Exile (Season 20, Episode 6)
Premise: A woman found beaten and assaulted in an alley turns out to be a missing college student living on the street with no memory of who she was.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 6
- Starring
- Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), ADA Peter Stone (Philip Winchester)
- Guest stars
- Aimée Spring Fortier as Grace Walker / Sophie Simmons, Jake Robinson as Silas Perry, Mat Vairo as Drew Brogan, James Leo Ryan as Tommy, Tim Bohn as Mark Simmons
- Director
- Stephanie Marquardt
- Writers
- Michael Chernuchin & Allison Intrieri
Summary
“Exile” begins when a cleaning crew finds a young woman unconscious in an alley behind a bar, her purse, phone and underwear gone. At the hospital she gives her name as Grace Walker; her injuries point to rape, and she remembers only men buying her drinks. She asks Benson and Carisi not to tell her boyfriend, Tommy, whom she calls a heart surgeon, and Carisi drives her home. The bartender sends the detectives to his edibles dealer, Drew Brogan, who says he left Grace with his friend Silas Perry. Silas, who is married, calls the sex consensual and says Grace swung a steel rod at him while going for his money clip.
Grace’s phone number turns out to belong to a sorority house at Spence College, and the doorman where Carisi dropped her off has never seen her. Silas remembers her talking about a diner near Broadway and 155th Street, which leads to a free lunch program funded by a wealthy couple named Walker. Staff there know Grace as a homeless woman who eats with Tommy, who is homeless too. A sorority sister, Kirsten, identifies her as Sophie Simmons, a pre-med student who disappeared in her freshman year three years earlier. When Sophie’s father, Mark, and stepmother, Patty, arrive from Rye, Stone, whose own sister once ended up on the street, lashes out at Mark.
Using a phone app that helps families locate homeless people, detectives find Grace as Tommy is beating her, and he is arrested. Grace now says Silas paid her for sex and she was hurt only after trying to take more money. She believes her parents are dead and does not recognize her own photo, yet she knows her father when he arrives. A psychologist diagnoses dissociative fugue, a rare condition in which trauma such as sexual assault leads a person to lose her identity and adopt a new one. Benson walks Sophie through the Spence campus, and at the office of Professor Logan Adams, who had given her a B-minus, Sophie remembers that he raped her there when she came asking for extra credit. The office’s new occupant says Adams died of a heart attack in March. Devastated, Sophie runs back to the streets, where police soon find her insisting she is Grace.
Spoiler, the ending: An offhand remark from Carisi, that he would kill Adams if he were not already dead, gives Benson an idea. In the final scene Sophie speaks directly to the dead professor, describing the three years she spent on the street and everything she lost, says she will never forgive him and vows to survive and move on with the help of her family and friends.
Why it stands out
- Aimée Spring Fortier is credited in a double role, as Grace Walker and as Sophie Simmons, the identity Grace has lost.
- Stone mentions that his sister once went missing and lived on the street before she was institutionalized, adding to the backstory of the ADA who arrived the previous season.