Photo: Michael Parmelee / NBC
Another Victim Of The Casting Couch/Screening Room/Pool
What starts as a routine car accident balloons into an investigation of a Hollywood sex ring, yet somehow a starlet's momager almost manages to be grosser than all the perps.
Still a lowly uniform, Nick and his partner pull up to a couple of young women screaming at each other in the street after the long-haired one apparently struck the shorter-haired one's car.
The longer-haired one is self-described celebrity train wreck Tensley Evans, who pulls a "don't you know who I am?" on Nick and then tries to flee the scene. She ends up at a dead end, whereupon Nick tries to apprehend her, and she decides to try to get out of it by coming on to him. But at her arraignment the next day, her momager yelps that there are mitigating circumstances -- to wit, that NICK came on to HER.
This could probably keep going to REAL REAL REAL Real Crime, but I'm just going to collapse all of it here. Rollins and Carisi go to check out Tensley's most recent rehab, where the director informs them that there was an incident -- which got hushed up -- in which Tensley fooled around with her roommate's underaged son. When SVU starts pursuing statutory rape charges, the court-appointed psychiatrist who examines Tensley suggests to Liv that when someone doesn't see an issue with an adult having sex with a child, it usually points to abuse in said adult's past. And sure enough, Tensley reveals that when she was "thirteen or fourteen," she was introduced to powerful producer Adam Brubeck, who had sex with her himself and also gave access to her to a bunch of his friends. ALSO, at one of these infamous "casting" parties, another young aspiring actress drowned in the process of giving head underwater alongside Tensley. And there's more, but I'll get to it.
When you hear "messed-up former child star," obviously you think of Lindsay Lohan, and Stevie Lynn Jones, who plays Tensley, bears a physical resemblance to her. But there are also elements of Amanda Bynes (car accident), Britney Spears (legal conservatorship of an adult), and Michael Egan, who earlier this year accused Bryan Singer and a group of gay entertainment business types of having abused him in his youth.
The details of the casting parties hew pretty closely to the Michael Egan story I read in New York magazine, so let's say it's primarily that they (a) changed the accuser's sex and (b) gave the Hollywood type a much tackier CV.
I thought for sure they were going to circle back to the rehab director since he's played by ten-time franchise player Dennis Boutsikaris, but it turns out that Brubeck -- Broadway and Smash's own Brian D'Arcy James -- did it.
"I looooooove threesomes." "Next time, he brought in two more guys -- first to watch, but then they said, 'Fair is fair,' so I did them too." "He wanted us to take turns on him while he held our heads underwater."
Everyone behaves.
"Amanda, it sounds like you're taking this a little personally." - Liv. Amaro also takes a long time to come around on believing Tensley's story given how she totally tried to have him put away on completely false charges.
He doesn't because he's not in this episode.
Most of these incidents have passed the statute of limitations, but after determining that Brubeck went to Canada to "audition" a very young actress for his proposed project Winnipeg Nights (HAAAAAAAA), Barba makes a case for sex tourism, which is surely the first time this charge has ever stuck to anyone who tried to get their rocks off by travelling to WINNIPEG.
After Liv shows Tucker the dash cam footage of Amaro being a completely upstanding citizen in the face of Tensley's overtures, he gets reinstated to SVU; we leave off on the "cliffhanger" that "Noah's in the ER"! DUN!!!!!