Alice Simonelli

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“	I just wanted to go home to my daughter. Charlie knew that. He was using that. He was never gonna stop! I was just scared all the time! Can't you understand that? He had all the power! I was nothing!	„
	~ Simonelli explaining why she had her rapist killed.

Alice Simonelli is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Punk". She is an incarcerated young woman who arranged for the guard who raped her to be murdered.

She was portrayed by Cara Buono.

Early life[]

Simonelli was arrested several times for drug offenses in her teens and early 20s, each time getting sentenced to probation or short jail sentences. She attempted to stop using after she gave birth to her daughter, Jennifer, but she eventually fell back in with her old life of drugs and petty crime.

Shortly before the events of the episode, Simonelli was once again arrested for drug possession, this time alongside one of her friends and fellow addicts. Assistant District Attorney Abbie Carmichael, then new to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, offered her a plea bargain in which she would serve no prison time in return for testifying against her friend, but Simonelli refused. Carmichael prosecuted the case, and Simonelli was found guilty and sentenced to five years in a women's prison. She joined a prison gang called the Paganos, with whom she was caught and disciplined for smoking marijuana and getting into a fight with another gang.

While she was incarcerated, she was repeatedly raped by head guard Charlie Tyner, who threatened to extend her sentence and have her daughter put in foster care unless she gave him what he wanted. The abuse went on for months until, finally, Tyner impregnated her. To force her silence, Tyner had another guard intimidate four-year-old Jenny by showing her one of the condoms he wore while he raped her mother.

Desperate, Simonelli turned to her cellmate, Candy Pacheco, and asked her to arrange for her brother, Luis, to kill Tyner. Luis agrees to the murder, and he tracks Tyner down to a bar and attacks him, ultimately forcing him down on his knees - humiliating him the way he had Simonelli - and shooting him in the head, killing him.

"Punk"[]

While investigating Tyner's murder, Carmichael and NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis interrogate Simonelli as a suspect after learning of her history of committing infractions for which Tyner "disciplined" her. Simonelli, however, refuses to say anything to Carmichael, whom she blames for the abuse she suffered because she put her prison in the first place.

They interrogate Candy, who, under Carmichael's threat to have her sentence extended and her inmate privileges taken away, admits that her brother committed the murder. Briscoe and Curtis arrest Simonelli and Luis, and Carmichael and Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy charge them both with murder.

During her trial, Simonelli demands that Carmichael be taken off the case, claiming that she is biased against her. Judge Joyce Randall denies the request, but Simonelli's lawyer, McCoy's friend and rival Danielle Melnick, manages to convince Randall to exclude the murder weapon as evidence, imperiling the case against Pacheco. When Simonelli miscarries what is proven to be Tyner's baby, she reveals what Tyner did to her, which Briscoe and Curtis confirm after interrogating the guard who had intimidated Jenny.

McCoy wants to make a deal with Simonelli for less prison time in return for her testimony against Pacheco, but Carmichael refuses, insisting that Simonelli is a violent, manipulative criminal and that she must have been the mastermind of Tyner's murder.

Simonelli testifies that she ordered Tyner's murder to protect her daughter and details Tyner's abuse. While cross-examining her, Carmichael asks her why she accepted gifts and extra privileges from Tyner if he was raping her; Simonelli replies that she feared his wrath if she refused the gifts. Finally, Carmichael asks why she had not told any of her fellow Paganos about the abuse. In response, Simonelli asks a stunned Carmichael if she has ever been raped, and tearfully admits that she blames herself for having been assaulted.

Carmichael - who was indeed a rape victim, having been assaulted in college by a law student she had been dating - arranges a meeting with Simonelli and offers her a lenient plea bargain in which she will be eligible for parole in three years if she testifies against Pacheco. Simonelli protests that Pacheco will have her killed if she testifies against him, but Carmichael assures her that her identity will be kept confidential. With Simonelli's testimony, Pacheco is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

External links[]

Alice Simonelli on the Law & Order Wiki

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Villains

Exiled: A Law & Order Movie
Gianni Uzielli