Serial Rapists 47 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Detectives link a series of sexual assaults and race to stop the attacker before he strikes again.
- Season 1 · Episode 19
Contact
A box-cutter rapist preys on women riding the subway, and when tainted lineup identifications sink the case, the squad turns to a pregnant victim who never reported her attack.
- Season 2 · Episode 3
Closure: Part 2
A new rape matching Kenneth Cleary’s method reunites the detectives with his first known victim, who has been following him herself.
- Season 6 · Episode 20
Night
A rapist who pays off undocumented cleaning women leaves one dead, and the trail leads to the son of a wealthy, protective mother.
- Season 7 · Episode 8
Starved
A speed-dating sting catches a controlling surgeon suspected of serial rape, and the girlfriend who could convict him becomes the subject of a right-to-die fight.
- Season 8 · Episode 3
Recall
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.
- Season 8 · Episode 5
Confrontation
A rapist who keeps returning to his victims is timing the attacks to their ovulation, and the only proof grows inside a victim who will not admit it.
- Season 8 · Episode 12
Outsider
A string of rapes by a man who craves praise draws Fin into an uneasy partnership with a Brooklyn detective who links them to three murders.
- Season 10 · Episode 1
Trials
A foster child’s escape in a stolen van exposes his use in drug trials and leads Benson back to his birth mother’s unsolved rape, part of a pattern targeting single mothers.
- Season 10 · Episode 4
Lunacy
The strangled body of a European astronaut turns up in the river, and Stabler’s childhood hero, a famous astronaut, helps steer the investigation.
- Season 11 · Episode 1
Unstable
A volatile detective helps SVU with a rape victim who trusts only him, and the case suggests Stabler sent the wrong man to prison ten years earlier.
- Season 11 · Episode 23
Wannabe
The rookie officer who catches a serial rapist in Central Park is really a teenager posing as a cop, which puts the whole case at risk.
- Season 12 · Episode 3
Behave
A recluse who says one man has raped her across the country for 15 years helps Benson pursue him, but his crimes are buried in untested evidence.
- Season 12 · Episode 7
Trophy
A rape-murder suspect’s box of keepsakes points to attacks from 1970, leading Benson to a woman who learns, as Benson once did, that she was conceived in a rape.
- Season 12 · Episode 13
Mask
A masked serial rapist who claims to redeem his victims is traced to a sex-addiction clinic run by the estranged father of one of them.
- Season 12 · Episode 23
Delinquent
A teenager caught in a woman’s bed falsely accuses Stabler of molesting him, and the detectives come to suspect he is a serial rapist.
- Season 13 · Episode 4
Double Strands
Rollins links a New York rape to a serial rapist she chased in the South, but the suspect’s DNA cannot tell him apart from someone he never knew existed.
- Season 13 · Episode 17
Justice Denied
When a Fleet Week rape copies a 2004 case, Benson must face the possibility that the confession she obtained sent an innocent man to prison.
- Season 13 · Episode 19
Street Revenge
As SVU hunts a serial rapist in West Soho, costumed vigilantes and a hostile reporter take the case into the streets.
- Season 15 · Episode 1
Surrender Benson
Out on bail after a mistrial, serial rapist William Lewis abducts Benson from her apartment and holds her on Long Island while the squad hunts for them.
- Season 15 · Episode 3
American Tragedy
A celebrity chef shoots an unarmed black teenager she mistakes for a serial rapist, and her manslaughter trial turns on race, fear and self-defense.
- Season 15 · Episode 5
Wonderland Story
A woman who was raped two years earlier is drugged and assaulted again after an underground party, as the squad sends Munch into retirement.
- Season 16 · Episode 9
Pattern Seventeen
A serial rapist who hums hymns and chokes his victims strikes in New York, and Rollins links him to Atlanta cases whose rape kits were never tested.
- Season 16 · Episode 13
Decaying Morality
A girl’s rape accusation against a man already suing the NYPD ends with her father killing him, before the evidence turns toward her uncle, a respected dentist.
- Season 17 · Episode 5
Community Policing
Hunting a pattern rapist, three detectives shoot and kill an unarmed young man, and Barba asks a grand jury to indict them while Benson defends the officers.
- Season 17 · Episode 11
Townhouse Incident
Checking on a family for her nanny, Benson walks into a violent home invasion and is taken hostage while the squad and IAB’s Ed Tucker try to get her out.
