Child molester Meredith Rice
Meredith Rice (Stacy Edwards) is the villainess of "Head", the season 5 finale of Law & Order: SVU (airdate May 18, 2004). She was a middle school principal and had previously been a devoted teacher.
Unbeknownst to Meredith, she was suffering from a brain tumor that had a drastic impact on her personality, causing her to become short-tempered and sexually aggressive with her husband and less fluent in her job. She also started having pedophilic thoughts, leading her to have inappropriate contact with two students before starting a sexual affair with 6th grader Shane Madden, who pursued the relationship with his principal due to his estranged relationship with his alcoholic mother. They had an encounter in the bathroom during a soccer game of Shane's, which was unknowingly recorded on a hidden camera planted by voyuerist Wade Donato.
When Wade was brought in by the SVU squad, he gave them the footage of the tryst in exchange for a reduced sentence. When Benson and Stabler began investigating, they went to a soccer game and saw Meredith hug a player before walking off with another, who they soon learned was her stepson Jason. Meredith's guilt was gradually exposed when Jason revealed that she often wore a "Soccer Mom" T-shirt to many of his games;the same one which was visible in the bathroom camera footage. After that, Meredith and Shane tried to run away together, with Shane being the instigator for the escape attempt. But the police found the two in their parked car in the midst of another tryst and, as Meredith was arrested, Shane revealed that she had been throwing up. While being interrogated by Stabler, Meredith insisted that what she did to Shane was the first time she'd ever committed such an act and that she had no idea why she did so. All of a sudden, Meredith attempted to sexually assault Stabler, causing him to shove her into the wall and send her into a seizure.
It was at the hospital that a CT scan revealed Meredith's tumor, which was determined to be the cause of her crimes. After Meredith had the tumor removed, she underwent a test to see if her pedophilic thoughts remained, confessing to Dr. George Huang beforehand that she had been molested by her grandfather as a child. The test showed Meredith no longer had pedophilic urges, and that the tumor alone was what caused her to molest Shane. But in her meeting with ADA Casey Novak, the only deal she would offer required her to register as a sex offender, meaning she could no longer work with children. Against her lawyer's advice, however, Meredith agreed to the plea, wanting to protect her students in the event that her tumor grew back. But later on, Meredith tried to contact Shane over the phone, breaking the restraining order that was in place. This drove Shane's mother Jackie to attack Meredith at her apartment, where Benson and Stabler arrived to arrest her. As she was apprehended, Meredith revealed her reason for contacting Shane: to inform him that she was pregnant and that he was the father, additionally revealing as she was taken into custody that her actions had resulted in her husband filing for divorce and her stepson resenting her.
Trivia[]
- Stacy Edwards also appeared on Lie to Me as villainous psychiatrist Dr. Christina Knowlton, on CSI as villainous conspirator Vickie Winston, and on The Mentalist as the evil Concetta Wale.
- Stacy Edwards also appeared in the 2014 film The Devil's Hand as the evil Susan Brown.