The villainous Jessica DeLay
Jessica DeLay (Rooney Mara) is the main villainess of "Fat", episode 7.20 of Law & Order: SVU (airdate May 2, 2006). She was a popular and ambitious 16-year-old student at Coretta Scott King High School and worked for the Manhattan Health Department, going undercover to expose stores that sold cigarettes to teens illegally.
Jessica also had a vicious vendetta against overweight people, shown by her and her friend Tommy Strahan brutally beating up Rudi Bixton when he fell asleep on a park bench on his way home from work. Jessica additionally stole Rudi's baseball cap and recorded Tommy as he beat Rudi, later posting the video online. The assault left Rudi with a broken arm and leg, costing him his job.
After Rudi's sister Mia, one of Jessica's classmates, discovered that Jessica had been Rudi's attacker, she and Rudi's brother Kenny kidnapped and assaulted Jessica in retaliation, cutting off one of her finger's as retribution for Rudi losing three fingers due to his diabetes. Even during her brutal assault, though, Jessica continued to be a bully and called Mia a pig and that pigs shouldn't be allowed to breed. Angered, Kenny took the baseball bat he'd been using to beat Jessica and sodomized her with it. When questioned by Stabler and Detective Lucius Blaine (who was temporarily taking over for Olivia Benson, who was reassigned to cybercrimes), she feigned innocence and claimed that she had no enemies.
After discovering evidence on Jessica's phone that proved she and Tommy assaulted Rudi, the two villainous friends were arrested. But both were soon after released after their lawyer Lionel Granger discovered that a TV news show about their arrest contained footage of Tommy, which had been taken by one of his friends, tainting the line-up that Rudi had done. But before Tommy left the station house, he was shot and killed by Rudi. It was after Rudi was sentenced to prison that Jessica was definitively proven to be his attacker when security footage showed her wearing the baseball cap she'd stolen from him. Her vendetta against the overweight was also discovered by Benson through her social media postings, as well as a secret of hers: Jessica herself used to be overweight and used to go to a school exclusively for obese kids. Stabler and Blaine both confronted Jessica with what they'd found in interrogation, causing Jessica to break down and reveal how much she'd hated being teased and insulted for her weight. While she revealed that she couldn't stand the sight of Rudi on the park bench, Jessica contested that Tommy had begun the assault and she tearfully expressed remorse for joining in. It's never revealed, though, whether or not Jessica was charged with assaulting Rudi.
Trivia[]
- Rooney Mara later appeared in 2013's Side Effects as the evil Emily Taylor.