declan Murphy, the team's former lieutenant, is working. Not only does each operation end up interfering with the other, but as part of his cover, Murphy pistol-whips someone he thinks is a john, but it's actually another SVU detective (Carisi) who transferred in after Murphy's departure.
  • Driven to Suicide: Often spurred by somebody crossing the Despair Event Horizon; most often a victim who's given up on seeing justice done or a former suspect who couldn't take the team's usual methods of interrogation.
    • A big one is the mentally ill witness in "Noncompliance" whom Olivia bullies, browbeats and pressures into temporarily modifying his medical routine so he can testify in an especially difficult case. She later finds the dude's lifeless body, as he has hung himself due to both her abusive behavior towards him and the side-effects of said med changes.
    • "Weak" ends with Hendrix telling Benson that Miranda Tate, a woman with schizophrenia who was the victim of a serial rapist, has committed suicide.
    • Another one is "Haystack" - a child goes missing and his mother hangs herself after an overzealous reporter accuses her of murdering her child during an interview. Stabler promptly chews the reporter out on live TV after the child is found alive. The beginning of this episode eerily mirrors the Melinda Duckett case with the reporter being a Expy of Nancy Grace.
    • In the episode "Bully", a corporate boss shoots herself after video footage of her abusing a timid business partner is leaked and her business is ruined. She castigates her late partner, the media, her employees and police at a press conference before killing herself, saying it was their fault. It's possibly a reference to the public suicide of former Pennsylvania treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, who shot himself during a press conference (his behavior was more contrite however). This inspired the song "Hey Man Nice Shot" by Filter.
    • Subverted in one episode where the team thinks that a teenaged girl hung herself after being a victim of cyberbullying due to her getting knocked up by another guy. At the end of the episode, they end up catching the person who killed her, her boyfriend who couldn't take the fact that she got pregnant in the first place.
    • Tucker in “The Longest Night of Rain” kills himself so that his wife won’t have to watch him slowly succumb to cancer.
  • Driven to Villainy: Seen in many guest stars, often thanks to the actions of the detectives.
    • One notable example is in "Spectacle" where a girl is taken captive and raped with one of her kidnappers threatening to kill her when confronted unless his demands are followed. Turns out it was all a ruse (the "victim" was in on it the whole time) to get the police to search for his younger brother, after being pushed aside so many times for other events, knowing that they would do so if the life of a young girl was at stake.

    E 
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • The first season was, surprisingly enough, probably the closest the franchise has gotten to having outright comedy. Obviously, given the show's subject matter, this resulted in a lot of Mood Whiplash moments (this is very evident in the Pilot). This is in stark contrast to the melodramatic and somber atmosphere that is associated with the show today.
    • The ending montage of the show's original opening credits features the cast walking towards the viewer while talking with each other similar to the opening of the parent series (and later Law & Order: Criminal Intent). The one that is used to this day where the cast are posing still while looking at the camera wasn't shown until the second episode of Season 2 coinciding with Stephanie March and Ice-T's Promotion to Opening Titles. Speaking of the original opening credits, Christopher Meloni was credited as "Chris Meloni" throughout Season 1.
    • Believe it or not, in the early episodes, it was Olivia Benson who was the fly-off-the-handle-violent-temper hothead partner and Elliot Stabler who was the stable, analytical, don't-let-it-get-to-you partner.
    • Olivia actually had a normal relationship with her mother early on.
    • Elliot's family life was featured far more prominently in season 1; this would be scaled back considerably following the season 2 opener, "Wrong is Right".
    • The first few episodes show the detectives testifying in court for unrelated cases.
    • Aside from his introduction, Fin is casually wearing suits while on duty during his first season. And speaking of his introduction attire, they are brightly-colored, instead of being dark and muted like the ones Fin has been wearing since.
