Law & Order: SVU Aired That Ray and Janay Rice Episode

On Wednesday night, Law & Order: SVU ran their inevitable “ripped from the headlines” episode about Ray and Janay Rice’s elevator incident, reproducing the initial conversations that many pundits, like ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, had when footage of the incident first surfaced. Did she provoke him? Was he was protecting himself? The usual victim-blaming stuff.

Then, within the show’s narrative, everything changed when LMZ (the NBC version of TMZ) released the full clip of the faux Rice hitting his wife. In the Law & Order story, all presumptions were cleared up immediately. If only real life were that cut and dry.