| “ | My husband is not a homosexual! | „ |
| ~ Sela exhibiting her denial about her husband's sexuality |
Sela Dixon is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Deceit". She is a wealthy housewife who murders her closeted husband's lover.
She was portrayed by Mary Beth Hurt, who also voiced Pazuzu in Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist.
Early life[]
Sela was born into a family of wealthy lawyers, and as a young woman married Jerold Dixon, a successful attorney with whom she had two children. Jerold was gay, but spent most of his life repressing his sexuality, both to lie to himself and to keep Sela happy. He even made a show of sexually harassing women who worked in his law firm to keep up appearances, which usually ended in Sela paying the women off to stop them from suing.
Eventually, however, Jerold fell in love with Elliot Wells, a fellow lawyer who was working with Jerold's firm on an environmental lawsuit. When Sela found out, she tried to pay Wells to get out of Jerold's life, but he refused. She forced Jerold to fire Wells, but that only made things worse; Wells threatened to sue Jerold for wrongful termination and make their affair a matter of public record. Not knowing what else to do, Jerold told Sela about his relationship with Wells and said that he was going to come out of the closet.
Humiliated by Jerold's betrayal and frightened of losing her social status if it became known that her husband was gay, Sela went to Elliot's apartment with a gun and shot him dead. Jerold arrived at the apartment moments later, and helped Sela dispose of evidence that would have incriminated her, including the gun and her dress stained with Wells' blood.
"Deceit"[]
During the investigation into Wells' murder, NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis arrest Jerold after finding out that he and Wells were lovers, discovering Wells' blood in his apartment, and getting Wells' ex-boyfriend Tony Conneca to implicate him by pretending to blackmail him. Sela pays for Jerold's bail and a high-priced lawyer who manages to get the charges against him dismissed.
Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy and Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid find out about Jerold's reputation for sexually harassing women, as well as the hush money Sela paid his victims. They question Sela, who seems more concerned about Jerold being outed than his being accused of murder. When the Dixons' doorman tells them that Jerold and Sela left separately on the night of the murder, giving Jerold enough time to kill Wells, they have him arrested again and refile the murder charge against him. Sela threatens to sue the district attorney's office and ruin McCoy and Kincaid's careers.
Jerold takes and passes a polygraph test in which he admits to being Wells' lover but denies killing him. McCoy and Kincaid retrace both Jerold and Sela's movements during the night of the murder and discover that they were both in Wells' apartment at the time of his murder, with Sela having gotten there first; they then realize that Sela killed Wells, and Jerold is covering for her.
McCoy and Kincaid meet with Sela and tell her that Jerold is covering for "the real murderer" and that they need to examine the dress she was seen wearing the night of the murder; she nervously replies that it is being dry-cleaned. McCoy then meets with Jerold and threatens to charge him as an accessory to murder unless he testifies against his wife. Jerold reluctantly tells a grand jury what Sela did, which results in Sela being indicted. Briscoe, Curtis, and Kincaid go to the Dixons' house to arrest Sela, whom they find sitting by Jerold's corpse, having stabbed him to death. Sela is then found guilty of both murders and imprisoned for life.
External links[]
- Sela Dixon on the Law & Order Wiki