- Season 17 · Episode 19
Sheltered Outcasts
Carisi lives undercover in a shelter for sex offenders to find a serial rapist, but the attacks point to more than one man and a killer outside the shelter.
- Season 18 · Episode 13
Genes
A rapist who claims a “rape gene” leads SVU to a therapy group where a serial attacker has confessed, and the law may protect what was said there.
- Season 19 · Episode 1
Gone Fishin'
Fin brings a fugitive serial rapist back from Cuba, and his unorthodox arrest turns the prosecution into an international dispute.
- Season 19 · Episode 2
Mood
Detectives doubt a young woman’s report of a rape by a man in a Prince Charming mask until a second victim describes the same attacker.
- Season 19 · Episode 22
Mama
An Alzheimer’s patient’s rape claim, mixed up with a 50-year-old memory, leads SVU to a temp aide who targets elderly women in care homes.
- Season 20 · Episode 4
Revenge
A string of home-invasion rapes by a fake pizza deliveryman leads the squad into an online community of men who blame women for their loneliness.
- Season 20 · Episode 8
Hell's Kitchen
A waitress who refuses to call her assault rape leads SVU to her celebrity chef boss, his uncharged Brooklyn cases and the prosecutor who passed on them.
- Season 20 · Episode 12
Dear Ben
A copycat revives the case of a 1980s serial rapist who taunted Stone’s father, and the search for the real attacker leads to a genealogy website.
- Season 21 · Episode 19
Solving for the Unknowns
A baker arrested for drunk driving realizes a man she met on a dating app drugged and raped her, and SVU finds a bartender who mixes custom sedatives for several men.
- Season 22 · Episode 7
Hunt, Trap, Rape & Release
A serial rapist case that crosses from the Bronx into Manhattan forces SVU to work with Bronx SVU’s new commander, Carolyn Barek, and her veteran sergeant.
- Season 23 · Episode 4
One More Tale of Two Victims
A man posing as a repairman rapes single mothers in front of their young children, and the brass decide which victim’s case gets prosecuted.
- Season 23 · Episode 18
Eighteen Wheels a Predator
A Central Park rape that seems solved is linked by DNA to a trucker who has assaulted women along the interstates for 20 years.
- Season 23 · Episode 21
Confess Your Sins to Be Free
A rapist strikes women who confessed their affairs to a priest, and Carisi’s childhood friend in the clergy will not say why he was caught at the scene of a trap.
- Season 24 · Episode 4
The Steps We Cannot Take
A gunman shoots a restaurant owner and his wife and abducts their daughter, and the search uncovers two women held captive for years in a house upstate.
- Season 24 · Episode 8
A Better Person
A detective’s child is murdered, and the case turns on what her father did to the crime scene to hide that she was living as a woman.
- Season 24 · Episode 13
Intersection
A man posing as an EMT rigs traffic lights to cause crashes and rapes injured women at the scene, until a third crash turns deadly.
- Season 24 · Episode 21
Bad Things
A string of stranger rapes in which the attacker knows each woman’s name points to men paying for revenge, while Muncy pursues a captor who starves his victim in a cage.
- Season 24 · Episode 22
All Pain Is One Malady
As SVU and Organized Crime close in on the revenge-for-hire site Shadowërk, a serial attacker unconnected to the site preys on strangers across the city.
- 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 25 · Episode 13
Duty to Hope
When the wrong man is charged in a string of gunpoint rapes, the real attacker strikes again and SVU races to free one man and catch another.
- Season 26 · Episode 7
Tenfold
Fin and Bruno hunt the man who choked and raped Wallen Sipes, a sex worker who distrusts police, while Carisi asks Benson to help him check out a substitute teacher.
- Season 27 · Episode 7
False Idols
When an author’s assistant stabs the author’s husband and accuses him of rape, SVU looks at how much his celebrated wife knew and enabled.
More themes: Crimes
- Blackmail & Extortion
- Child Abuse & Neglect
- Child Murders
- Child Sexual Abuse
- Con Artists
- Cults
- Date Rape & Consent
- Domestic Violence
- Gang Rape
- Grooming
- Gun Violence
- Hate Crimes
- Hostage Standoffs
- Human Trafficking
- Incest
- Kidnapping & Abduction
- Male Victims
- Murder for Hire
- Online Predators
- Prison Rape
- Prostitution & Sex Work
- Serial Killers
- Stalking & Voyeurism
- Statutory Rape
- Vigilantes & Revenge
- War Crimes