Confess Your Sins to Be Free (Season 23, Episode 21)
Premise: A rapist strikes women who confessed their affairs to a priest, and Carisi’s childhood friend in the clergy will not say why he was caught at the scene of a trap.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 23, Episode 21
- Starring
- Capt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), ADA Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino)
- Guest stars
- Aidan Quinn as Burton Lowe, Kelly AuCoin as Father Colin Regis, Patch Darragh as Father Ryan Duffy, Kristen Connolly as Audrey O’Neill, Traci Wolfe as Beverly Morrison
- Director
- Norberto Barba
- Writers
- Story: Denis Hamill & Monet Hurst-Mendoza & Warren Leight & Kathy Dobie & Micharne Cloughley; Teleplay: Julie Martin & Christian Tyler
Summary
“Confess Your Sins to Be Free” opens in a confessional, where Audrey O’Neill admits to an affair and says she plans to leave her door unlocked for her lover again; a week later she confesses that she was raped. Carisi, at the church to see his childhood friend Father Ryan Duffy, runs into Audrey’s sister, Caitlin McKenna, and asks Benson to talk to Audrey. Meanwhile Burton Lowe, five months sober, asks Benson to hear his amends for their relationship when she was 16, and she tells him to make amends to the other women too. Audrey says a masked man walked in through the door she had left unlocked for her upstairs neighbor, Vince Costa, choked her with what she thinks was a belt and raped her. Fin and Velasco doubt it was Vince, and her husband, Rikers guard Shane O’Neill, has an alibi.
The only other person who knew about the unlocked door was a priest: Father Duffy or the pastor, Father Colin Regis (called John Regis in the episode). Neither will discuss confessions, and neither has an alibi. Det. Mia Ruz confesses to each priest that she will meet a lover after closing at a downtown gallery and gives a door code. Father Duffy shows up and is arrested, but says he cannot explain why he came. Carisi, sure his friend is no rapist, suspects the real rapist confessed to Duffy. At Regis’s previous parish, a woman raped three years earlier while expecting her lover also got white lilies afterward, like Audrey, and Regis was transferred six weeks later.
Benson hears Burton speak at his AA group, where he says he truly loved her; she says she loved him too, but that does not make it right. Then Beverly Morrison, one of his editors, tells Benson that Burton raped her six months earlier, after Benson left his hotel room, when she was too drunk to consent, and that she recorded his amends. Burton says he remembers nothing and offers to plead guilty. Carisi appeals to Duffy as a friend, and Duffy, without breaking the seal, hints that Regis confides in someone else: his dead mother, whom Regis’s father strangled with a belt for cheating when Regis was nine.
Spoiler, the ending: At her grave, Regis tells his mother about raping Audrey and the others while detectives record him, and he is arrested. He pleads guilty to seven rapes over a decade and is defrocked, and Audrey moves in with her sister. Burton, against his lawyer’s advice, takes a plea to sexual misconduct with six years’ probation and registration as a sex offender. Benson tells him she wants to forgive him and that he has a long road ahead.
Why it stands out
- Aidan Quinn returns as Burton Lowe, introduced earlier in the season in “The Five Hundredth Episode.”
- Cyndee Rivera, who played Mia Ruz in Season 22, returns in the role, now credited as a detective.