My memory of “Flight” was jogged thanks to an article in the New York Times about 9 East 71st Street: the $56 million New York mansion where Epstein allegedly abused underage women. Carter disputed her account in a statement, saying that Ward did not have enough on-the-record sources.) editor in chief Graydon Carter removed on-the-record sexual misconduct accusations against Epstein from a story she wrote for the magazine in 2003. (Last week former Vanity Fair contributor Vicky Ward claimed that former V.F. It can’t have helped that a plea bargain, combined with choice media ties on Epstein’s part, apparently choked the news cycle short when he was indicted in 2008. I suspect that’s at least in part because, having grown up just outside of New York-and having been reared on the same sensational stories on Eyewitness News and in the local papers that everyone in the SVU writing room was reading-I’d grown a little immune to tales of Manhattan elites and their regular, and not infrequently sexual, abuses of power. “Flight” is humbler in scope than Brown’s work, obviously, but not in intention.īut unlike those others, the Epstein episode stands out for me because I only realized who it was about years after the fact. That makes-and made-it ripe for messy, trashy, impassioned reenactment by a show like SVU, in which justice is the source of almost all of our narrative desire, the commonly hoped for conclusion of every episode. justice system and the vagaries of power. It’s a story about manipulation: of the young and underprivileged women Epstein sought out and allegedly assaulted over many years, and, of course, of the U.S. presidencies), allegedly operated in plain sight as a sexual predator. Brown’s “Perversion of Justice” investigative series, published last year, details the complex, infuriatingly unjust ways that Epstein, a man of great financial means and significant political ties (including to multiple U.S. In real life the NYPD is said to have been overly lax in monitoring Epstein’s sex offender registration, a detail discovered only recently, yet perceptively, apparent in “Flight” thanks to SVU’s long-running fixation with the ability of the powerful to subvert justice. As conceived by SVU, Jordan Hayes is a friend-a donor-to the NYPD. The police bit is particularly intriguing.
For the latter charge, he served only 13 months in prison courtesy of a plea bargain, despite federal prosecutors identifying up to 36 underage victims. But this episode tackles an earlier case, when he was convicted of soliciting minors for prostitution in 2008.
The episode is unmistakably inspired by the case of Jeffrey Epstein, who was arrested this month on charges of sex trafficking conspiracy and sex trafficking minors in Florida and New York (and pleaded not guilty to all charges). “Flight” opens with a disclaimer: “The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.” A usual sighting in the land of SVU, though particularly eerie while rewatching this episode in 2019. Hayes wanted a massage, the victim said, but she had to remove her clothes to give it. The recipient: a “billionaire pervert”-so described by the ever tactful SVU-named Jordan Hayes ( Colm Feore).
Instead she wound up at a birthday party where, she tells detectives Elliot Stabler ( Christopher Meloni) and Olivia Benson ( Mariska Hargitay), she and other young girls were the unsuspecting birthday presents. She thought she was coming for a modeling job. The perpetrator, she says, flew her to New York on a private jet. We learn that she’s been triggered: two nights prior the girl was sexually assaulted at a party in New York City. An unaccompanied 12-year-old on a plane to Paris freaks out after her seatmate, an older man, reaches over her to close the window shade. “Flight”-season 12, episode 15 of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which aired in 2011-cold opens like any other SVU episode: with a crisis.
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