Tonight on NBC Law & Order SVU returns with an all-new Thursday, October 23, 2025 episode and we have your Law & Order SVU recap below.
In tonight’s Law & Order SVU season 27 episode 5 “Feed The Craving,” as per the NBC synopsis, “When a woman in active labor is abducted, Rollins and Curry look to her doula for an account of events. Carisi tries to get a confession in front of the jury.”
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In tonight’s Law & Order SVU episode, a woman in active labor was believed to have been abducted. Detective Rollins was back at SVU. She was working this case. She rejoined her old division after running her own unit. She was essentially forced out of her unit by the new Chief of Detectives. First, she brought in one of her own people.
She then kept tying Rollins’s hands until she made the job hell. The woman gets what she wants and she wants even successful units to be wholly dependent on her. She’s already started in on Captain Benson’s unit as well. She brought in her own guy. She kept asking Benson to take a desk job. They have one of the most successful divisions in the NYPD and so Benson’s doesn’t get the end goal.
Benson also hired back Rollins because they were friends. Benson was godmother to at least one of Rollins’s kids. She also never stopped working with Rollins’s husband the ADA.
Them working together again wasn’t going to be easy, but they knew how to handle it. The pregnant woman that was abducted was Natalie Tanzillo. Her child was stillborn. She wanted to wait until the last possible minute before going to the doctor and her doula finally convinced her to go. Then Natalie saw “him” outside. She fled in panic. She wasn’t abducted. She also wasn’t pregnant.
Natalie told the doula that her baby was stillborn. She also said she got pregnant by her rapist. She apparently met the rapist at work. Rollins checked and Natalie hasn’t worked for a full two years.
Her W2 proved that. They did find out that Natalie was involved in a charity so they thought she was volunteering when she met this rapist. Once Natalie was found, she was rushed to the hospital. It wasn’t the closest hospital because she refused to go to Northwell Greenwich Hospital. They took her to Presbyterian instead when the doctors quickly dismissed her for not being pregnant.
Natalie couldn’t even tell Benson herself. She seemed disorientated if not confused. Her not being pregnant also didn’t make sense because they found Natalie’s apartment.
She had baby clothes. She has sonograms. They weren’t even sure if Natalie had been right about her rapist stalking her. The one thing they knew for sure was that she had undergone some trauma. Benson does believe she was assaulted and she thinks she came up with the pregnancy as a means of making peace with what happened.
They did find the sonogram. They couldn’t believe that Natalie was going through psychosis yet was mindful enough to downloaded fake images off the internet. They started to theorize that maybe she had been pregnant once. They found the custom made onesie. They were tracking down who ordered it when they checked out her workplace at the charity. It was called “Wheels for Pups”. Her supervisor there has a record from when he went streaking in college. He was now a happily married gay man. He also told them that working with Natalie was tough.
When she wasn’t coming up with fake illnesses, she implied she had a miscarriage. She thought that maybe they were right in that Natalie had once been pregnant. Until they found out who sent the onesie. It had been her previous doula. She said that Natalie wasn’t a victim. She was actually a predator.
Natalie told the sob story about her baby being stillborn and wanting to give birth at home. The doula wasn’t medically trained. They also felt so bad for Natalie that they offered to be their doulas for free.
Only Natalie sexually abused over thirty doulas. They have a message board. One person posted and soon they were all on SVU’s doorstep. Natalie masturbated over Facetime. She massaged her nipples in full view of the doulas. She always claimed that she heard it could stimulate labor. She asked these women to bathe her, massage her, and dress her. She was never ever pregnant. She was simply a predator that found out how to con women into being alone in a room with her for days on end. Benson wanted to throw the book at her.
Benson didn’t care how hard it was going to be to put a female perp behind bars. Or that Natalie was going to spin this into a sob story about her own rape traumatizing.
She was an emotional vampire and Benson knew how to trap her. Benson was genuinely earlier when she thought she was a victim. She gave Natalie her own personal phone number in case she wanted to press charges. Natalie eventually called. She thought she could manipulate Benson like she did the doulas and Benson proved to be a match for her.
Benson got her to go back on her lies. All of them. She was never sexually assaulted. She was never ill. She makes things up to grab attention and it’s time she she’s stopped.
She was arrested. She was arrested on a scheme to defraud on top of the sexual assaults. Her lawyer later came up with a defense in which she was not guilty by reason of insanity. She struggles with Munchausen. She comes up with means of making herself sick to gain sympathy. She got a doctor to agree with that assessment. And the doctor was wrong because it went much further than that.
Natalie was put on the stand. Carisi tore into her. He got her to admit she does know right from wrong. She did when she wouldn’t let someone get arrested for assaulting her. He made her look bad and so her lawyer agreed to a plea agreement. She pleads guilty to the fraud charges. And won’t be charged for the sexual assaults.
That’s okay because Benson just knows that she’ll be seeing Natalie again.
THE END!