    • Amanda Rollins fondly mentions in Season 14 that her sister gives her stuff, suggesting a friendlier relationship than later episodes would imply. (Then again, she seems to have a rosy view of that relationship and Kim in general, at least until Kim finally pushes her too far, so it's unclear.)
  • Embarrassing Damp Sheets: Averted in "Bedtime"; a suspect explains why her blood was on the bed where a murder took place: she and the victim's husband were going to have sex there, but then her period came. (And she kept the sheets to prove it, since she was a Stalker with a Crush.)
  • Embarrassing Tattoo: In "Spectacle": A tattoo was supposed to mean "Try or Die" in Chinese, but what it actually meant was "Pie or Die."
  • Empty Cop Threat: A favorite trope of the entire franchise. Don't expect anyone to be called out on it no matter how much they use it to strong-arm people into talking.
  • Empty Shell: Missy in "Damaged" is a realistic variation on this trope. After being arrested, she tells detectives, "You can't kill me. I'm already dead."
  • End of an Age:
    • The appropriately named Season 5 episode "Loss" saw the departure of the show's first ADA Alexandra Cabot. She would eventually rejoin the cast briefly from Seasons 10-11, however.
    • The Season 9 finale "Cold" saw the departures of Casey Novak and Chester Lake. Novak, who was immediately introduced after the aforementioned Cabot's departure, was the longest serving A.D.A in the show to this very day.
    • Season 12 is what many believed to be the final "classic" SVU run. The Season Finale "Smoked" in particular featured the departures of original cast member Elliot Stabler along with Season 2 additions Melinda Warner and George Huang (though the latter already made his final appearance a few episodes prior, his actor is still credited), as well as the death of long-time (circa Season 3) Recurring Character Sister Peg. Also coinciding with this are the conclusions of both Law & Order: LA and Law & Order: Criminal Intent around the same time, making it the final time the show is part of the original Law & Order franchise since the parent series already concluded the previous year. The season also marked the last appearances to date of the show's resident judges Lena Petrovsky and Elizabeth Donnelly. Perhaps symbolic of the larger changes, it's also the last season to use the One-Word Title Idiosyncratic Episode Naming; beginning in Season 13, multi-word titles became the new norm.
    • Season 15 saw the retirement of original cast members John Munch and Donald Cragen, leaving Olivia Benson as the sole original cast member left. Not only that, but their departures took away the show's remaining connections to both the parent series and Homicide: Life on the Street in which Cragen and Munch were respectively transplanted from.
    • The Season 16 finale "Surrendering Noah" features the departure of Nick Amaro, Olivia's second partner in the series.
    • The Season 17 finale featured the first ever instance in the series of a member of the unit being killed in the line of duty, not to mention the permanent impact it has on other major characters (particularly Benson and Chief Dodds).
    • Season 19 saw the departure of Rafael Barba, the show's first male ADA and the second-longest serving one in the show after the aforementioned Novak.
    • The Season 20 finale. Not only did it featured the departure of the show's fifth ADA Peter Stone, it also leads to the show officially outliving its parent series.
    • Season 21 features the deaths of two prominent recurring characters; Olivia's half-brother Simon Marsden who was introduced in Season 8, and Ed Tucker who was a presence in the show since Season 3.
  • Enfant Terrible:
    • The episode "Born Psychopath" revolves around Henry, a manipulative 10-year old boy who has homicidal tendencies whenever he doesn't get what he wants, to the point where he locks his mother in the laundry room, ties his sister to a bed while nearly lighting his family's apartment on fire, ties a neighbor's kid to a chair in a closet, drowns his neighbor's dog, takes another child hostage inside a playroom, and shoots Amaro in the abdomen. Fortunately, Amaro was wearing a bulletproof vest.
    • The episode "Lost Traveler" revolves the real killer Courtney, who shows no emotion except with a mild annoyance that her friend Emma told the truth. When asked why she did it, she simply replied with an emotionless: "Why not?"
