Vice President Joe Biden isn’t a stranger to appearances on TV shows or in skits with TV characters, but this might be the first time he played to his serious side.
Biden will guest-star on an episode of “Law & Order: SVU” called “Making a Rapist” that will air Wednesday night.
The episode opens with Biden honoring Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and the team at SVU for making their way through thousands of backlogged and untested rape kits, according to the Daily Beast.
“My Dad used to have an expression. He said, ‘The greatest sin any person can commit is an abuse of power,’ and the greatest abuse of power is rape,” Biden announces to the precinct. “It takes women a long time to heal. And when the victim isn’t believed, when she goes through the invasive process of having a rape kit put together, and then it’s stuck on a shelf somewhere, and then the rape kit is never ever tested, well, we fail. We fail her. We fail so many women.”
This isn’t exactly acting for the VP. He told NBC that when SVU started airing in 1999, many police departments didn’t have sexual violence units, and it helped change the culture of policing.
“This one, I didn’t have to act about,” Biden said. “This one is just right from the gut.”
Biden has been involved in women’s issues for a while. He wrote the Violence Against Women Act more than 20 years ago, which partially mandates that women not be forced to pay for their own rape kits after they’ve been sexually assaulted. It also promoted training for police officers and judges that taught about the realities of dealing with domestic abuse and sexual assault.
More recently, he has represented It's On Us, the White House’s campaign for the prevention of sexual assault. He also made headlines earlier this year when he wrote an open letter to the victim of Brock Turner, the former Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting a woman behind a dumpster.
“You have shaken untold thousands out of the torpor and indifference towards sexual violence that allows this problem to continue. Your words will help people you have never met and never will,” Biden said at the time. “You have given them the strength they need to fight. And so, I believe, you will save lives. I do not know your name — but I will never forget you.”
Comments