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| “ | It's about time something bad happened in your life, don't you think? | „ |
| ~ Holly taunting Meghan over having her raped. |
Holly Schneider is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Theatre Tricks". She is an aspiring actress who arranges for her friend and fellow actress Meghan Weller to be raped because she envies her beauty and success.
She was portrayed by Gayle Rankin.
Early life[]
Holly was born and raised in Hennepin, Minnesota along with her best friend, Meghan Weller. Both of them aspired to be actresses on Broadway, so they moved to New York City to live together and audition for roles. While Meghan found success early on thanks to her talent and beauty, however, Meghan - who had always been considered an "ugly duckling" compared to Meghan - struggled to find work, eventually having to resort to selling her body on a prostitution site called Sugar Babyz.
She managed to arrange an audition for herself and Meghan for a play directed by one of her clients, minor playwright Ted Scott, hoping it would be her big break. Ultimately, however, Scott - a notorious womanizer - cast Meghan in the lead so he could have a chance at sleeping with her. Holly, having finally had enough of living in Meghan's shadow and debasing herself for men like Scott, devises a plan to ruin both of their lives: She would set Meghan to be raped and frame Scott for it.
"Theatre Tricks"[]
Holly creates a fake profile for Meghan on the Sugar Babyz site and messages Judge Gerald Crane, a client who pays her to roleplay with him in his rape fantasies. As "Meghan", she tells him that she wants to roleplay with him onstage on the opening night of Scott's play, Nine Circles. Crane goes to the play, an interactive version of Dante's Inferno in which the audience acts out their sexual fantasies with the cast while wearing robes and animal masks, and rapes Meghan onstage while wearing a goat mask. He does not know that he is actually raping her, however; he believes that her cries of pain and pleas for him to stop are "part of the show".
When Meghan tells Scott what happened, he calls the police, and Detective Olivia Benson of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit arrives to investigate, with Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cabot in tow. Benson questions Meghan, who says that someone wearing a hawk mask held her down during her rape. The next day, Benson and her partner, Detective Nick Amaro, question Meghan and Holly, and the latter steers them toward suspecting one of Meghan's many "stage door Johnnys".
The SVU team briefly suspects Jason Roberts, an obsessed fan who began stalking Holly after setting up her web portfolio, but he proves his innocence by providing a recording he had made of the rape that also identifies a theatre critic as the man in the hawk mask, who had also thought it was all an act. The critic's description of the rapist's engraved cufflinks leads them to Crane, who insists that his encounter with Meghan was consensual.
Scott is also briefly considered a suspect because Meghan refused to sleep with him, while Crane presided over his divorce. Scott protests his innocence and says that someone is using his information from the SugarBabyz site to set him up. Benson and Amaro inform a horrified Crane that someone on the Sugar Babyz site manipulated him into raping Meghan. Wanting to make amends for what he did, he supplies a list of his lovers from the website - including Holly.
Amaro and Detective Amanda Rollins go to Meghan and Holly's apartment, where the former is packing to move back home. They say that Scott set up the rape, which, as intended, provokes Holly to inadvertently reveal that she knows him, as well. Amaro and Rollins confront her about her Sugar Babyz profile and sleeping with Scott and Crane and about her jealousy of Meghan. Holly angrily accuses Meghan of having everything handed to her and tells her that she wanted her to know what it felt like be degraded and humiliated. When Meghan asks her why she did it, Holly coldly replies that it was about time that something did not go her way. She is then arrested and imprisoned for rape.
External links[]
- Holly Schneider on the Law & Order Wiki
