Broken Rhymes (Season 18, Episode 6)
Premise: The rape of a transgender art student in a mall restroom leads SVU to a record label and a hardcore rapper hiding his love for her.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 18, Episode 6
- Starring
- Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), ADA Rafael Barba (Raúl Esparza)
- Guest stars
- Mitchell Edwards as Hype, Wyclef Jean as Vincent Love, Okieriete Onaodowan as Cash Lewis, Sabel Gonzales as Eva Carson, Will Swenson as Mitch Hampton
- Director
- Adam Bernstein
- Writers
- Story: Brianna Yellen & Robert Cohen & Céline Robinson; Written by: Rick Eid & Jeffrey Baker
Summary
“Broken Rhymes” opens with Eva Carson, 24, a New Jersey art student, found in a mall restroom, beaten and sexually assaulted with a pipe. A mother and her ten-year-old daughter discover her and glimpse a black man in the hallway with blood on his pants. Eva is transgender, and with the state’s new gender-neutral bathroom law in the news, the squad treats it as a possible hate crime. The mother, Liza Johnson, makes her disapproval plain and keeps her daughter, Sophie, from saying more. Eva’s parents, Nina and Mark, say she had been fighting with her boyfriend, Logan Blake, who lied about a long lunch; he was at a surgeon’s office trying to recover a deposit for an operation Eva had called off.
Eva had lost a modeling job after slapping a guest at a party thrown by record executive Vincent Love. The guest was Love’s new rapper, Hype (Randall Leonard), whose lyrics are full of anti-gay and anti-trans slurs, and a post places him near the mall shortly before the attack. Producer Cash Lewis claims he and Love paid Eva $50,000 to keep quiet about writing Hype’s rhymes, and the check turns up torn in her apartment. After Hype’s DNA is found under Eva’s nails, he is arrested on his way to her hospital and admits they were secretly in love; he had backed out of a public lunch with her and was drinking at a bar during the attack. Once Liza is warned she faces arrest for interfering, Sophie picks Cash from a photo array. Eva dies.
Serving a warrant on Cash, the squad finds him shot, with Hype holding a gun that belongs to Love, and Cash dies. With lawyer Mitch Hampton, whose fees Love pays, Hype claims he fired in self-defense during a contract dispute. Barba offers first-degree manslaughter if Hype admits he acted out of grief for Eva, then second-degree manslaughter and three years if he testifies against Love, using a recording made two days before the attack in which Love tells Cash to make Eva listen. Hype refuses, insisting he is not gay and no snitch.
Spoiler, the ending: At trial Barba argues that revenge, however understandable, is still murder, while Hampton calls Eva a fiction the prosecution invented. The jury convicts Hype of second-degree murder. Love is not charged on screen, and the episode closes on the news that Hype’s single has reached number one.
Why it stands out
- Wyclef Jean guest-stars as record executive Vincent Love; the episode was originally titled “Bad Rap.”
- Mitchell Edwards plays the rapper Hype, with Okieriete Onaodowan as his producer, Cash Lewis.