Written By Kevin Fox and Warren Leight
Directed By Jennifer Getzinger
A college student (Hannah Marks) who turned to niche rape porn to pay her college tuition is attacked by some classmates who confuse fantasy with reality when they discover her double life. Although she is not the one on trial, she must fight to prove her innocence in the courtroom as her double life is brought up for questioning and whether "no" meant "no" in her case..
Tropes
- Corrupting Pornography: Invoked. A porn star, Evie, is gang-raped by her classmates because she's been starring in rape fantasy pornography. Their argument is that they were "confused" by seeing Evie behave provocatively on screen and that this led to them raping her in reality. Evie and the unit are horrified, but they still get away with it - though the jury convicts them, the judge overturns the verdict.
- Downer Ending: Evie, who stars in fake rape porn videos (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 verdict, 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 slut-shamed and ostracized by her peers, and expelled from the 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. Demoralized and dehumanized, she films a haunting goodbye video, citing that her choices were taken away by everyone (her rapists, her peers, the university, and the judge), and now she only has one left. Soon enough, we see that said choice: to become a full-time porn star. The detectives try to talk her out of it, but to no avail; as Evie puts it, she can't return to Hudson due to her expulsion and soiled reputation, and she refuses to return home and face her parents or enroll in another school due her reputation and the immense shame she now feels from within because of the entire debacle. In her now-broken mind and heart, the world of porn is now the only way she can get any respect. The last scene of the episode is of Evie taking a drug (methaqualone, used as a muscle relaxant), with her 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 as the detectives can do nothing but watch and walk away. To her, "at least when I say stop, they stop."
- Hollywood Law: A rather egregious example, even by this show's standards. New York law does not allow a judge to overturn a jury's verdict simply because he disagrees with it. A motion to set aside a verdict requires a defendant to raise a specific legal error which was timely objected to. In other words, a defense attorney would have to repeat an argument he already made and convince the judge that he got it wrong the first time. Such a motion cannot be made pro forma as was shown in the episode. Carisi called it a "judgment not withstanding" which is a thing that exists in civil law, not criminal.
- Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Evie Barnes, a young woman who stars in rape-fantasy porn to pay for college, is really raped, and her attackers are charged. After the rapists are convicted, the judge overturns the verdict, stating that the evidence is ambiguous. Debatable, but then the judge goes on to accuse Evie of staging the entire thing as a publicity stunt, making it clear that he was hostile to her from the beginning. Rafael Barba, the prosecutor, is livid, telling the judge that he's "setting the clock back on rape law fifty years" (in the most overt display of anger ever seen from Barba up until that point) and declaring without hesitation that he's going to appeal the ruling.
- Promotion to Opening Titles: Peter Scanavino earns a spot in the opening theme as part of the main cast (sadly without his Porn Stache).
- Wretched Hive: Hudson University is such a hotbed of rape and rape cover-up that Evie's R.A. tells the detectives he knows better than to take any rape accusation to campus officials.
