The 8 Biggest ‘Law & Order: SVU’ Controversies

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the longest-running live-action show in American primetime TV, has had more than a few problems in its record-setting run.

For example, NBC just pulled an SVU episode from the schedule amid criminal charges against actor Timothy Busfield, and that decision comes nearly a decade after another episode of the cop drama was relegated to cold storage, never to be seen again.

Plus, SVU, like predecessor Law & Order, had many rough moments — and rough-’em-up interrogations — in its early years. Below, find a timeline of our picks for the Dick Wolf production’s biggest controversies.

1999: SVU kicks off its first season with offensive language

SVU’s first season is riddled with offensive language, including a homophobic slur in the episode “Nocturne” — and that same word came up again as recently as a Season 18 episode — as well as a pejorative term for intellectual disability in the episode “Third Guy.”

The show has also offended viewers over the years with its language toward transgender individuals and, of course, its depictions of police brutality, as one wrote in a Reddit thread about the most shocking SVU moments.

“The language used to describe transgender folks early on in the show still shocks me,” that fan wrote. “Obviously, things have gotten a lot better in Season 12 onward, but early SVU did some really questionable (and often awful) things. Also, the level of brutality shown, as far as how certain characters treated suspects, is still deeply upsetting to me. I couldn’t believe we were supposed to be rooting for a person who beat up suspects regardless of whether they were innocent or not.”

LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT: Mariska Hargitay, Christopher Meloni

NBC/Courtesy: Everett Collection

2003: Dominican-American protestors picket NBC over “Rotten” episode

As Fin Tutuola (Ice-T) interviews a jailed man about a fellow inmate in the Season 4 episode “Rotten,” the man replies, “He’s Dominican. They’re animals.”

That dialogue had a group of about 30 protestors complaining outside NBC’s Rockefeller Center headquarters in 2003. “[The line is] what really has us upset,” Mercedes Jimenez-Ramirez, a spokeswoman for the Dominican-American Anti-Defamation League, told the New York Post. “It’s a generalized term — it sounded like they were talking about Dominicans as a whole, not as [just one] character in that particular case.”

In response, a network spokesperson said, “NBC does not want to air our discussions in the media, and therefore we have no comment.”

2011: Rosie Perez sues SVU producers over alleged on-set injuries

In 2011, Rosie Perez sued the producers of SVU, alleging that she was “recklessly pulled, grabbed, yanked, wrenched and/or manhandled” as she filmed her guest-starring role in the Season 11 episode “Hardwired,” that her injuries resulted in severe pain and numbness, and that she had been out of work for a year, per the Associated Press. Perez reached a settlement with production companies Northern Entertainment Productions and DDF Films in 2012, according to E! News.

2016: NBC puts a stop to “Unstoppable” episode

NBC was set to air the Season 18 episode “Unstoppable,” in which Gary Cole plays a political candidate accused of sexual assault, in 2016, but the network delayed the airing for two weeks before dropping the episode from the schedule completely. At the time, Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape scandal had just broken, threatening the former Apprentice star’s presidential campaign. NBC didn’t offer a reason for deciding not to air the episode, per CNN.

Ice-T later described the “Unstoppable” plot to Vanity Fair, saying, “There was this guy who was running for president — he was very Trump-ish, and girls were coming out of the woodwork saying he was raping them. And me and Mariska, we’re on his bumper, and he’s sweating it. But at the end of the day, it comes out that he was innocent. He didn’t do it. So we’ve got to apologize, and he’s still doing his thing, talking his s***. And it turns out that his campaign advisor, who was his best friend, was booby-trapping him because he knew he would be terrible for America!”

The rapper-turned-actor added, “I don’t even think it’s worth showing. It wasn’t one of our best shows.”

2019: Court documents allege Diane Neal trashed her former SVU costars

In 2019, former SVU star Diane Neal (Casey Novak) accused ex-boyfriend JB Benn of abuse, and Benn countersued, and one exhibit in Ben’s suit contains comments Neal allegedly made to the manager of her unsuccessful U.S. Congress campaign.

According to those court documents — cited by Page Six in 2019 — the actor said her SVU costars were “awful people,” with Ice-T as an exception, and Mariska Hargitay (Olivia Benson) was a “total b****.”

In a statement to Page Six, Neal denied having made those comments, saying, “Most of the people I’ve worked with are amazing. I love almost everyone I’ve ever worked with. Mariska and I were not the closest, but that doesn’t mean we have any animosity towards each other.”

2020: Police brutality outrage casts SVU in a different light

As the killing of George Floyd reinvigorated protests against police brutality in the United States, critics urged SVU fans to scrutinize their beloved show’s portrayal of cop work.

“For how could I watch a show that glorifies detectives, and law enforcement as a whole, when that same institution seemed so inextricably linked to the (often deadly) violence inflicted daily on Black and brown bodies?” Libby Torres wrote for Business Insider.

And in a Rolling Stone essay, Ej Dickson called Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) “the platonic ideal of an emotionally unbalanced, physically abusive Bad Cop” and said Benson’s supporters have to acknowledge “that she plays a major role in perpetuating the idea that cops are inherently trustworthy and heroic, and that many viewers are unable to distinguish between the gossamer fantasy of how justice should be handled, and how it actually is.”

2022: Showrunner David Graziano is hit with bullying complaints

In 2022, complaints from more than a dozen individuals against David Graziano, then SVU’s showrunner, came to light. The former coworkers, who worked with Graziano on other shows, claimed that he had a volatile temper and left staffers in tears and that he made degrading comments about support staff, women, and People of Color, according to the Los Angeles Times. Two people called working with Graziano “traumatizing,” and some former coworkers accused Graziano of objectifying women with sexualized comments.

In a statement, Graziano acknowledged being a “difficult person” to work with in a prior job but denied making offensive or inappropriate comments. A source told the Times that NBUniversal investigated complaints against Graziano and found him to be operating within professional expectations.