      • In the very similar Season 1 episode "Uncivilized", that killer, a teenage boy, says of his victim that the child "was a loser anyway" (while his friend, who does have a conscience, breaks down sobbing in the next room).
    • The two girls in "Dissonant Voices" who manipulated their brothers into accusing their music teacher of sexual misconduct because he dropped them from his private coaching.
  • Enhance Button: Used often. Notably deconstructed in "Authority" guest-starring Robin Williams. He acts as his own defense attorney and questions the techie on the software used to enhance a photograph that showed him leaving a library, which was the key piece of evidence against him. He coaxed the techie into admitting that the software can only make educated guesses based on various factors of the picture itself and can't actually recreate the scene shown the photograph in higher resolutions. Williams's character then presented the original photograph, where his face is too shadowed to be seen. It works and the jury lets him go.
  • Ephebophile: The writers think these guys are scum.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Benito Escobar in "Poisoned Motive". He is a major Smug Snake who doesn't even flinch at a Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique. When he finds out his girlfriend is assassinated, that facade falls apart and he's left a sobbing mess.
    • The Season 2 episode "Victims" revolves around a serial killer targeting paroled sex offenders. The detectives, Stabler in particular, have a hard time showing sympathy for the dead offenders' families and loved ones, who clearly still loved them in spite of their transgressions.
  • Every Car Is a Pinto: Occurs to hilarious effect in "Bullseye". A suspected pedophile takes off in his car outside of a courtroom and drives into the side of a truck at a relatively low speed. The crowd reacts with shock as the officers sprint towards the crash, and after several seconds have passed, the car explodes in a spectacular fireball complete with several-story high flames. From minor front end damage that barely even crumpled the bodywork.
  • Everyone Has Standards: In "Rockabye", a nurse is personally opposed to abortion and is okay with using a fake abortion clinic ruse to try to talk women out of getting abortions, but draws the line at the head doctor of her clinic extending the ruse to pretending to schedule the procedure and then using fake medical reasons to deliberately delay their appointments until it's too late for them to abort.
    • The episode "Loophole" involves a serial burglar who discovers child porn in the home of one of his victims and anonymously reports it to the police.
  • Everything Is Racist: In "P.C.", lesbian rights (no, not LGBT rights, solely lesbian rights at first) activist Babs Duffy constantly accuses peoples of lesphobia, usually over trivial slights. However, she turns out to be right that there really is a rapist targeting lesbians, who actually did commit a deliberate slight against her just so she'd be irked. Her militancy backfires against Duffy after she comes out as being bisexual, which outrages her followers.
  • Evil All Along:
    • ADA Paula Foster, albeit her reasons make her something of a Tragic Villain.
    • The psychiatrist in "Repression" appears to be a caring professional who is treating a young woman with a long history of sexual abuse by her own father. In the end, it turns out that the psychiatrist is a quack who inadvertently brainwashed the woman into believing she was molested by treating her with sodium amytal, a drug notorious for creating false memories in people who take it, thereby leading the victim to a narrative that matched what the therapist already believed to be true. Her careless and dangerous conduct results in the young woman's father getting killed and the whole family getting torn apart.
    • In the third season episode "Justice," a grieving mother of a teenage girl is revealed to be the one who murdered her own daughter in a fit of rage when the girl confessed to her that her stepfather (the mother's beloved second husband) raped and impregranted her when she was eleven.
    • In "Home Invasions," a female LGBT rights activist and her husband are gunned down in what looks like a hate crime, complete with the word "queers" spray-painted on the house's wall. The husband was molesting their teenage daughter, and his wife knew and didn't care that it was happening. The crime was committed by the family's former housekeeper and her brother, who were trying to save the daughter.
  • Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: In "Patrimonial Burden", when the Sinister Minister is confronted with the accusations of raping and impregnating the two teenage girls, he warns the girls' parents that, should the case go forward, the negative publicity will ruin their show. In so doing, he is completely oblivious to the notion that, not only are the parents sincere in their beliefs, but they genuinely love their children, and, while the fame and money is nice, their children's welfare is more important.
