You can tell this episode was made before the Me, Too movement got a full head of steam up because there's no way it would be made now like this. The idea that the veracity of the accuser in a sexual assault can in any way be questioned -- even with the notion of reasonable doubt being so vital to our system of investigation and jurisprudence -- would mandate that an SVU episode today prove the accused is guilty.
But this episode was made 16 years ago, when the world operated in more even-handed terms. Yes, the investigators immediately assume that a teenager who accuses a teacher of rape must be a victim, but to their credit, they pursue the investigation further. (Keep in mind, too, that while the teacher says she was, in fact, the one raped, the investigators still choose to give the teen the benefit of the doubt -- there's always an advantage to firing the first salvo.)
The better SVU episodes always operated in the shades of gray that real life usually presents, not the weird, performative black-and-white of SVU now. That's what makes this episode so compelling. You go through a range of emotions watching events play out versus the simplistic "Go team!" on SVU today. Compare it to any episode of the past 5 or so years of SVU, and you'll see how much more "meat" there is here to the storytelling, too, from the plot to the dialogue to the direction. Even the locations are plentiful.
So, why not a higher score? Because the episode flips the genders for the characters. As we're told perhaps ad nauseum -- not because it isn't true but because it makes the series start to seem more like a lecture rather than a drama -- it's women who endure sexual assault the most, a fact that seems to be how SVU justifies having the villains of the past 19 years being 99.9% male.
This raises the question of why the SVU investigators didn't take her side of the argument more seriously. After all, she claims to have been raped, too, and if the statistics are that women overwhelmingly are the ones who get assaulted, then why the rush to judgment against her? It's an element that hardly gets addressed.
