Family Secrets 43 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Hidden pasts and buried truths inside families that surface once a crime is investigated.
- Season 1 · Episode 2
A Single Life
A writer’s fatal fall from her apartment window leads the detectives to her psychologist, a TV anchor and a father whose abuse she spent her adult life escaping.
- Season 1 · Episode 5
Wanderlust
A travel writer is found dead in the room he rents from a lonely landlady, and suspicion moves between her, her secretive boyfriend and her teenage daughter.
- Season 1 · Episode 17
Misleader
When a conservative Christian college president’s pregnant daughter-in-law is found strangled in a Manhattan hotel, a burglar’s trail gives way to an affair inside the family.
- Season 2 · Episode 4
Legacy
A seven-year-old with a history of hidden injuries lies in a coma while the detectives sort through her father, stepfather, stepbrother and mother.
- Season 3 · Episode 7
Sacrifice
A young husband is shot and raped in an alley outside a gay bar, and his silence hides a family supporting a sick child through work in pornography.
- Season 3 · Episode 19
Justice
An unidentified teenager dies after a rape and beating, and the hunt for her killer exposes the secrets of a judge’s family.
- Season 3 · Episode 21
Denial
A rape victim’s grisly keepsake leads detectives to a toddler’s remains hidden in a closet for 14 years, and to a mother and grandmother each hiding a child’s death.
- Season 4 · Episode 10
Resilience
A 15-year-old girl’s suicide attempt after a rape leads detectives into her family’s home, where her father’s obsession with having more children hides a murder.
- Season 5 · Episode 1
Tragedy
A heavily pregnant artist disappears in what looks like a carjacking, and the detectives race to find her before a dangerous labor kills her and her baby.
- Season 5 · Episode 3
Mother
A psychiatrist known for treating sex offenders is attacked and left in a drug den, and the investigation exposes her methods and a patient’s buried past.
- Season 5 · Episode 15
Families
A 16-year-old prep-school student is found dead and pregnant, and the baby’s DNA reveals a family secret that ties two New York households together.
- Season 7 · Episode 18
Venom
Fin’s son is caught digging for a body on what he says was a stranger’s boast, and the DNA that clears him exposes a family secret and a killer close to home.
- Season 8 · Episode 10
Scheherazade
A priest sends Stabler to a dying man who has waited decades to confess, and his slowly told stories uncover old bank robberies, a buried partner and the truth about his daughter’s birth.
- Season 8 · Episode 16
Philadelphia
Benson finds her half brother just as a New Jersey captain targets him as a rapist, while her distraction costs the squad a chance to catch two men raping men in Central Park.
- Season 8 · Episode 17
Sin
The murder of a male escort leads to a famous anti-gay preacher, his devout wife and a family secret that someone in the church was willing to kill to bury.
- Season 8 · Episode 19
Florida
Benson risks her career for her fugitive half brother, learns the truth about the man who fathered them both, and uncovers who really framed Simon.
- Season 8 · Episode 22
Screwed
A killer’s murder trial turns into a trial of the squad itself as Fin’s former stepson exposes the detectives’ past lapses.
- Season 10 · Episode 3
Swing
When Stabler’s daughter is arrested after breaking into a stranger’s home, a bipolar diagnosis forces him to turn to the mother he has kept out of his life.
- Season 11 · Episode 2
Sugar
The murder of a young woman found in a suitcase draws SVU into the world of paid “sugar” dating and the family of the website’s owner.
- Season 11 · Episode 11
Quickie
A teenager’s murder leads SVU to an anonymous-sex app and a stockbroker who knowingly spreads HIV, and then to the victim who takes revenge on him in court.
- Season 11 · Episode 20
Beef
An animal-rights activist working undercover at a meat-packing plant is murdered, and the evidence left at the scene has been planted to frame a co-worker.
- Season 12 · Episode 5
Wet
A public relations executive for a soda company is poisoned with wild mushrooms, and a water-rights activist eagerly claims the blame.
- Season 13 · Episode 3
Blood Brothers
A 13-year-old’s pregnancy leads SVU to the son of a powerful political family, and his murder exposes his father’s secret.
- Season 13 · Episode 8
Educated Guess
A drug-addled prisoner says he saw a rape inside a psychiatric hospital, and the patient who denies it turns out to be hiding years of abuse by a relative.
- Season 13 · Episode 13
Father's Shadow
A reality TV producer who drugs and assaults young performers is jailed, and his devoted son takes hostages to force his release, leaving Benson to talk him down.
- Season 13 · Episode 14
Home Invasions
The shooting of a gay-rights lawyer and her husband looks like a hate crime until the surviving daughter’s secret reshapes the case, while Rollins’s gambling catches up with her.
- Season 13 · Episode 16
Child's Welfare
While Benson’s half brother fights the city for his children, an abandoned newborn leads the squad to a couple who hold young women captive to bear children.
- Season 13 · Episode 20
Father Dearest
A missing teenager’s search for her sperm-donor father exposes a man who poses as the donor to seduce the donor’s daughters as revenge on him.
- Season 14 · Episode 7
Vanity's Bonfire
A toddler’s kidnapping by a woman claiming to be her birth mother uncovers a forged adoption and an affair that a Supreme Court candidate wants buried.
- Season 16 · Episode 12
Padre Sandunguero
When Amaro’s estranged father is accused of fracturing his young fiancée’s skull the night before their wedding, Nick becomes the key witness to what she first said.
- Season 17 · Episode 7
Patrimonial Burden
When the 13-year-old daughter of a famous religious reality-TV family turns up pregnant, SVU uncovers abuse that her family and church have kept hidden.
- Season 17 · Episode 15
Collateral Damages
A sting on a celebrity boxer leads SVU to a child pornography ring and to the NYPD’s own deputy commissioner for public information.
- Season 18 · Episode 9
Decline & Fall
A bartender who remembers nothing after a retail billionaire’s birthday party learns that two generations of his family had sex with her, and the patriarch claims he is too impaired to stand trial.
- Season 19 · Episode 5
Complicated
A young woman found in Central Park is taken for a girl kidnapped ten years earlier, and the detectives come to doubt both her story and the missing girl’s family.
- Season 19 · Episode 7
Something Happened
A woman who knows she was raped but remembers nothing works through the night with Benson, and the memories lead to a dead man and a family secret.
- Season 19 · Episode 9
Gone Baby Gone
Noah is abducted from a Manhattan mall, and Benson discovers that his grandmother, Sheila Porter, planned the kidnapping.
- Season 20 · Episode 7
Caretaker
A father and his two children are stabbed in their beds, and suspicion moves from the family’s devoted nanny to the children’s mother.
- Season 20 · Episode 17
Missing
A six-year-old found in the trunk of a stolen car leads SVU to her kidnapper and to a boy who vanished from a Queens park in 2002.
- Season 24 · Episode 9
And a Trauma in a Pear Tree
Benson’s Christmas trip to introduce Noah to his half-brother turns into an off-duty hunt for the men filming guests at her motel, as Rollins prepares to leave SVU.
- Season 24 · Episode 18
Bubble Wrap
When a construction magnate’s son is accused of raping an employee, his mother buys the victim’s silence, and then the victim dies of a mysterious lung injury.
- Season 25 · Episode 11
Prima Nocta
A bride is raped the night before her wedding, and Rollins, between jobs, helps Benson track a man who targets brides-to-be.
- Season 26 · Episode 2
Excavation
A woman’s discovery of her stepfather’s old journal leads SVU to investigate a retired federal judge for abusing her when she was eight.
- Season 26 · Episode 21
Aperture
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.