  • Evil Counterpart: Robin Williams' character in "Authority". As a freedom-loving, anti-authoritarian anarchist whose "noble" goals are actually a cover for more selfish personal motives, he forms a poetic contrast to the SVU crew, whose fascistic tendencies are born out of a genuine, if perhaps misguided, desire for the greater good of the people.
  • Evil Is Petty: The villains on "Intimidation Game" want to kill a game developer for making a game they don't like! Note that the game hadn't even been released yet: They hated the game developer, and her game, simply because she happened to be female. (The fact that she was not white may or may not have had something to do with it, too.)
    • In the episode “Swimming with the Sharks,” a young woman frames her boss for two rapes, embezzlement, destroys her hard earned career & private business, and nearly has her committed to an insane asylum. Her motive? She is “almost positive” the boss stole her gold pendant when they were childhood friends.
  • Evil Twin: The plot of the episode Double Strands. The detectives arrest a suspect for a series of rapes, even tying him via DNA evidence and a distinctive tattoo, but further investigation into the suspect's background leads them to a twin brother that he did not even know about, but knew about him.
  • Evil Cripple: Dorothy from "Care". She beat a five year old to death with her cane and dies peacefully and quietly of a heart attack that caused her no suffering. Elaine from "Totem" also counts.
    • In the season one episode "Limitations," the detectives capture a serial rapist who suddenly disappeared several years ago, only to discover that he has been crippled in a road accident and is now confined to a wheelchair, which the reason he stopped his crime spree.
  • Excuse Boomerang: Law & Order (and its various spin-offs) will often have something like this happen when an Amoral Rules Lawyer has some scheme backfire and get their words thrown in their faces. A particularly satisfying example happened in SVU Season 2's "Manhunt" , when a Serial Killer facing a bullet-proof capital punishment case for his crimes in the USA was arrested in Canada, whose constitution forbids extradition on capital charges. When a Canadian judge questioned his defense attorney about the risk of Canada becoming a haven for capital offenders if they set this precedent, he smarmily replied "I prefer not to speculate on a hypothetical situation which may or may not result from the high court's ruling". Alex Cabot's response is to amend the extradition charge to possession of stolen property, which is not a capital charge. When the defense attorney says that his client is obviously going to be charged with the capital crimes the second he's back on American soil (which Cabot doesn't even bother denying), the judge uses his exact words to justify extraditing the murderer on the charges actually brought, barely concealing how much he enjoys it.
  • Exotic Entree: "Wildlife" has a character with an animal smuggling ring, whose members eat several of the animals.
  • Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: In "Blinded", the detectives are able to find their culprit very early — a man who kidnapped and raped a young girl — but, he seems that he has an airtight alibi as the car used was a rental and he has no idea how it was used in the act as it was obviously checked in. As the detectives are talking to forensics, they mention that some of the muck found in the car came from a place the man had been... and it suddenly dawns on them they had been had. The perp got a good headstart on the run as the detectives realize the man had turned in the car, but must have came back and stole it when it was haphazardly left unguarded, unlocked and with the keys in the ignition.
    • In "Acceptable Loss", the team busts a sex trafficking ring that has a minor connection to a terrorist group trying to smuggle an operative into the country, but one of the victims' stories just isn't adding up: she had a private room in the house, something none of the other girls had, despite being the newest girl in the bunch, and according to the record books the unit finds, she'd never booked or recorded any dates, even though their surveillance had seen her with what appeared to be a client. As they talk through the conflicting information, it starts to dawn on them — that "victim" was actually the terrorist.
  • The Extremist Was Right: In the episode "Spectacle", the villain of the episode is a young man whose little brother was kidnapped eight years ago, never being found because law enforcement gave up without much of a fight. He was absolutely convinced that they could easily have found him even with the trail being eight years cold if it weren't for the fact that the world simply didn't care enough about his brother, so he resorts to, with both the accomplice and "victim" in on it because they're his friends, kidnapping a young, pretty college girl and having his accomplice physically abuse and rape her on camera, then demanding the FBI find his brother before he lets her go. They find his brother in less than half a day.
