Until 2010, I had never watched a full episode of Law & Order. I saw a scene every few years when actor friends made their television debuts with roles as crime victims or cops. These provided me with sufficient context for understanding the series in its entirety: The reliable tedium of courtrooms imbued with women shrieking in fear provided the type of cheap, synthetic entertainment that made well-to-do suburbanites chafe when they saw an unfamiliar car driving through their neighborhoods. When I moved to New York City at 18 to write and study theater, family and acquaintances would ask me: Is it scary? and I would laugh and wonder what they had seen on TV that week.
Three years later, on one of those sunny autumn afternoons that comprise New York movie montages, I was walking up the stairs of my Harlem apartment building when a man grabbed me in front of my door and told me that if I screamed, he would shoot me. To borrow the benefits of the camera cutting away from the 11 felonies that came next: In went “Girl” and out came “Special Victim.”
Afterward, there were police, an ambulance, the fluorescent light of a hospital room—all the things you are supposed to do when something like this happens. But it was 2010, years before the #MeToo movement brought forth a wider social consciousness about sexual violence and availability of resources. At the time, I was still operating by the set of instructions I had grown up with: to not leave my drinks unattended at parties, to walk with my keys between my fingers at night, and to check the back seat of a parked car before climbing in the driver’s seat. These lessons in womanhood did not cover what followed when those actions failed to circumvent violence. Courtroom advocacy and trauma-informed mental health care were blips on a cultural radar; the internet of the time was a dimly lit road paved to inconsistently traversed message boards. The only insight I gained after hours of scrolling was that my circumstances were so uncommon that there was no playbook for what came next, let alone any explanation for why a stranger wanted to hurt me, what accounted for this particular villain origin story. Every effort I made to find a guidepost was like putting a message in a bottle and hurling it to the sea, staring into a gray horizon and waiting for it to be returned with an answer.
What the waves tossed back was Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I was hoping to see something I recognized, a frame in which I could contextualize my life. I did not expect that something to be someone—and for that someone to be me.
I started binge-watching the show while holed up in my then-boyfriend’s bedroom, too paranoid to leave his apartment while he was at work. I could not return to my apartment because news crews still regularly drove past it, and I had taken time off of work and school to deal with the demands of being a witness in a criminal investigation. This is what I was, in legal parlance: not a victim, but a witness to myself. Reading the news, meanwhile, turned me into a spectator of my own life. Between episodes of SVU, I consumed a steady stream of articles about the “brazen” daytime assault of the City College student, followed by updates about the suspect’s prior sex-crime history when he was arrested. Then there was the final, scandalous plot twist: He had already been awaiting sentencing for a drug-related offense, which had been delayed by a judge in response to the claim that he needed to visit a hospitalized family member. Had the judge not postponed his sentencing, his incarceration would have started the day before he assaulted me.
These were the realities I had to contend with; the person I was now. My attention could no longer be held by whatever I had enjoyed before this version of myself materialized. SVU was the only distraction I could latch onto, waiting for its crudely fashioned copaganda to give me a sign that this limbo had an endpoint.
Within two episodes of watching, I had clocked the show’s less-than-accurate representations of criminal court proceedings: the length of time it takes for a case to work its way through bureaucracy (months and years, rather than SVU’s days and weeks); the attentive, caring engagement of police officers (mostly hands-off after the arrest, to say nothing of cop-related current events); and the resources available to survivors (an understaffed and belligerent Office of Victim Services that could never clarify if they had paid my hospital bills until CNN reported on my case years later). But the blips of similarities among the inexactitudes gave me a sense of control I could not find among detectives or the district attorney’s office, where the specifics of the case’s progress were withheld from me so they would not influence my future testimony. So I continued watching. And watching. And watching.
I had never thought about the insistent disclaimer at the beginning of every episode—the following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event—although I was vaguely aware of its ripped-from-the-headlines drafting strategy. I started to recognize recent events and scandals involving real celebrities and politicians in the show’s storylines as I caught up to newer episodes. These, I thought, were the point of the disclaimer: public figures with their public-figure lawyers and public-figure wallets. Then, in 2011, almost a year to the day after I was assaulted, I started watching the latest season.
I put SVU on as background noise while I cleaned my room in my new Washington Heights apartment. Now 22, I was in my senior year of undergrad, my schedule once again dense with the multiple part-time jobs I needed to pay rent and the courses I had to retake from the semester I was forced to abandon. The days were long and exhausting, but felt like something approximating normalcy, despite my anxiety about the still-pending trial.
