Tonight on NBC Law & Order SVU returns with an all-new Thursday, October 10, 2024 episode and we have your Law & Order SVU recap below.
In tonight’s Law & Order SVU season 26 episode 2 “Excavation,” as per the NBC synopsis, “Devastating repressed memories come back to a woman when she finds an old notebook in her family home. Bringing charges in a decades-old crime proves even more difficult for Carisi when a powerful judge stalls the case.”
Tonight’s Law & Order SVU season 26 episode 2 looks like it is going to be great and you won’t want to miss it.
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In tonight’s Law & Order SVU episode, Captain Benson has had to battle it out with the powerful since the start of her career. She put criminals behind bars. She gets justice for the victims. She always with leads with her heart and her heart was telling her that Maggie wasn’t lying.
Maggie was a young woman that showed up at the precinct one day. Her family was cleaning out the house because her parents were moving. Her mom and stepdad wanted something smaller now that their kids were all grown up. The kids came by the house to assist when Maggie found something. She found her stepdad’s journal.
In the journal, her stepfather admitted to raping her when she was eight. Maggie doesn’t remember it. She’s an alcoholic. She’s been in and out of rehab for years.
She just drank earlier that day. She broke her four month sobriety. Her sister had to drag her out of the bar to help their parents. Maggie was cleaning out the basement when her sister kept finding things. She found Maggie’s favorite stuffed animal. She found Maggie’s favorite nightgown. Maggie doesn’t remember any of those things. They are significant gaps in her past. Trauma would explain a lot of it.
It’s just that it’s going to be hard making a case if Maggie can’t remember the crime. Benson brought that up. Maggie told her she doesn’t want to take this to court.
She doesn’t know what she wants to do. She thought her stepdad cared about her. Their relationship has been admittedly strained lately because of her addiction. Her stepdad always told her she wasn’t living up to her full potential. She couldn’t hold down a job. She couldn’t manage a relationship. The one thing Maggie in her corner was that she’s never made false allegations before.
Maggie truly buried her trauma until she found that diary. The diary was written in her stepfather’s handwriting. It goes into details about assaulting her. It mentions her age at the time.
The color of her favorite nightgown. He even added a date. It all lines up. Maggie was eight back in 2001. He told about his victim being his stepdaughter. He more or less confessed in that diary and now the cops were trying to authenticate it. They believed Maggie. The problem with moving forward was that her stepfather Judge Leonard Andrews.
He was a former federal judge. He’s retired now. Only he was a smart man. He was a Rhodes scholar. He still has powerful friends and the diary could always be dismissed as fiction. Benson was working with her team to find evidence when she got a called to the Andrews home. Maggie’s sister called her. Peyton said that Maggie was drunk. She was tearing up her room. She was worried that Maggie could hurt herself and so Benson went to their home. She calmed down Maggie. She had Maggie go to the hospital.
It turns out Maggie was starting to remember. She got drunk because she remembered one incident. She remembered that Andrews came into her room at night and she woke up to see him standing over her.
He told her she wet the bed. He had already removed her nightgown. She later found her nightgown in the hamper. It wasn’t wet. Neither was the bed. Maggie never wet herself. She was assaulted. Andrews came up with that story to explain why he was in her room late at night. It worked because it had Maggie doubting herself as a kid.
What makes matters worse was that Maggie’s mother was a pediatrician. She used to bathe Maggie. Maggie also seemed to remember her mom sending her husband away whenever Maggie was naked.
Did the mother know something? She and her husband showed up at the hospital because Peyton told them that Maggie lost it. The cops tried to question Andrews. His wife backed him up. She said that as a pediatrician she would know if someone harmed her daughter. She wasn’t her daughter’s doctor. She just said she would know if something happened.
Well, the judge nor his wife stuck around long enough to answer questions. They got Peyton. They left the hospital and hired a string of attorneys. The cops still have the journal that was pretty self-explanatory.
The judge did what they expected would do. He came up with a story. He claimed it was fiction. He said he had ideas about writing his own book. He wanted it to be like “Lolita”. He also said he gave up on his dream of being a writer because he was a better judge. He denied molesting Maggie. They searched his home and they found Maggie’s old nightgown. And there was still sperm on it.
The judge didn’t bother to wash the nightgown because he kept it as a memento. He also didn’t seem to hurt the other two children because they were his. Peyton was Maggie’s half-sister. There was a half-brother named Charles as well. The cops tried to talk to Charles. They wanted to know if Charles remembered any abuse. Charles refused to answer their questions. He claimed Maggie was lying because she was an addict and that their dad was strict on them because he loved them. He went as far as to call Maggie a liar when she said the abuse wasn’t only physical.
It was also verbal. Maggie remembered that. Charles only called it strict. He refused to speak up for Maggie and the family convinced Peyton to fall in line. The whole family turned against Maggie. It was extremely awful in court. They all said that Maggie was lying. Her own mother sided with Andrews.
Lillian claimed that her husband told her he was writing a book. She also said that Maggie has always had mental problems. Charles heard his mother lie on the stand and that’s what got through to him.
Charles was four when Maggie was eight. He remembered his dad coming out of Maggie’s room several times at night. He knew even then that something was wrong and he went to his mother. She’d tell him that he was imagining it. She deliberately covered for her husband raping her daughter. She knew.
She still chose her husband. The cops then looked into Lillian. She did treat her daughter. She found evidence of abuse that she covered up. She was later questioned and that’s when it all came out.
Lillian found out about the abuse. She had her husband write it down. He said everything that happened. She used that as leverage. She told him that if he ever touched Maggie again that she would go to the police with the confession. She thought that was enough. She didn’t want to raise three children by herself.
She also thought Maggie was calling out for attention and that the diary would stop her husband from “cheating” on her again. To this day, she still saw Maggie as the other woman and not as a child or a victim.
Lillian couldn’t get arrested for what she did. Only they took away her license to practice medicine. She lost her three children. They’re never going to talk to her again. Not that she cared about them. Her husband changed his plea to guilty and he will be serving seven years in jail. He was the only one Lillian genuinely cared about.
THE END!