  • Eye Scream: In the episode "Quickie", a man who is knowingly spreading around HIV is put on trial. One of the women he has infected comes up to him at the end of part of the trial and sprays him in the face with hydrochloric acid-maiming him and blinding him in one eye. Yikes.

    F 
  • Face–Heel Turn: CSU Scrappy Stuckey isn't good at handling insults and criticism... unfortunately he's great at handling the Idiot Ball.
    • FBI Agent Dana Lewis: first appears as "Star," a white supremacist activist, and then proves herself to be a smart and compassionate federal agent, then a brave and determined rape victim... and then a murderer.
  • Failed a Spot Check: It's ridiculously amazing how many suspects ignore the detectives staking them out in a Crown Victoria Police Interceptor mere feet away from them.
    • Equally amazing is the number of times the detectives can stand next to each other, but need one to point out to the other the evidence or suspect that is in their line of sight.
  • Fake Faith Healer: The episode "Careless" has the rare sympathetic version. Not only does he believe in his own powers, but he also believes he's responsible for the death of a child—and he's wrong about that too.
  • Fake Identity Baggage:
    • In "Serendipity", a doctor murders a pregnant woman and inserts a tube with the blood sample of another man into his arm, so that his DNA sample doesn't match the DNA of her baby. It turns out that the man he took the blood sample from is a pedophile whom the NYPD is after. His choices are to keep quiet and be convicted of child molestation, or admit the deception and in doing so all but confess that he killed the pregnant woman (since he went to such lengths to hide the DNA match). He ultimately chooses the latter choice, only to be murdered by the real child molester who was afraid the doctor would reveal his identity.
    • In "Stranger", a badly abused young woman, whose real name is Kristen, was kidnapped and raped for years by her father. Upon escaping, she took the identity of Heather Hollander, who disappeared. The SVU investigation eventually reveals that Heather's older sister Nikki actually killed her, a fact her mother was aware of and covered up. Nikki tries to kill Kristen to keep her secret, and the Hollanders are completely destroyed anyway.
    • "Complicated" has a similar premise to the above. A 21-year-old woman poses as a girl named Emma Lawrence who went missing ten years ago. It turns out that the girl was actually killed by the father who covered it up and made it look like she had been abducted. The SVU team fear that this will put her in danger from the killer who may be paranoid of her exposing the secret.
  • Faking the Dead: Alex Cabot. Also, Cal Cutler in "Bedtime".
  • Fallen Hero: In "Lunacy" it turns out the Victim of the Week was raped and killed by Elliot's own personal idol.
    • Called on by Rollins in "Collateral Damages" when she and a rookie cop work a sting that proves a revered boxing champ is a pedophile.
    Rollins: Work this job long enough, all your heroes die.
  • False Prophet: In the episode "Charisma", the detectives deal with Abraham Ophion, a pedophilic priest who has convinced his followers that he is a prophet.
  • False Rape Accusation: On a rare occasion, the character accused of rape will turn out to be innocent after all. One example is "Dissonant Voices," where a preschool music teacher named Jackie Walker is accused of molesting his students, and he loses his rising stardom as a TV music coach on an American Idol-type show. However, it comes out that his main alleged victims were fed stories by their older sisters, former students of Walker who were jealous that he chose another girl to take onto the show instead of them. At the end of the episode, Walker chews out the SVU team for ruining his reputation and job over false accusations while his accusers only get probation.
    • A few episodes have a slightly more sympathetic variation where a person really was assaulted, but accuses the wrong person or otherwise misrepresents the details of the attack. These include a little girl who pointed the finger at a family friend because she was being pressured to name her molester but was too afraid to give up the actual perpetrator, a battered wife who made up a stranger rape because she didn't want to admit it was her husband who actually raped her, and a college student whose adviser convinced her to embellish her true story of rape into a gang rape as part of a publicity stunt (which results in everyone, including the real rapist, going free).
