As Law & Order: SVU viewers know, Olivia Benson does not quit.
That’s also true of actress Mariska Hargitay, who’s played the character since 1999.
Kym Worthy, a prosecutor in Michigan’s Wayne County, had made the upsetting discovery of more than 11,000 untested rape kits sitting on a shelf in a police evidence room, NBC journalist Andrea Canning explained Tuesday on Today.
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“So she made it her mission to get all of them tested,” Canning said while promoting her new Dateline True Crime Weekly podcast.
Of course, the county needed funding for so much testing, and that’s where Hargitay entered the picture.
“She helped them raise the money to get this done, and it’s having a ripple effect across the country. It’s making changes everywhere — for police departments, for prosecutors’ offices,” Canning said. “So hats off to Kym Worthy…. She deserves the biggest pat on the back for this. Thousands of cases were solved. They found 22 serial rapists among these kits.”
Hargitay’s real-life experience with law and order doesn’t stop there. The actress spoke in May about a situation she faced because of her role as Benson. In April, she had been filming a scene for an upcoming episode and was wearing her Benson wardrobe when a lost young girl approached her.
Whether it was because the little girl thought she was an actual cop or not, Hargitay and the child were “meant to connect in that moment,” the actress told ET at Variety‘s Power of Women event.
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Fans of Hargitay, Benson, and her former partner, Elliot Stabler — played by Christopher Meloni — will be glad to know that Meloni is writing an episode of his show, Law & Order: Organized Crime, for its upcoming fifth season that features Benson. Hargitay, who has appeared on more than a dozen episodes of Meloni’s Law & Order franchise series, “will be with OC for a moment there,” he recently revealed.