Candace Lamerly (Michael Learned) is the hidden villainess of "Privilege", episode 4.17 of Law & Order: SVU (airdate February 21, 2003). She was the mother of Douglas Lamerly and the grandmother to his son, Drew Lamerly. Candace was the matriarch of the Lamerly family, having grown close to Drew after his mother checked herself into rehab and Douglas began working away from home more often.
The evil Candace soon after began shaping Drew to be a violent rapist; her way of (in her mind) making him a man. Candace often took Drew to a brothel to pick women for him to have sex with, with Drew raping escort Jenny White after taking her to his prom. Drew later began an abusive relationship with Carmen Trancoso, shoving her from his family's high-rise apartment balcony when she threatened to sue him for assault. During the investigation, Candace and Drew went along with the SVU squad's initial belief that Carmen committed suicide.
When the detectives uncovered evidence proving Carmen was murdered as well as Drew's past assault on Jenny, Candace confessed to what Drew had done to Jenny and went along with Drew's assertion that their head of security Tom Paysen was obsessed with Carmen and likely killed her. But in actuality, Candace had had Tom alter the security footage to cover for Drew. When it was proven that Drew was in fact Carmen's killer, Candace made claims to Drew's attorney Lorna Scarry that Drew's father was abusive to him and was the cause of his violent tendencies. She even made the claim on the stand, saying that she had failed her son and was trying to redeem herself with her grandson. But Candace was proved to be lying when Dr. Huang revealed how her accusation about Douglas failed to correspond with Drew's statement from a lie detector test Huang had conducted on him, in which he stated that his relationship to his father was of "mutual indifference" due to him being away on business so often.
Candace's villainous nature was fully revealed when Jenny White revealed under interrogation that Candace had taken Drew to the brothel, rather than Douglas as Candace claimed. When ADA Alexandra Cabot confronted Drew on the stand about this and the other inconsistencies in his claims about his father, Candace screamed for her to stop before collapsing, which caused Drew to attempt to assault Cabot before being dragged from the courtroom. Candace was later arrested at her home, with Douglas blasting his villainous mother for turning his son into a monster. As she was arrested, the evil Candace blasted Douglas for (in her mind) being an embarrassment and claimed she had made Drew into a man.