    • In "Reparations", a man breaks into a woman's apartment intending to rape her to teach her racist grandfather (who had raped the man's mother several decades earlier) a lesson, but changes his mind. Unfortunately, the aforementioned racist grandfather convinced her that no one would believe her unless she claimed a rape had taken place. The episode makes it clear that the grandfather is the real villain; the granddaughter genuinely believed that the only way the police would take her seriously was if she claimed there was a rape, and is horrified when she realizes it was just one more manifestation of her grandfather's bigotry.
  • Family Theme Naming: Happens occasionally when a perp's or victim's family is involved.
    • From "Alternate", Janis and her sister Cass are named after Janis Joplin and "Mama Cass" Elliot, both female inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
    • From "Home", Jacob, Adam, and Daniel are all Biblical names.
  • Famous for Being First:
    • In episode concerning the first case of female-on-male gang rape under a new law that basically de-genderized all existing rape law, the cops and prosecutors aren't even sure at first if what happened could be considered a crime.
    • Although the defendant, a police officer who allegedly raped his wife, is acquitted in the episode "Asunder" Cabot considers this case a victory: she was the first to get a case of marital rape past the Grand Jury, paving the way for someone else to succeed.
  • Fandom Rivalry: In-Universe. Mikka Von, the new ADA from Chicago in "Wet," talks about trading in her beloved Bears for the Giants, and Elliot says, "Jets."
  • Fanservice Model: Various chapters are dedicated to these kind of models and how they're victims covered by their unit. An example is a 2016 chapter in which a fashion photographer is accused of raping a model during a shoot, but his much more successful older designer brother tries to make the case go away.
  • Fascinating Eyebrow: Expect Olivia to do this Once per Episode.
  • Fate Worse than Death: Implied for the killer in "The Third Guy". He was a high-functioning mentally handicapped man who had committed murder. Due to his disability, he instead ends up committed to a mental hospital indefinitely. While Cragen is angry by his belief that he's a Karma Houdini who will get hot chocolate and Winnie the Pooh read to him every night, the reality of the situation sets in for him quickly: he is now stuck in a place with other, more glaringly mentally ill individuals which horrifies him.
  • Females Are More Innocent: Despite the fact that they have meet several bad women the detectives of this show seem to stubbornly believe this especially if the girl is of childbearing age (older women are sometimes considered capable of evil). The worst offender is probably Olivia who has at various times refused to believe that a woman was capable of murder, bent over backwards to prove a vicious female rapist and mutilator was justified in her actions, refused to arrest a girl for filing false charges and killed an even younger girl, and once even argued that rape is less heinous when it was one female against another, namely a teenage girl who'd raped and killed her sister but had been abused herself when she was younger (she was overruled on the last two).
  • Fetish: Olivia has been known on occasion to use a suspect's fetish as an interrogation technique. She also uses it as a means of staying alive when she was kidnapped by Lewis. It comes back to bite her in the ass when Lewis uses his previous knowledge and experiences with Benson's use of this technique to point out to the jury that Olivia could have very well been playing out some kind of sick, perverted fantasy with him.
  • Fetishes Are Weird: Consistently, the show portrays anybody with a fetish as either a rapist, a rapist wannabe, a serial killer, or a pathetic loser.
  • Flush the Evidence:
    • During the episode "Poisoned Motive", drug dealer Earl Talley runs to the bathroom to flush his drug stash minutes before police arrive.
    • The episode "True Believers" has a complicated rape trial where the perpetrator flushed part of the DNA evidence along with a condom.
  • Foil: Defense attorney Minonna Efron for ADA Rafael Barba. She looks like a frumpy English professor while he looks like he just stepped out of GQ, and speaks much more bluntly than his sophisticated, Ivy League-educated delivery, but she can nevertheless hand him his ass in court.
