Promising Young Gentlemen (Season 23, Episode 15)
Premise: After a freshman is raped at an exclusive college club, SVU charges every member with conspiracy and Carisi seeks a gender-based hate crime charge.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 23, Episode 15
- Starring
- Capt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Chief Tommy McGrath (Terry Serpico), ADA Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), Defense Attorney Elana Barth (Jenna Stern), Det. Andy Parlato-Goldstein (Jason Biggs)
- Guest stars
- Avery Cole as Annabel Nelson, Ryann Shane as Mia Morino, Beverly D’Angelo as Serafina Carisi, Trey Fitts as Austin Drake, LaChanze as President Rosa Freeman
- Director
- David Grossman
- Writers
- Story: Julie Martin & Warren Leight & Denis Hamill & Monet Hurst-Mendoza & Micharne Cloughley; Teleplay: Candice Sanchez McFarlane & Brianna Yellen; Story & teleplay: Kathy Dobie
Summary
“Promising Young Gentlemen” begins as Rollins meets Carisi’s mother, Serafina, at Sunday dinner along with his niece Mia Morino, a dorm RA and campus sexual assault advocate at Hudson University. That night members of the Bishop Club, an old and exclusive Hudson finals club, take nine young women by party bus to a steakhouse, make them leave their phones and bags on the bus, and invite some back to the club. Mia then calls Carisi: Annabel Nelson, an 18-year-old freshman in her dorm, has been raped. At the hospital Annabel says a member named Austin carried her upstairs on his back to look for her purse; she passed out in a room full of old paintings and woke to find Austin raping her while at least two others held her down.
Her roommate, Sarah Franklin, names the other two as Jacob Hoffman and Brad Calloway. Club president Whitaker Yates stalls the detectives, and the three suspects call Annabel willing before their parents take them home. The staff talk: at the steakhouse, Lloyd Severio admits the members tipped well to keep the women’s glasses full, and Oscar Jimenez, who has worked at the club for 30 years, saw Annabel taken upstairs. In an old club photo the squad spots Hate Crimes detective Andy Parlato-Goldstein, a former member famous for a drinking game. Welcomed back as a legend, he hears the members sing a new pledge song about drugging and assaulting women, and Carisi charges the whole club with conspiracy.
All 16 members are arrested in a dawn raid that angers Hudson’s new president, Rosa Freeman, and Chief McGrath, who warns that it looks punitive. Defense attorney Elana Barth, a former judge, tells reporters it is open season on young men. When Mia’s advocacy group marches to the club, members pepper-spray and hose the protesters and hang an inflatable doll bearing Annabel’s face. Phone photos show the boys wrote slurs on Annabel’s body, and Carisi adds a hate crime charge based on gender to the three rape counts, a move with no precedent; the judge denies Barth’s motion to dismiss it.
Spoiler, the ending: Jacob agrees to testify that he held Annabel’s arms while Brad wrote on her and Austin raped her, in exchange for a year in jail. Brad is offered attempted rape with a three-and-a-half-year minimum. Faced with Annabel’s underwear, which Whitaker says Austin handed him as a trophy, Austin taunts Parlato-Goldstein with an antisemitic remark, but the case ends without a trial. In return for the conspiracy counts being dropped, alumni and trustees agree to close the Bishop Club for good, and students rally outside chanting for the members to leave.
Why it stands out
- Beverly D’Angelo guest stars as Carisi’s mother, whom Rollins meets for the first time.
- Jason Biggs plays Det. Andy Parlato-Goldstein of Hate Crimes, a former Bishop Club member who goes back inside to help the case.
- Carisi attaches a gender-based hate crime charge to a rape case, a step the episode notes has no precedent.