True Believers (Season 13, Episode 6)
Premise: A piano student raped at gunpoint watches her case unravel when a civil-rights defense lawyer attacks the police work and her own credibility.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 13, Episode 6
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Bureau Chief Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie), Defense Attorney Bayard Ellis (Andre Braugher)
- Guest stars
- Sofia Vassilieva as Sarah Walsh, Cedric Sanders as Michael Wedmore, Rachel Deacon as Jen, Dusty Brown as Paul, Aisha De Haas as Mrs. Wedmore
- Director
- Courtney Hunt
- Writers
- Robin Veith
Summary
“True Believers” opens as Sarah Walsh, a 19-year-old piano student, holds her building’s door for a young man who follows her into her apartment, pulls a gun and rapes her. She showers, plays a graded recital and reports the attack the next day. Benson stays with her through the rape kit and clashes with Jen, a crisis counselor who warns Sarah that cases like hers are hard to win. Elevator video shows the attacker, Rollins and Fin stop and frisk young men in Hamilton Heights, and Sarah then spots her rapist on the street. Amaro chases Michael Wedmore into his family’s apartment in the Jefferson projects, arrests him amid his mother’s screams and recovers a gun from under the couch, and Sarah identifies him from a car.
At the arraignment Bayard Ellis, a onetime lawyer for drug kingpins who now runs a civil-liberties center, takes Michael’s case for free, and Bureau Chief Michael Cutter steps in to prosecute. Munch tells Ellis he admires his second act; Ellis demands the paperwork on every stop and frisk, posts Michael’s bail and challenges both the street identification and the gun. The judge lets both stand, though Benson testifies that she never saw Michael throw the gun and only heard Amaro shout a warning, which strains the new partnership. Sarah at first keeps the rape from her parents and from Paul, her piano teacher and boyfriend. Warner finds Michael’s DNA on Sarah’s beer cup but another man’s semen on her bed, and Sarah admits a lie: the night before the attack she brought home a man from a bar whose name she never learned, so her sexual history is now open to the defense.
At trial Michael says he sells marijuana, carried Sarah’s groceries and drank a beer, then left after she suggested sex; he denies owning the gun. Ellis takes Sarah through the friendly-looking elevator video, her recital, the stranger from the bar and why she told no one, and Cutter answers that the defense has put the victim’s private life on trial.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury acquits Michael of both rape and weapon possession, and someone in the courtroom yells a racial slur. Sarah turns on Benson for putting her through the trial; Benson tells her that she saw her and believes her before Sarah’s parents lead her away. Benson then confronts Ellis over shaming Sarah and playing on stereotypes. He points to the thin evidence, calls himself a true believer and says she is one too. They admit the job is wearing them down, and when he invites her to a softball game he coaches for his daughter, she says she does fine on her own.
Why it stands out
- Andre Braugher makes his first appearance as defense attorney Bayard Ellis, a recurring adversary who becomes a friend of Benson’s.
- Ellis asks Munch “Have we met?”, a nod to the six seasons Braugher played opposite Richard Belzer’s Munch on Homicide: Life on the Street.