| “ | You don't understand. Look what he did to me, just look! What was I supposed to do? | „ |
| ~ Bowen rationalizing the murder she committed. |
Martha Bowen is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Blue Bamboo". She is a singer who murders her former employer as revenge for physically and sexually abusing her.
She was portrayed by Laura Linney, who also portrayed Wendy Byrde in Ozark.
Early life[]
Bowen was a struggling professional singer who was hired by Japanese businessman Shiunro Hayashi to move to Tokyo and perform in his nightclub under the stage name "Nicolette Clayton". Once she was there, however, he began beating and sexually abusing her, forcing her to sleep with him and his customers under threat of taking her passport and leaving her penniless and homeless in a country where she did not even speak the language. As a result of Hayashi's abuse, Bowen contracted a sexually transmitted disease that left her sterile and unable to have sex.
Eventually, Hayashi tired of her and released her from her contract, allowing her to return to New York City, where she made a living singing commercial jingles under the name "Christie Jakes". She nurtured a grudge against Hayashi, and all other Japanese men, however, and began stalking him a year later upon hearing that he was back in New York on business. She met with him at a nightclub and went with him to his hotel room, where she shot him in the stomach and left him to die.
In "Blue Bamboo"[]
NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Mike Logan interview Bowen while investigating Hayashi's murder, and she claims she never met him. After getting a list of the singers Hayashi "auditioned", however, they discover that she and "Christie Jakes" are one and the same, and that she made three phone calls to his hotel on the day of the murder. They bring Bowen into their station house for a line-up, where she is positively identified by a waitress at the nightclub, while her DNA matches that left at the crime scene, giving Briscoe and Logan enough evidence to arrest her for murder.
Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy and Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid find out about Bowen's history with Hayashi, and talk to several other white, female singers whom he abused. Meanwhile, Bowen claims to have been suffering from Battered Woman Syndrome when she killed Hayashi, which would legally mean that she acted in self-defense. Meanwhile, her lawyer makes several subtle allusions to the racist stereotype of Asian men lusting after and abusing Western white women.
McCoy has Bowen examined by forensic psychiatrist Elizabeth Olivet, who finds her a textbook case of a battered woman. Suspecting that Bowen fits the diagnosis too perfectly, McCoy has Briscoe and Logan examine her bookshelf, which contains several books about domestic violence and Battered Woman Syndrome, many of which have high-lighted passages that match Bowen's testimony word for word. Kincaid confronts Bowen about this while cross-examining her, and Bowen protests that she had no choice but to kill Hayashi.
McCoy persuades the judge to instruct the jury not to consider Hayashi's ethnicity or prior acts in their deliberations. They ultimately give in to their prejudice, however, and acquit Bowen.
External links[]
- Martha Bowen on the Law & Order Wiki