I was folding clothes when I heard sounds reminiscent of my old Harlem neighborhood come from my laptop speakers: bachata, the exchange of voices in a bodega, the chime of a door opening. I paused, the sensation of dread returning like a horse’s bit that had been shoved between my teeth and was being used to yank my head up. These were common New York City sounds, but surviving violence generates an uncanny set of instincts. A college-aged, baby-faced woman materialized on the screen, smiling her way through a transaction, her arms full of groceries she could barely carry.
I watched the girl—a pianist studying at the nearby college, we learn—walk through my old neighborhood on a sunny afternoon and enter a run-down, noisy apartment that looked like the one I used to live in, wrestling the groceries through a door that looked like mine. I listened to an actor pointing a gun say the same words that I had heard a year earlier: don’t scream.
For the past year, I had watched myself from the outside, a kaleidoscope of images and descriptions pulling me further from myself. Now I had manifested as a scripted character, except they had made me a blond.
I watched the character (whose name, Sarah Walsh, echoed mine) calmly counter the intruder’s commands, like I had, and tell him that someone else might be home any minute to encourage him to leave, like I had. I listened to her say that she did not have cash, but could go to an ATM, like I had—knowing it made no sense, but desperate to stall whatever was to come in an unwinnable game of psychological chess.
She offers the intruder a drink, later explaining that she knew it would be a pathway to obtaining DNA evidence; when the man who assaulted me took my debit card and demanded the PIN, I wrote down the real number rather than a random one because, in my heightened state of awareness, it had occurred to me that the card use could be traced. And, in a matter of hours, it was—to a bodega where he was caught on security cameras withdrawing money from my checking account, leading to his arrest. (At the time, I was not thinking about an arrest; I was thinking that my parents would need to figure out who killed me. Sarah Walsh at least seems to be aware that she will not be killed off so early in her narrative arc.)
There is security footage in the episode, too, but it comes from Sarah’s apartment building elevator. The detectives acknowledge that the perpetrator looks like he knows where he is going, a suspicion also raised by the detectives assigned to my case—that I had been followed over a period of time, my predictable school schedule memorized—but never confirmed. Sarah’s assailant says he does not want her money. He calmly tells her to take off her clothes and climbs on top of her. The camera then cuts to Sarah being interviewed by Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson.
Partially because this is network television and partially because sexual violence is something that humans only choose to conceptualize in the vaguest of terms, we do not see or hear what else happens in that room: the various forms sexual violence can take, the escalation to physical violence and strangulation, the degradation of bargaining for survival, the desperate attempts at escaping out the fire-escape window, the Schrödinger’s-cat-like nature of existence under the immediate threat of death. There is nothing quick about being held hostage, sexually assaulted, and almost murdered in your own bedroom, no distillation into a four-minute scene. It is a long, drawn-out negotiation with the void, the absence of god and time.
As the episode progressed, I watched Sarah walk through a messy crime scene and wonder aloud why her apartment had been trashed by CSI, like I had; put on a performative face to fulfill her commitments, like I had; kiss her older boyfriend who was a musician and piano instructor, just like mine was; and reassure her concerned out-of-town parents who knew the big city would commit some sort of evil eventually, also like mine had. I still tried to convince myself that this was coincidental. But then Sarah went to have a drink at her regular bar—a scene filmed in the actual bar I frequented with my classmates after rehearsals that ran late into the night. Then everyone else’s SVU became my Black Mirror.
I almost stopped watching at that point, but my case was moving through the court system with the urgency of tar pitch and would be open for another two years. Wasn’t this why I started watching the show in the first place—to find out what was going to happen to me? So I kept going.
The second half of the plot diverged from my own experience, but the characterization of Sarah Walsh rang loud and close: the arts student prioritizing education and creative work, determined to make it in the big city, against the guidance of her family, joking about becoming a better artist after being traumatized, a joke that I—and every writer I know—made many times over. Her boyfriend suggests that her “rough” Long Island hometown contributed to her intense work ethic and self-motivation, recalling questions I was asked by detectives about my upbringing in New Orleans. I could see myself in her righteous independence, her naivety turning to bitterness, and her heightened success just after her assault. I was in a tied race for valedictorian a year after I was attacked.
