If I Knew Then What I Know Now (Season 23, Episode 13)
Premise: A young woman who has just met her birth mother asks SVU to find the man who raped her mother at a teenage party 18 years earlier.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 23, Episode 13
- Starring
- Capt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), ADA Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), Trial Division Chief Lorraine Maxwell (Betty Buckley), Sgt. Hasim Khaldun (Ari’el Stachel)
- Guest stars
- Gates Leonard as Ashley Peters, Lisa Joyce as Michelle Young, Joe Curnutte as Cole Eaton, Ben Jeffrey as Josh Wilcox, Kadia Saraf as Counselor Anya Avital
- Director
- Juan J. Campanella
- Writers
- Story: Warren Leight & Denis Hamill & Monet Hurst-Mendoza & Kathy Dobie; Teleplay: Julie Martin; Story & teleplay: Micharne Cloughley
Summary
“If I Knew Then What I Know Now” begins when 18-year-old Ashley Peters, who has just met her birth mother, Michelle Young, comes to SVU to report that Michelle was raped at a party at 15, the night Ashley was conceived. Sgt. Hasim Khaldun is on loan from Hate Crimes while Fin and Velasco quarantine. Michelle, who drinks heavily and remembers almost nothing, refuses to cooperate until Benson says that she too was conceived in a rape and that Ashley wants to face this with her. Her mother, Lois, blames her. At home, Rollins’s daughters ask whether “Uncle Sonny” is Billie’s father, and Carisi presses Rollins to stop hiding their relationship from their bosses and her girls.
A Polaroid of Michelle with classmate Mavis Halpin leads to an Upper West Side bar and then to a townhouse with a red door, the site of a party on July 4, 2003. Walking through it, Michelle recalls being helped upstairs, a lion in the bedroom and the man saying she would always remember him. Former owner Denise Wilcox’s elder son, Zach, a lawyer, will not name guests. Her younger son, Josh, now a park ranger in Vermont, says he and Michelle only fooled around in his ground-floor room and gives DNA. Ashley connects with him online and embraces him as her father, but the test excludes him and his brother. Josh explains that upstairs was off limits except to Cole Eaton, Zach’s Yale roommate, who slept in the parents’ room that summer and later married Josh’s sister, Katie.
Eaton, now a hedge fund executive, says every woman he slept with that summer was eager, and his DNA matches Ashley’s. Wearing a wire, Michelle meets him; he offers to wire her money, and she recalls the words he used that night. Trial Division Chief Lorraine Maxwell then tells the team that in 1968, as a Radcliffe freshman, she was assaulted at a party thrown by Harvard’s Porcellian Club and never told anyone, and she wants Eaton prosecuted. His lawyer, Anya Avital, calls the memory convenient, but with Josh and Mavis ready to testify, Eaton is arrested.
Spoiler, the ending: Michelle tells Ashley that seeing her happy matters more than a trial. When Ashley meets Eaton, he wants to call Michelle a past relationship, and Ashley refuses any contact until he admits the rape. To avoid trial, Eaton waives the statute of limitations and pleads guilty to endangering the welfare of a minor, a misdemeanor, receiving two years on probation plus 400 hours of service, and agrees to pay Ashley’s tuition and Michelle’s student debt. Both women accept. Rollins tells Benson that she and Carisi are together, and Carisi suggests they talk to her daughters that night.
Why it stands out
- Trial Division Chief Lorraine Maxwell discloses that she was sexually assaulted in 1968 at a Harvard Porcellian Club party and had never told anyone before.
- Benson tells Rollins that she was 13 when her drunken mother, Serena, said she wished she had never had her because of the rape.
- Rollins and Carisi decide to disclose their relationship, and Rollins tells Benson.