Sweetie (Season 19, Episode 6)
Premise: The best-selling author of a memoir about a childhood in prostitution is stabbed near the piers, and the detectives learn the man was an actor hired to play a writer who may never have existed.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 19, Episode 6
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Vivica A. Fox as Kate Tenny, Billy Magnussen as Cody Larson, Heather Matarazzo as Janice Dunlap, Christopher Evan Welch as defense attorney David Haig, Jeremy Gender as Sweetie Ness/Dale Marks
- Ripped from the headlines
- The episode is reportedly based on the JT LeRoy literary hoax, in which writer Laura Albert published books presented as the true story of an abused teenage boy, while her sister-in-law Savannah Knoop posed as LeRoy in public.
- Director
- Mario Van Peebles
- Writers
- Ed Zuckerman & Luke Schelhaas
Summary
The Investigation
“Sweetie” opens with the stabbing death of Sweetie Ness, author of the hit memoir Little Whore, after a night of readings and nightclubs. His agent, Kate Tenny, says the book tells how his mother sold him to men as a child. A clubgoer recalls a young woman pressing him about poems at a dive bar near the piers, and the agent’s fan-mail file leads to Janice Dunlap, visiting from Iowa, who saw a dyed-blond man argue with him outside.
Photos from outside the club show the blond man in a jacket he won at pool, and a gay-bar patron says the man called himself Sweetie Ness and had cigarette burns like those in the book. With the patron’s consent, the detectives search the man’s hotel room and find an annotated copy of the memoir and a bloody shirt. The victim has no burns and no physical sign of a history of prostitution, and the room’s prints belong to Cody Larson, 24, a truck-stop hustler.
The dead man turns out to be Dale Marks, an actor from Louisville. Tenny admits she hired him to play Sweetie and drew the book from Larson’s story, gathered years earlier while interviewing child prostitutes as a journalist. Larson had demanded money from her, and her second wire transfer leads the detectives to a Bronx truck stop, where a sting nets him.
The Trial
Larson, who now wants to be called Sweetie, is charged with second-degree murder. His lawyer, David Haig, who is also suing for royalties, produces an affidavit from the patron saying he paid Larson for sex, and the judge rejects Cutter’s reliance on Minnesota v. Olson and suppresses the shirt. Janice wavers after visiting Larson at Rikers. Learning the memoir is a composite, the prosecutors fly in three other men whose stories it used, and Haig subpoenas them as alternative suspects.
At trial Tenny switches sides, swearing that Larson wrote the book and that Marks was hired to shield his privacy, which erases the motive. Janice, flattered by an autographed copy, confesses to the killing. Cutter calls her himself and shows that Larson’s supposed secrets came from a published Marks interview and that a former boyfriend had a restraining order against her; she breaks down and says she last saw Marks with Larson.
Spoiler, the ending: During deliberations, Rubirosa notices that Marks had a dead phone. The jury convicts Larson, and records for Janice’s lost phone show a call to Tenny half an hour after Larson’s fight with him. Tenny’s prints reveal prostitution arrests at 16 and 18 and sealed arrests at 12 and 13, suggesting she is the real Sweetie Ness. Searches turn up no evidence against her, and the prosecutors move to vacate Larson’s conviction.
Why it stands out
- The bloody shirt is suppressed because the man who let police into the hotel room is found to be a paying customer rather than an overnight guest entitled to consent under Minnesota v. Olson.
- The prosecutors win a murder conviction and then move to vacate it once the evidence points toward the agent who invented Sweetie Ness.
- Cutter’s plan to show a witness that the memoir is a composite backfires when the men he brings to New York become defense witnesses and alternative suspects.