The actress playing Sarah Walsh’s mother also happened to be the (now late) wife of a colleague I had in my actual theater job. The previous summer, I had interviewed for a seasonal nannying gig for the SVU actress who played Elliot Stabler’s wife. There are jokes about living in a simulation and then there is actually starting to believe it—that everything you know is fiction.
I cringed through the rest of the episode’s sensationalized racial politics: A civil rights defense attorney takes on the case as a strategic move for his own career, focusing on invalidating the white victim’s identification of the Black defendant. Toward the end of the episode, we find out that Sarah failed to disclose a sexual encounter that impacts the DNA evidence being used against the suspect; her credibility is destroyed, reasonable doubt is established, and a guilty rapist walks free. The end.
As the credits rolled, I tried to anchor myself back to my body, seeing every warped carnival mirror iteration of what had happened at once: the parallel characterization of brunette writer turned blond musician, the manipulation of the real facts into one about false accusations against Black men, the irony of being a broke college student pursuing a writing career while a major television network made untold amounts off of a story that only I knew. (NBC did not respond to Slate’s request for comment about whether the SVU episode in question had been inspired by my case.) I also knew dozens of regular viewers of the show, some of whom would recognize me in the premise of the episode. Now I had to consider what else they might believe from watching the fictionalized ending, and whether they might think I had lied in any part of my statements to detectives. I didn’t know which source of the narrative was worse, the sensationalized news headlines or the fictionalized television episode; neither was really mine.
In Law & Order, the victims’ arcs are typically contained within a single episode, but I discovered recently that Sarah Walsh is a lucky exception, featured in a second episode two seasons later. In what must have been a particularly sadistic day in the SVU writers’ room, she is raped again, this time by a different man at a Brooklyn warehouse party, not unlike many I have attended. This time she earns a ripped ear piercing (which happens to match my own ripped ear piercing from childhood) and a condescending explanation of “revictimization” from Olivia Benson. Even watching this conjures an irrational wonder of whether her fictional narrative is coming for me in real life. When I discuss this with my friends I keep asking: Do I sound fucking crazy? Am I fucking crazy? Fear, in the victims of SVU, lives on the surface, a stereotypical combination of hypervigilance and reactivity. But fear is not just responsive, it also creates new realities: When everything is fictional, nothing is fictional.
We are asking ourselves to believe many things when we fictionalize, stereotype, and reduce to digestible fragments the real experiences of real people: that bad things will not happen to us if we take care to avoid certain behaviors, that good and evil are binary, that heroes and truth prevail, that violence can fit into a moral framework and be cured with the repair of societal ill. Adults need these fantasies like children need fantasies of castles and knights; without imagining a just world, the real one has no foundation, only blueprints and scaffolding. I have seen this need be so intense that I have constructed my own careful architecture around the reality of this part of my life, even 14 years later, not because I harbor shame about it, but because I have to constantly calculate if someone is ready to handle hearing about it. So when people tell me they have been binge-watching SVU, I nod and say I am catching up on Succession. What else can you do?
SVU did satisfy any questions I had about villain origin stories. Being violated and brought close to death is one sort of psychological abyss, but to live with the belief that actors and producers have exploited your rape for money, and that more than 5 million viewers, including some of your own friends, watch it for entertainment while they eat takeout on Thursday night—that will bring you dangerously close to becoming the Joker. Sarah Walsh or the Joker, the victim or villain: either way, a character.
This mundane reality of my own case’s outcome would have been too anticlimactic for prime time. The trial was postponed every few months for the next two and a half years. I tried to live a normal life, but was mentally frozen in place and time, tethered to a pending conviction. On the first day of the trial, the man who assaulted me entered a guilty plea to the top felony charge of predatory sexual assault moments before I was set to testify. He is currently serving a sentence of 13 years to life, eligible for parole in 2033.
But these are still only plot points, not the story. The real story, beyond what can be sanded down to a 40-minute time slot or 10-page essay, has subplots and spinoffs—every door opening three more, every wall a false front, every staircase leading to a hole in the ground, spiraling until you begin to realize that a story like this has no bottom. Inside the television-show character is a news story, and inside the news story is a victim who reported a crime; inside the victim who reported the crime is a normal 21-year-old walking home from college; and inside the 21-year-old, a 7-year-old girl who once dreamed of moving to New York.
Since she is my fictional counterpart, I try to imagine Sarah Walsh’s life in step with mine. I wonder where she ends up by the time she is in her mid-30s, as I am now. I hope she gets a happy ending. I hope that she is the one who writes it.
