Law & Order SVU , which focuses on sex crimes, often relies on real life crimes currently in the news for its scripts, homing in on the victims of those crimes. ("SVU" stands for "Special Victims Unit.") But what happens when the victim in a torn-from-the-headlines episode changes her story? As it turns out, such was the case with Wednesday's season premiere based on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sex scandal in which a prominent banking official was accused of forcing himself upon a hotel maid. It later turned out that the maid turned on Strauss-Kahn after he refused to pay her for sex, inventing a story about how he had attempted to rape her. "In this case, I don't believe we ripped from the headlines. I believe the actual story ripped us off," series show-runner Warren Leight told today's (Friday) New York Post. Leight said that as the maid's story began to unravel and Strauss-Kahn was set free, "We had to do rewrites. Everything we had in our initial draft" had to be changed." He said that the actual events began changing so rapidly that he worried that the final scenes might have to be enacted live on the day of the broadcast.

16/09/2011