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| “ | He's as queer as a $9 bill. Whatever he got, he wanted. | „ |
| ~ Becker dismissing his victim. |
Bill Becker is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Gridiron Soldier". He is a sadistic college football coach who orders his players to sexually assault their new and prospective teammates in order to punish them for failure and "toughen them up".
He was portrayed by Glenn Morshower, who also portrayed General Shepherd in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Rip Blazkowicz in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and Aaron Starkey in The X-Files.
Early life[]
Becker was the head coach of Hudson University's celebrated football team. While he led his team to win multiple championship games, however, he "instilled discipline" in his players by brutally hazing and humiliating them for the slightest failure or "sign of weakness".
He also ordered his players to haze each other, even to the point of sexually assaulting "weak" teammates. During one season, he caught his quarterback, Eddie Thorpe, crying in the locker room after suffering a painful injury; to punish him, Becker ordered a few of the older players to take turns sodomizing him with a broomstick, all while Becker told him to "take it like a man". Thorpe, a closeted homosexual, remained silent about the assault for fear of Becker outing him and ruining his chances of going pro after graduation.
"Gridiron Soldier"[]
A year after ordering Thorpe's rape, Becker hosts Cedric Jones, a high school football star from Loganville, Georgia, who is being courted by multiple colleges, during recruitment season in the hopes of getting him to join Hudson's team. Jones tells Becker that he has already made a verbal commitment to Georgia Tech University, but Becker tries to entice him by setting him up to spend a night with two cheerleaders named Zoe and Tanya. When Jones reaffirms his commitment to Georgia Tech, however, Becker decides to "teach him a lesson".
He orders Zoe and Tanya to lure Jones into the school gym's weight room and blindfold him, making him believe that they are going to have sex again; while Jones is blindfolded, however, Ty Lee, a gay male cheerleader, starts performing oral sex on him. Lee removes Jones' blindfold so he can see what is happening, all while Tanya, Zoe, and a few of the team's players laugh at him; Thorpe also witnesses the assault, but does nothing to help Jones for fear that Becker will retaliate by outing him.
Humiliated and traumatized, Jones flees the room and orders a cab, asking to taken to a sports bar. The cabbie drops him off at a gay bar, where Jones ends up punching a man for flirting with him. He is then arrested for assault, with the possibility of being charged with a hate crime.
Jones' uncle Larry calls Detective Amanda Rollins of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit, a family friend, to see what she can do to help his nephew. Rollins and her partner, Detective Nick Amaro, question Jones, who insists that he is not homophobic and was merely defending himself, but who also tries to punch Amaro when the detective puts a hand on his shoulder, screaming that he is "not a f-g".
Rollins and Amaro, who have both seen such behavior in male rape victims, suspect that he has been assaulted, and persuade their skeptical Sergeant, Olivia Benson, to let them investigate further. They question Zoe and Tanya about their night with Jones, and they say that they merely took him out to dinner. Sensing that they are lying, Rollins and Amaro threaten to arrest them for hindering the investigation, scaring them into admitting what really happened. They talk to Lee, who dismisses the assault as "a prank", and the other players, who say that Jones wanted it to happen. Becker, meanwhile, says that he had nothing to do with what happened, and that Jones deceived him and Hudson University by touring the university just so he could spend a weekend partying.
Becker fears that Jones will take him to court, however, so he tries to intimidate him into silence by sending Tanya to visit him in jail and tell him that the team has a video of Lee performing oral sex on him. Terrified that his family will see the video, Jones attempts suicide by hanging himself with a bed sheet; he survives, but breaks his neck, leaving him paralyzed and destroying his chances of a football career. Rollins visits him the hospital and tries to persuade him to testify against Becker, but he refuses, determined to make sure that no one will ever see the video.
Rollins, Amaro, and Benson persuade Assistant District Attorney Rafael Barba to issue arrest warrants for Tanya, Zoe, Lee, and Thorpe, in hopes that they will turn on Becker. Rollins and Amaro interrogate Thorpe, who refuses to say anything against Becker and dismisses what happened to Jones as "nothing". Sensing that Thorpe was also abused, Amaro asks him if he thinks the assault was "nothing" because he was put through worse, and whether he turned a blind eye to Jones' suffering in order to put some of his own burden onto someone else. Fighting back tears, Thorpe admits that he, too, was raped at Becker's instigation, but insists that he is "man enough" to stand it and punches a hole through the interrogation room's two-way mirror to prove it.
Rollins and Amaro arrest Becker in front of his assistant coaches for facilitating Thorpe's rape. Becker sneers that Thorpe is too weak and "queer" to testify against him in court, but Rollins replies that he "toughened up" Thorpe enough that he should be able to handle it. As she and Amaro take Becker into custody, Rollins throws his own words back at him, telling him to "take it like a man".
Becker eventually pleads guilty to rape in the first degree and facilitating sexual assault, and he is presumably given a long prison sentence.
External links[]
- Bill Becker on the Law & Order Wiki
