Friending Emily (Season 14, Episode 6)
Premise: When a 14-year-old tourist vanishes from a college party and turns up on a live darknet stream, the squad tracks her captor through the girls he took before her.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, Episode 6
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Rafael Barba (Raúl Esparza)
- Guest stars
- Catherine Missal as Emily Culphers, Taylor Spreitler as Taylor Culphers, Chris Coy as Peter, Izzie Steele as Wendy Davis, Lindsay Pulsipher as Kim Rollins
- Director
- Jim McKay
- Writers
- Story: John P. Roche; Written by: Kevin Fox
Summary
“Friending Emily” opens as Rollins’s sister, Kim, turns up at the squad room with nowhere to stay, and Rollins hands over her apartment keys. That night two sisters visiting the city on a school trip, Taylor Culphers, 15, and Emily, 14, go to a fraternity party at Tompkins Square University after a young woman named Wendy sends Taylor an e-vite. Emily, looking for her sister, accepts a soda from a friendly older man, Peter, who leads her out.
Police find Taylor with a 21-year-old student, Merc, who is arrested for statutory rape. Emily had filmed her own abduction and sent the clip to Taylor before her phone died. The e-vite planted spyware on Taylor’s phone, giving the kidnapper the details he used to win over both girls. Merc says Peter supplies drugs and liquor to parties alongside Wendy, whom he calls his sister. A check with the national child-exploitation center leads to Lolitaville, a hidden site that streams Emily live in a windowless room, but the feed runs through untraceable onion routing. Emily’s parents arrive and blame each other. An FBI agent, O’Connell, offers little beyond the name of Job, a jailed hacker who once knocked out child-pornography sites.
Job slips a virus into the site’s host and uncovers five years of uploads from Peter, a new girl each year, with Emily the sixth and viewers now invited to send requests. Earlier victims point back to Wendy: Beth Marks, now a stripper calling herself Misty Day; Liza, who overdosed after meeting Wendy again; and photographer Katrine Kearns, who covertly hands over Wendy’s hometown, Marquette, Michigan. That matches Jane Kalreiss, a girl missing for years, and Taylor picks her out from an age-progressed photo. Kim, meanwhile, brings a stranger and drugs into the apartment and is later stopped by officers for an open container.
Benson and Amaro question Wendy to rattle her, and a wiretap catches her coded call to Peter pointing to Staten Island. The house there is a decoy, and Peter taunts Amaro over a live camera. Arrested, Wendy insists Peter rescued her and her family never looked for her, until she sees their flyers and speaks by video with her mother and sister. She then recalls that the house has no front steps and sits on a curving road.
Spoiler, the ending: Officers storm it and arrest Peter, who protests to his camera that he is unarmed and unhurt, and Emily goes home with her parents. Cragen orders Amaro to take a day off with his daughter. At home, Rollins finds Kim in bed with Jeff, the boyfriend who beat her, and orders him out with a countdown and a threat to shoot; Kim snaps that she never asked for help.
Why it stands out
- Lindsay Pulsipher first appears as Kim Rollins, Amanda’s troubled sister, a role she returns to later in the season.
- Frank Deal, who played prosecutor-turned-defense attorney Don Newvine in the show’s first two seasons, appears here as FBI agent O’Connell, a part he plays again in season 15.