Folly (Season 2, Episode 17)
Premise: A string of attacks on male escorts in Manhattan hotels leads the squad to the agency’s ruthless owner and then to a married couple acting out a violent shared fantasy.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 17
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March)
- Guest stars
- Eddie Cahill as Tommy Dowd, Patricia Kalember as Leslie DeSantis, J. Tucker Smith as Gary Sutton, Marguerite MacIntyre as Darlene Sutton, J.K. Simmons as Dr. Emil Skoda
- Director
- Jud Taylor
- Writers
- Story: Dawn DeNoon & Lisa Marie Petersen & Robert F. Campbell & Jonathan Greene; Written by: Todd Robinson
Summary
“Folly” begins when a bleeding young man staggers into a hotel lobby during a wedding photo shoot. Tommy Dowd, 21, was struck with an ashtray in a room registered to him, and a week earlier a St. Louis businessman was hit with a phone by a woman after he refused to get rough with her. A couple from Altoona, Pennsylvania, tell Benson and Stabler they heard a woman scream. Dowd says he met a blonde named Jill at the hotel bar and that she pushed him to hit her.
The bartender reveals Dowd already had a key when they met and often came in with older women. Dowd admits he works for Leslie DeSantis’s escort agency, Man About Town, to help his widowed mother pay his late father’s gambling debts. The booking was made with a credit card stolen from an Illinois woman. A third escort, Victor Coe, is left in critical condition. Fired by DeSantis for selling sex to her clients on his own, Coe had been seeing Claudia Baines Marshall, and her husband, bank chairman Darien Marshall, paid him $75,000 for his silence. Dowd, who borrowed heavily from DeSantis, says she then demanded sex and threatened to call in the loan when he tried to quit.
After a woman picked up by Vice is ruled out in a lineup, the lab finds that the blows could not have come from the woman in the bed: a man who left semen in the closets of both rooms struck the victims. Dr. Emil Skoda describes a shared psychotic disorder in which a woman stages an assault so her partner can play the rescuer. When college student Gregory Moore, filling in for Dowd on a last-minute booking, is killed with a vase at the Broadway Hotel, Dowd agrees to wear a wire against DeSantis. She finds it and badly burns him before officers break in.
Spoiler, the ending: DeSantis is charged with attempted murder, but she cannot name the couple, who booked with a different stolen card each time. The card numbers lead to an accounting firm billing for a mail-order warehouse and to accountant Gary Sutton, whose wife, Darlene, is the “Altoona” woman. Detectives catch Darlene waiting in another escort’s hotel room. Gary confesses, saying it began after he pulled a man off Darlene in their bedroom and the rescue aroused him. The squad worries she will blame him and win a psychiatric defense. In the final scene Darlene calls Gary her protector, asks to go home and is told she is going to jail.
Why it stands out
- J.K. Simmons appears as Dr. Emil Skoda, who explains the idea of folie à deux, a shared madness, to the squad.
- Eddie Cahill guest-stars as escort Tommy Dowd, with Patricia Kalember as his boss, Leslie DeSantis.