Aperture (Season 26, Episode 21)
Premise: A witness sees a gunpoint assault through a telescope, and the squad finds the victims are wealthy stepsiblings who were forced into sex on camera and are hiding what happened.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 26, Episode 21
- Starring
- Capt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), Det. Kate Silva (Juliana Aidén Martinez), Capt. Renee Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly), ADA Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino)
- Guest stars
- Ava Jean as Josephine DeWinn, Tristan Spohn as Atlas DeWinn, Kate MacCluggage as Natalie DeWinn, Robert Beitzel as Derek Rhodes, Mickey Nixon as Jaden Thomas
- Director
- Jean de Segonzac
- Writers
- Story: Gabriel Vallejo & Nicholas Evangelista; Written by: Michael Carnes
Summary
“Aperture” begins at an open house, where a man looking through a staged telescope sees a gunman across the street forcing a young woman, stripped to her underwear, to get dressed. No victim has called the police. In the fifth-floor sublet, CSU finds tripod marks, and the building’s plumbing yields some 25 condoms. Elevator footage shows a gunman carrying a camera bag with a young woman and a boy who tries to shield her. Facial recognition identifies them as Josephine “Josie” DeWinn, 18, a Stanford-bound honors student, and her 17-year-old stepbrother, Atlas. The owner, Mark Ziegler, rented the place online to someone using a Houston woman’s stolen credit card.
Curry and Silva meet Josie, who admits she was raped but refuses to file a report, saying she wants to leave it behind when she goes to college. Benson and Carisi tell her father, insurance executive Gordon DeWinn, and Atlas’s mother, lawyer Natalie DeWinn, who knew nothing. Atlas says the gunman locked him in the bathroom. Then Natalie is texted a video in which the gunman forces Josie and Atlas to have sex with each other. Josie says she offered herself to spare her brother, and Atlas admits he was never in the bathroom. A $5 million ransom demand follows, and Natalie’s ex-husband, Derek Rhodes, flies in from the Bahamas, where he was once arrested over hidden bikini photos of a 16-year-old Josie on a phone; he says the phone, and the photos, belonged to Atlas.
Footage from a Houston gas station shows cashier Jaden Thomas removing a card skimmer, and he matches the gunman. After Josie tells Atlas about the photos, he goes after Derek at his hotel with a metal bat and is arrested. Hidden prints of candid photos of Josie turn up in his room. Extradited, Jaden says he and Atlas had played Rainbow Six together for years, that Atlas offered him $2,000 to stage and film the assault once Josie was headed to college, and that the ransom was his own idea.
Spoiler, the ending: Confronted with Jaden’s texts and the photos, Atlas breaks down in front of his mother, saying he loves Josie and could not stand to lose her. Natalie vows to pay for his defense and is told she is only delaying a long prison term; asked who will tell Josie the truth, she says her son comes first. Josie, kept apart from her stepmother until the case is over, says her whole relationship with her brother was a lie.
Why it stands out
- The title points to the case’s lenses: the crime is spotted through an open-house telescope, and the assault was filmed from a tripod.
- One of Juliana Aidén Martinez’s last episodes as Det. Kate Silva; her final appearance is the season finale the following week.