Anonymity (Season 28, Episode 3)
Premise: A five-year-old’s abuse leads SVU to a dark-web site of child sexual abuse material, and to an FBI task force that is keeping the site open to pursue child traffickers.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 28, Episode 3
- Starring
- Capt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Sgt. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane)
- Guest stars
- Whitney Andrews as Analyst Jackie Sears, Nanrisa Lee as Lauren Fei, Jeremy Landon Hays as Craig Lynch, Quinn Blades as Sam Caldwell, Alejandro Hernandez as John DeMarco
- Director
- Norberto Barba
- Writers
- Nicholas Evangelista
Summary
In “Anonymity,” John DeMarco finds bruises on his five-year-old son, Michael, and blames the boy’s 17-year-old babysitter, Brandon Klein. Michael tells Benson it was Brandon’s friend, a man, and that they took pictures. Brandon tells Bruno and Rollins he has sexual thoughts about children and, under threat from a man named Lloyd he met online, took Michael to an empty West Village apartment, where Lloyd made the boy undress and photographed him. Real estate agent Lloyd Harris is arrested at a showing; his camera’s memory card has been wiped.
Lloyd makes material for The Gate, a dark-web site of child sexual abuse material that features only New York children aged five and under. Analyst Jackie Sears finds Michael’s photos there among files of dozens of children. Its anonymous creator, Gatekeeper, scrubs every upload and posts a daily “canary” telling users the site is safe. Bruno reviews every file alone overnight, which Benson says she never asked for. He counts 26 children and finds two leads: a girl’s bedroom with a window view of the World Trade Center, and a classroom where a man has a girl named Gemma undress. A school T-shirt leads to Gemma Byrnes and to the arrest of Eric Smith.
A moderator asks to meet Lloyd, and the meeting turns up FBI agents Lauren Fei and Craig Lynch. Their task force has secretly kept The Gate running for six months to track traffickers who use it to arrange the sale of children. They shut down Lloyd’s account and demand that SVU limit its arrests; Benson orders them out. Michael’s father agrees to see a therapist. After a squad debate, Benson decides to keep hunting Gatekeeper even if it sinks the federal case.
Sears traces Gatekeeper to a Tribeca apartment, where Bernadette Caldwell’s brother Sam has been staying since losing his job. Sam is arrested at a park with her young daughter, Iris, the girl in the bedroom video. Benson gets him to unlock his laptop by raising the prospect of court-approved contact with Iris, a tactic Bruno questions. The task force arrives with a federal detainer, takes Sam and the evidence and reveals it plans to run the site itself.
The ending
Spoiler: Fin tells Bruno about an early case he still thinks about and brings him in on a plan. Benson tells Fei, who has requested a Justice Department review of her leadership, that nothing of the site will be left to run. Sears and Computer Crimes pull data to find more producers, the day’s canary never goes out and users abandon The Gate. Sam is charged and expected to stay in prison. Benson sends Bruno on leave; he suggests he was following her lead.
Case outcome: Lloyd Harris, no verdict or plea; Eric Smith, no verdict or plea. Conviction rates
Why it stands out
- Fin recalls one of his first SVU cases after moving from Narcotics, when Capt. Cragen had him talk to a four-year-old boy, and says he still thinks about it 30 years later.
- Rollins is chided for setting up her partner with a mother from her daughter Jesse’s school, and someone jokes that it isn’t too late to swap partners again.