  • Food as Bribe: Benson and Stabler use this on a homeless girl in "Streetwise" to get her talking about the case they're investigating. Having not had a proper meal in a very long time, she eagerly chows down.
    • Rollins does something similar in "The Book of Esther".
  • A Fool for a Client: Many, many, many examples over the course of the series, almost none of them positive, since many cases have involved an offender cross-examining his or her victim on the witness stand. In "Daydream Believer," however, Barba takes full advantage of this trope, allowing the perp a generous amount of rope with which to hang himself.
    • Unfortunately averted in Season 14, Episode 18. The defendant of that episode, Purcell, is accused of raping sports reporter Avery Jordan, and later dismisses his counsel and opts to represent himself. Purcell proves to be significantly more competent than expected and he succeeds in convincing the jury to find him not guilty of rape, though they do find him guilty of stalking. To make matters worse, he also proves competent in representing himself when he sues for custody of the resulting child. He doesn't succeed, but he does get the judge to award him minimal visitation rights. His not being a fool for a client ends up making him a Karma Houdini, though Jordan gets the last laugh: she leaves town to somewhere beyond extradition and takes the baby with her.
    • Also averted in "Authority". The judge actually cites this saying when the defendant indicates his intention to represent himself, but he ends up getting himself acquitted. It helps that a lot of the case against him was circumstantial to begin with, making it easier for him to create doubt.
  • Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling:
    • Olivia and her half-brother, in as much he (and his girlfriend) foolishly ran away after getting in trouble with Child Protective Services rather than wait for the authorities as Olivia told him, which caused them to be charged with kidnapping.
    • Amanda Rollins is a straight-edge cop and protective of her sister Kim to a fault. Kim has substance abuse issues and a horrible boyfriend who she sets up to get shot by her sister for insurance money and when it's clear she's going to jail she disappears along with literally everything Amanda owns, from her furniture to her food.
    • "Friending Emily": Emily, the younger one, is strait-laced and obedient while older sister Taylor is a rebellious party girl. Unfortunately Emily's obedience is very attractive to a kidnapper/rapist.
    • Fin's son Ken and stepson Darius are an extreme version of this.
  • Foreshadowing: In "Bedtime", Jaclyn Smith greets Stabler and Benson at the front door of her apartment. Note that she does not seem to let them inside, and yells to 'Pietro' that she's stepping out for a moment. Gee, I wonder what she could be hiding?....Cal Cutler maybe?
  • For the Evulz: In Season 13, Episode 9, "Lost Traveler", a young Romani boy named Nico is kidnapped on his way home from school and is eventually found dead after having been tortured first. The prime suspects are the Rom Baro and a local man named Marc who is described as a "man-child". The culprit is neither one; it also isn't the bully from the beginning who mockingly told a fortune by spitting in Nico's hand. The culprit is a girl named Courtney, with her friend Emma as her accomplice. But while Emma tearfully confesses and is regretful that Nico ended up dead, Courtney is eerily calm as she first calls Emma a "stupid little bitch" and then finally confesses to the crime. When the detectives ask Courtney why she did it, she responds in the spirit of this trope, "Why not?"
  • Freudian Excuse: Practically every single criminal/victim/witness tries to pull one.
  • Functional Addict: ADA Sonya Paxton, an abrasive but deep down good-hearted woman, turned out to be a functioning alcoholic. She left when it was discovered she was drunk during trial(s), had to take a breathalizer test in front of the whole court, and finally disbarred.
    • She later returns, the incident having shaken her up enough for her to have gone to AA and actually seem to be putting in an honest effort to stop drinking. (There's a brief "fake-out" moment during the episode where it appears she might have relapsed, but it's just a typical psych-out).
  • Friendly Local Chinatown: Common plots in Chinatown involve The Triads and the Tongs and sex slavery.

Top