Recall (Season 8, Episode 3)
Premise: A prominent lawyer charged with rape is cleared in one case by DNA, and Stabler’s new partner finds the woman he attacked as a teenager.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 8, Episode 3
- Starring
- Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Dani Beck (Connie Nielsen), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Casey Novak (Diane Neal), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie), CSU Ryan O’Halloran (Mike Doyle), Judge Lena Petrovsky (Joanna Merlin)
- Guest stars
- Leslie Caron as Lorraine Delmas, Charles Shaughnessy as Martin Trenway, Robin Weigert as Heather Stark, Lily Rabe as Nikki, James Naughton as Charlie Moss
- Director
- Juan J. Campanella
- Writers
- Jonathan Greene
Summary
“Recall” opens with Stabler and his new partner, Det. Dani Beck, losing a rapist in a foot chase after he attacked a young woman, Nikki West, and wiped her down with alcohol pads. Nikki recalls a scar like a backward L on his hand. Cragen has heard that Beck was pushed out of the Warrants squad for being overzealous and asks Stabler to keep an eye on her. Beck arrests ex-convict Barry Cole after a fingerprint hit on a Jaguar parked at the scene, but O’Halloran tells Stabler that Cole’s prints were only on the passenger window. The set where the rapist crouched belongs to Martin Trenway, a leading personal injury lawyer and former Manhattan prosecutor, who rented the car. Stabler has Cole released.
Trenway, wearing a wrist brace, says he must have touched the car while picking up dropped papers. Nikki picks out his scarred hand in a lineup of hands, and he is charged but released on $25,000 bail. Beck then points reporters to Trenway, and his photo in the paper brings in Heather Stark, who says he raped her five years earlier. Only four days remain on the statute of limitations. Beck’s outburst at a clerk slows the search for Heather’s old rape kit at a leaky Queens property warehouse, and Stabler tells her to stop bullying people and to pay more attention to victims. At trial, the defense notes that Trenway’s picture had run in Heather’s newspaper 22 times, and an expert explains how suggestion can change memory. When the kit turns up, its mold-damaged DNA rules Trenway out.
To keep the case over Nikki from looking like another mistaken identity, Novak needs a past victim to testify. Beck combs unsolved attacks from Trenway’s college years in Ithaca, law school in North Carolina and boyhood in Douglaston, Queens, and finds the 1960s beating of Lorraine Delmas, whom she saw in the courtroom gallery. Delmas, the best friend of Trenway’s late mother, promised her to look after the boy. She will not talk to Stabler, but alone with Beck, speaking French and hearing that Beck’s husband, a police officer, was murdered four years earlier, she says Trenway raped her when he was 15.
Spoiler, the ending: At a hearing, the judge will not let Delmas testify, since the attack is decades old and nothing supports her account. Delmas then reveals that she hid the clothes she wore that night between the beams of her basement, and the DNA on them matches Trenway. He pleads guilty to raping Nikki and agrees to name every other victim he can remember, and Novak recommends the maximum sentence. Delmas tells Nikki to live her life and not hide away as she did.
Why it stands out
- Leslie Caron won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for playing Lorraine Delmas; her key scene is spoken mostly in French.
- Beck tells Stabler she was born in Denmark, and her husband, a police officer, is revealed to have been murdered four years earlier.