Tonight on NBC Law & Order SVU returns with an all-new Thursday, April 27, 2023 episode and we have your Law & Order SVU recap below. In tonight’s Law & Order SVU season 24 episode 19 “Bend The Law,” as per the NBC synopsis, “Carisi must tread carefully when Maxwell’s husband becomes a person of interest in an SVU investigation. Benson sends Velasco to take an old friend into custody.”
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In tonight’s Law & Order SVU episode, Detective Velasco was still tracking down his old friend. He confessed to witnessing a murder. He claimed his friend was the killer and so his captain told him he either had to bring in the friend or he has to walk away from NYPD. Being a cop doesn’t justify what he did. He hasn’t reported his friend before now.
He has to make it right, but tracking down someone he hasn’t talked to in almost twenty years was hard. He hasn’t seen or talked to the guy. He doesn’t hang out with his old friends. He has no idea what happened to this killer. And Captain Benson still made sure he took the time off to track down this guy.
Velasco’s lead said Chili was in Maine. Benson asked him to take Churlish with him and, while they were out of the picture, the rest of Manhattan SVU caught a case. They were called in after a trio of teenage girls were found half naked with wealthy men at their social club. One of the men’s wives had found condoms in his briefcase.
She then went to his club with a gun. She shot off his junk only she also rescued these girls. The girls were fifteen. They were kids from New Jersey. There was a chance that they had been trafficked across state lines and so Captain Benson had her people investigating what happened.
Benson also had a hard time because one of the men at the club was Roger Briggs. Roger was the husband of Trial Division Chief Lorraine Maxwell. She was ADA Carisi’s boss.
She was a big deal within the justice system. Now, her husband could potentially sink her career. Roger called his wife right away. He was arrested along with every man at the Whitmere Club. He was brought to the station. He was questioned. His wife later joined him and she advised him not to say anything without a lawyer present.
Lorraine was trying to protect him. Only Roger was in deep trouble. There was someone who claimed Roger was an active participant in trafficking those girls. The girls were approached at the mall for a hostess job in New York City. They naturally jumped at the chance to make money.
Then they were asked to do stuff. They were asked to perform oral sex along with inappropriate touching. It never graduated to sex yet it could have been a matter of time at that point. The girls were willing to do everything as long as they got designer handbags or thousands of dollars for it.
They didn’t even realize they had become child prostitutes. They just thought they were being adults. Not that any of those men saw them as adults. The man who approached them for that “hostess” job must have known they were children. They sure look like teenagers. Only Francis Fuller was claiming he thought they were older. He said he only hired them as hostesses. He also said that it was Roger who was taking pictures of the girls and trading them around like baseball cards. Which was child pornography.
SVU talked to each child alone. They all said they had no interaction with Roger. They saw him hanging around at the club. He was usually drinking with his friends. Roger never approached them. He never had sexual contact with him. It was just Francis who was claiming Roger was involved and Roger was denying everything. He said that Francis was just trying to paint him as the bad guy because they were in business together. Roger told the cops that Francis wanted to blackmail him out of the business using this situation.
Except that was a lie. Lorraine knew for a fact that Francis and Roger were no longer in business together. She heard from Francis’s wife that Francis left the business because Roger was losing money. Roger is always losing money. He didn’t come from wealth or have a job. He likes to spend his wife’s money on bad investments and not everyone fell for his act. Lorraine knew he was bad with money. She may have suspected that Roger was with her because she pays him an allowance, but she still loves him.
Lorraine informed the cops about Roger’s lie. She told them to get a warrant. They did and they found pictures of the naked girls in Roger’s locker at the club. The photos had all been taken without their consent. It’s likely that Francis was telling the truth when he said Roger used the photos to blackmail the girls into doing sexual stuff. It would also explain why none of the girls were willing to come forward about him. Roger was facing real trouble now with the law. He was being charged with child pornography because that was the only thing they could prove.
Lorraine was advising him to take a deal. Everyone around Roger had realized the jig was up. It was just him that couldn’t see it. Roger kept believing that his wife could get him out of the situation and she wasn’t going to. Roger surprised Lorraine with dinner one night because he said they didn’t get to enjoy their anniversary. He did get arrested that night. Only Roger told Lorraine he wanted to make it up to her and the whole time he was trying to convince her to save him. And so she ignored him to the point he got mad.
Roger finally told her what he really thinks of her. He was calling her castrating as well as other things when he started choking on his meal. She saw him choking and she did nothing to save him. Lorraine watched him struggle for a couple of minutes before she called 911. By the time the ambulance came, Roger was dead. It was considered divine intervention by everyone around him. They were all glad he was dead. They were glad he wasn’t going to drag down Lorraine or ruin her career with his little stunts.
And Velasco found his friend. Chili now goes by Anthony Santini. He was married with a kid. He teaches high school Spanish. But Velasco still recorded him confessing to murder. Several murders in fact and now its up to Benson to determine what she’ll do with the recording.
THE END!
