Producer's Backend (Season 16, Episode 3)
Premise: A troubled former child star is charged with abusing a 15-year-old, and her story leads SVU to the producer who abused her and to a girl’s drowning.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 16, Episode 3
- Starring
- Sgt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), ADA Rafael Barba (Raúl Esparza), Judge Felicia Catano (Aida Turturro), Defense Attorney Marvin Exley (Ron Rifkin)
- Guest stars
- Stevie Lynn Jones as Tensley Evans, Brian d'Arcy James as Adam Brubeck, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson as Donna Evans, Drigan Lee as Brody Clark, Robert John Burke as IAB Lt. Ed Tucker
- Ripped from the headlines
- Based on Lindsay Lohan’s arrests and her relationship with her mother, Dina Lohan.
- Director
- Michael Pressman
- Writers
- Story: Julie Martin & Warren Leight; Teleplay: Jill Abbinanti & Brianna Yellen
Summary
“Producer’s Backend” begins with Amaro, still on patrol, arresting former teen star Tensley Evans after a car crash while she taunts and propositions him on his dash camera. In court before Judge Felicia Catano, who has seen her many times on probation, her lawyer, Marvin Exley, and her mother, Donna, claim she fled because Amaro demanded sex. Tensley then tells detectives she left rehab because the psych director, Jim Durant, came on to her. Rollins and Carisi find Durant confident that the security cameras will clear him, and he mentions that Tensley had an encounter with a patient’s teenage son.
Benson shows the dash camera footage to Lt. Ed Tucker of Internal Affairs, and Amaro is cleared and returned to SVU. Footage from the rehab shows Tensley performing a sex act on 15-year-old Gregory Miller, who calls it the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, and Tensley is arrested. After a court-ordered evaluation, psychiatrist Emily Sopher hints to Benson that Tensley may have been abused herself. Tensley, now 24, describes being passed among producer Adam Brubeck and his friends from her early teens, in exchange for roles, and says her mother put her on the pill. The statute of limitations has run out, and Barba insists on indicting Tensley.
Rollins and Amaro question Brubeck at a casting pool party; he blames Tensley’s mother. The squad finds a trail of troubled former child stars and the drowning, nine years earlier, of 15-year-old actress Amber Forbes at Brubeck’s Beverly Hills home. Pressed about that night, Tensley harms herself in a suicide attempt. Recovering, she says Brubeck held both girls’ heads underwater during sex; she choked and went inside, and Amber drowned. Actor Brody Clark, her former fiancé, admits he stayed silent because he was with a man at the party, and Brubeck’s house counsel, Dennis George, then hands over audition videos. Every encounter was shot in U.S. states where the age of consent is 16, except a tape of 16-year-old Maude Peterson in Winnipeg for a film that never existed.
Spoiler, the ending: Maude tells two detectives that Brubeck flew to Winnipeg, auditioned her alone in his hotel suite and had sex with her all weekend. Confronted with a sham script he registered and a budget covering only his flight and hotel, Brubeck is arrested by federal agents for traveling abroad to have sex with a minor. Tensley, sentenced to community service, talks on morning television about being a predator’s victim. Benson then learns Noah is in the emergency room.
Why it stands out
- Amaro returns to SVU after his stint on patrol at the start of the season.
- Hoda Kotb makes a cameo as a TV anchor, and Ron Rifkin returns as defense attorney Marvin Exley.
- Former child star Josh Saviano, a real-life New York attorney, plays defense lawyer Don Taft.