Hell's Kitchen (Season 20, Episode 8)
Premise: A waitress who refuses to call her assault rape leads SVU to her celebrity chef boss, his uncharged Brooklyn cases and the prosecutor who passed on them.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 8
- 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
- Genevieve Angelson as Kayla Morgan, Luke Kirby as Andrew Liebowitz, Jacob Pitts as ADA Chris Hodges, Sara Bues as Bethany Fisher, Lora Lee Gayer as Emily Holmes
- Director
- Monica Raymund
- Writers
- Richard Sweren & Ryan Causey
Summary
“Hell’s Kitchen” starts at Far Rockaway by Andrew, a fashionable Lower East Side restaurant, where chef Andrew Liebowitz has waitress Kayla Morgan look after two TV producers at an after-hours party. Before dawn, two patrol officers walking past see Uber driver Michael Boykin on top of a screaming Kayla in his back seat, her shirt torn. Boykin says she was dazed and attacked him when he tried to get her out, and his phone confirms he was talking to his wife during the ride. Kayla remembers little and denies being a victim. Staff say she headed to the wine cellar with Liebowitz, who calls the sex consensual and says it was not their first time. Kayla concedes that she said no and he kept going, but insists it was not rape and wants the police out of her life. At home, Benson struggles with Noah, who refuses to eat his dinner.
Brooklyn SVU files show that three women who worked at Liebowitz’s Park Slope wine bar accused him of assault after closing time; each had been given drink or marijuana, and each lost her underwear to him as a keepsake. Brooklyn ADA Chris Hodges, a rising prosecutor known for championing victims, declined all three cases. Stone, describing how his sister was murdered by people he was prosecuting, persuades Kayla to come forward, and police arrest Liebowitz during her shift for first-degree rape. But after a Molineux hearing, the judge bars the Brooklyn women from testifying, and the case stalls. Benson urges Stone to dig into Hodges; at a Brooklyn bar Stone learns that Hodges pitched for Far Rockaway High, and the detectives establish that he and Liebowitz grew up around the corner from each other.
Liebowitz’s finances show no payoffs. Then a newspaper reports the uncharged Brooklyn assaults, and Bethany Fisher comes in to say that at a party when she was 15, Hodges pinned her down and tried to rape her while another boy egged him on. Her friend Emily Holmes recalls Bethany fleeing a bedroom where, Emily believes, Hodges and Liebowitz had been with her. Confronted, Hodges blames Liebowitz, says he pulled his friend off her, and agrees to set things right.
Spoiler, the ending: Wearing a wire, Hodges gets Liebowitz to boast that Kayla put up only a little fight and to talk about how Hodges shielded him in Brooklyn; Liebowitz also insists that Hodges was the one who attacked Bethany. Liebowitz is arrested on the spot, and Hodges is taken into custody too. Later Kayla, now working at another restaurant, brings a dish as a thank-you and learns that Brooklyn’s new sex crimes prosecutor is reopening the old cases against Liebowitz.
Why it stands out
- The case is framed by the 2018 MeToo moment: the defense compares the prosecution to Bill Cosby’s, and Hodges, a public advocate for victims, worries about being “Judge Kavanaughed.”
- Jacob Pitts guest stars as ADA Chris Hodges, and Monica Raymund directs.