Blackout (Season 20, Episode 18)
Premise: After a police gala ends with defense attorney Nikki Staines drugged and raped, SVU’s inquiry leads to a well-connected lawyer with leverage over a judge and the department.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 18
- Starring
- Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), Deputy Chief William Dodds (Peter Gallagher)
- Guest stars
- Callie Thorne as Nikki Staines, Titus Welliver as Rob Miller, Ian Blackman as Judge Leonard, Charlie Thurston as David Smith, Jerry Clicquot as J.J. Austen
- Director
- Chris Misiano
- Writers
- Peter Blauner
Summary
“Blackout” opens with Benson on the stand as defense attorney Nikki Staines wins dismissal of charges against Wally Stevens, accused of organizing a sex party attended by underage girls. That night Benson and Rollins attend a police charity event, where Staines, who is suing the NYPD for $15 million over surveillance of activist groups, spars with Fin, and Deputy Chief Dodds introduces Rob Miller, an influential lawyer working with the department’s defense team. Hours later Staines is found half-conscious in the vestibule of her building and asks for SVU. She believes she was drugged and raped. Her wallet is untouched but her phone is gone; a former client, J.J. Austen, says she recorded conversations on it and kept nothing in the cloud. Her blood alcohol is .12 and the tox screen is inconclusive.
Staines insists a police officer attacked her to get the phone. Dodds refuses to subpoena the 50 officers at the event and sends Benson to Miller, who offers location data on nearby sex offenders and a file questioning Staines’s honesty, then asks Benson out. Rollins, suspicious because Miller claimed to place her accent, digs in. A former associate, David Smith, says Miller fired him and shut him out of every other firm. Staines points out that a threat of sanctions in the file was made privately in Judge Leonard’s chambers; Leonard warns Rollins off, and a law professor tells Carisi that a plagiarism scandal from Leonard’s law school days quietly disappeared, probably with Miller’s help.
Over drinks, Miller spots a crime scene tech posing as a busboy taking his glass and admits having sex with Staines in his limo, calling it consensual and saying she asked to walk home. Staines then drops the case, afraid of losing her daughter in a custody fight. Soon after, state troopers pull Benson over with Noah in the car and order her out at the roadside. Benson accuses Dodds of being in Miller’s pocket; he warns that if they go after Miller, they cannot afford to miss.
Spoiler, the ending: Dodds wears a wire to meet Miller, who is also his lawyer. Miller admits he has Staines’s phone, found on the floor of his limo, hints that she will be dealt with and threatens to release a memo Dodds wrote. Miller is arrested, and Dodds gives Benson the memo, about her, written after Noah’s kidnapping, saying it never left his desk. With Miller jailed without bail on federal charges, Staines breaks down in Benson’s arms, saying she now understands what she did to the victims she tore apart on the stand.
Why it stands out
- Callie Thorne’s defense attorney Nikki Staines, seen earlier in “Dare” and “Revenge,” becomes the victim.
- Titus Welliver’s Rob Miller returns in the season’s last two episodes, “Assumptions” and “End Game.”