Undertow (Season 26, Episode 15)
Premise: A New Jersey teacher who had sex with a 16-year-old at a hotel pool says she was drugged, leaving Carisi to prosecute a case with two possible victims.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 26, Episode 15
- Starring
- Capt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane), Capt. Renee Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly), ADA Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino)
- Guest stars
- Marilyn Caserta as Stacey Moran, Billy Keogh as Ryan Perry, T.C. Matherne as Billy Moran, Nathan Wallace as Grant Moran, Clea Alsip as Emily Perry
- Director
- Martha Mitchell
- Writers
- Story: Gabriel Vallejo & Nicholas Evangelista; Written by: Brendan Feeney
Summary
“Undertow” opens at a Manhattan hotel, where Billy Moran breaks six months of sobriety on his fifth anniversary with his wife, Stacey, 28, who teaches sixth grade in Union, New Jersey. She leaves him in their suite and goes down to the bar, where she meets Ryan Perry, a guest at his father’s third wedding in the same hotel, and the two end up at the pool. Ryan’s stepmother, Emily, finds a pair of women’s underwear in his rented tuxedo and brings him to SVU: he is 16. Ryan tells Bruno that he and Stacey drank, kissed, had sex in the hot tub and fell asleep by the pool, and that she never asked his age. The bartender and hotel cameras back up the timeline.
Benson and Curry find Stacey at home in New Jersey. In front of Billy she says she must have blacked out after a double vodka soda, and he insists she is the one who was assaulted. Her DNA is in Ryan’s rape kit. With Billy’s brother Grant as her lawyer, she admits Ryan handed her a small bottle of vodka before the pool and a few sips left her uninhibited and high. Carisi offers a misdemeanor plea with no jail time, but it would still put her on the sex offender registry and end her teaching career. Her tox screen shows MDMA, and pills found in Ryan’s room test positive. Arrested on a drug charge, Ryan admits he crushed pills into the vodka to get through the wedding and that Stacey drank from it without being told. His phone holds a message to friends about hooking up with an older bridesmaid, but Carisi cannot prove he meant to drug anyone, and Stacey is arraigned for third-degree rape.
Hotel video of two wedding guests passing the pool leads to Ryan’s cousin Thomas D’Angelo, whose photo shows Stacey straddling Ryan and smiling. At trial Ryan says Stacey started the sex. Grant uses his texts, the spiked vodka and the underwear to paint him as a predator who spoke up only because he was caught. Billy blames his own relapse for driving her from the room, and Stacey testifies that she was drugged and that Ryan made the first moves. Carisi answers that she never asked his age and that the case comes down to 28 against 16.
Spoiler, the ending: In closing, Grant calls Ryan a calculating hunter, and Carisi asks the jurors whether they would see the case differently if the minor were a girl and the adult a man. The jury reports that it is hopelessly deadlocked on the single count, and the judge declares a mistrial. The episode does not say whether Stacey will be tried again.
Why it stands out
- Reverses the usual statutory rape case: the accused is a 28-year-old woman and the complainant a 16-year-old boy, and Carisi’s closing asks jurors to imagine the genders swapped.
- Written by Brendan Feeney and directed by Martha Mitchell, who also directed the season’s “Divide and Conquer.”