“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. 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. We learn that she’s been triggered: two nights prior the girl was sexually assaulted at a party in New York City.

The perpetrator, she says, flew her to New York on a private jet. She thought she was coming for a modeling job. 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. The recipient: a “billionaire pervert”—so described by the ever tactful SVU—named Jordan Hayes (Colm Feore). Hayes wanted a massage, the victim said, but she had to remove her clothes to give it. The assault proceeded from there.

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“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. 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). But this episode tackles an earlier case, when he was convicted of soliciting minors for prostitution in 2008. 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.

Key details of the episode are consistent with Epstein: the millionaire-plus status; the assaults on younger women who’d been recruited to give massages and, loosely, the details of their experiences; and Hayes’s birthday party guest list, which includes a duchess, the mayor of New York, a former president, and NYC’s police commissioner—all of which imply a level of power and political influence that holds just as true, if not even truer, for Epstein himself.

The police bit is particularly intriguing. As conceived by SVU, Jordan Hayes is a friend—a donor—to the NYPD. 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.

Miami Herald reporter Julie K. 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. presidencies), allegedly operated in plain sight as a sexual predator. 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. justice system and the vagaries of power. 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. “Flight” is humbler in scope than Brown’s work, obviously, but not in intention.

It is also, like so many episodes of SVU, consummately watchable, even in retrospect, and very memorable. There’s a pure, symmetrical drama to it: the hour opens with a girl screaming bloody murder on a plane, and ends with a woman—Hayes’s recruiter, collaborator, and, importantly, another of his victims—screaming in a police station over Hayes’s betrayal. It’s replete with classic SVU pivots: a rape accusation countered by the alleged rapist claiming he was the one raped (by a 12-year-old, in this instance); a just conclusion that gets swallowed up and subverted just a moment later, when the Epstein-esque character cuts a deal and practically gets away scot-free.

Truthfully, though I’ve seen most episodes of SVU more than once and have an almost embarrassing working knowledge of most of the show’s plot points, casting changes, and most notorious episodes (storied takes on everything from Michael Jackson and Joe Paterno to Rihanna and Chris Brown, Trayvon Martin, multiple personality disorder, and meth addiction among gay men), I hadn’t actively thought about “Flight” since seeing a rerun of it some years ago.

But unlike those others, the Epstein episode stands out for me because I only realized who it was about years after the fact. 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. 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. (Last week former Vanity Fair contributor Vicky Ward claimed that former V.F. editor in chief Graydon Carter removed on-the-record sexual misconduct accusations against Epstein from a story she wrote for the magazine in 2003. Carter disputed her account in a statement, saying that Ward did not have enough on-the-record sources.)

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. As my eyes flew past the details in the Times story—the “life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier,” the “small dining room [arranged] to resemble a beach scene”—my mind dredged up pictures of Stabler and Benson on a tour of the Hayes mansion. I was seeing white marble. I was seeing the squeaky-clean room where Hayes coordinated his attacks, and a large closed-circuit television showing a bird’s-eye view of massage table.

SVU is a curious object in that way. Its stories are familiar by design: headline fodder that’s sometimes on enough of a time delay to allow your active memory of a real scandal to erode, leaving gaps and pockets. SVU’s mission is to fill those gaps like hot concrete, with sensationalistic fictions that mirror and sometimes override real life.

You would think I’d find that dangerous—but I get SVU's logic. This being a straightforward procedural, the truth undoubtedly gets twisted, in part, so that the show will be protected from legal liability...and because, well, it simply makes for better television. For all its trashy, flashy, leaden seriousness, SVU can be proof positive that the truth, as an ideal, is best dramatized through fiction.

During my rewatch, I was surprised by how consistently and effectively the Epstein-like episode still nails this balance. On the show, for example, Jordan Hayes walks right into the police station and tells the story of the assault—with him as the victim. This did not actually happen. But it does allow the show to explore another, considerable point: as someone alleging a rape, the Hayes character manages to protect himself from being named in the press. It’s a slick bit of media manipulation—the kind to which Epstein, like the other mega-powerful men toppled by the #MeToo moment, is no stranger. Hayes is surrounded by his lawyers in this moment, which signals another long-running fixation of the show, to say nothing of what's routinely proven true by everyday life: justice is just another word for something that can be bought.

“If he was a blue-collar kiddie-diddler—,” says Detective Tutuola (Ice-T), before his boss, Captain Cragen (Dann Florek), cuts him off: “Well, he isn’t.” This is openly an episode about class, as cases of this scope, with victims this age, frequently are. When it’s revealed that Hayes records everything that happens in his massage room, he says it’s because of concerns about money: “People see me as a winning lottery ticket,” he says. “You can understand why I’d need to record my massages.” Again, real life and television overlap eerily, instructively. Just last Thursday, Epstein’s lawyers argued that their client should be able to wait out his pretrial proceedings at home, in his mansion. Not allowing him to do so, they argued, would violate his “equal protection” under the law: it’d be picking on him for being rich.

SVU couldn’t have invented a better twist, though the one that ends “Flight” might rival it. All the usual avenues—the police commissioner, the mayor, a sympathetic judge—have been unavailable to Stabler and Benson during their investigation, because those avenues are all in the pocket of Hayes. Justice is hard won for just a moment—but just as quickly as they catch Hayes, the feds intervene to take him to a swanky white-collar prison, rather than a maximum security facility. It happens in a matter of seconds, with Hayes kicking up dust in the faces of angry detectives, a weeping co-conspirator, and a confused, unsatisfied TV audience.

It’s telling that it takes a man of Hayes’s power to get a show like this, predicated on satisfaction, to deny us the pleasure of a righteous ending—telling that extreme wealth is what it takes to throw the stories we tell ourselves about justice completely out of whack. It’s a sudden, disruptive, enraging conclusion. And it’s as close as the show will ever get to real life.

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