Mr. Heller, much like Ms. Lohan herself, was also big on excuses, telling the judge the reason he was unable to file the correct paperwork in time for a dismal of charges was because her previous lawyers had made such a mess of things. Unfortunately, the woman who sponsored Mr. Heller in court to be Ms. Lohan's representative has "never practiced law a day in her life."

Now Ms. Lohan is faced with two choices: either get another lawyer, or waive her right to a competent one. Hmmm ... wonder what she'll choose!

Ha ha, just kidding!

Mariska Hargitay as Det. Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU (NBC)

The showrunner for Dick Wolf’s last standing Law & Order program, Special Victims Unit, was struggling to understand how people watch “marathon” sessions of the show he manages. “The children episodes are disturbing, even to us,” said Mr. Leight.

He singled out one such episode, entitled “Friending Emily,” in which detectives go to an FBI office to view images of abused children. Mr. Leight sounded shocked, tired and a little bit horrified over a detail that he and his writers chose to put in the episode. He sounded a lot, in fact, like SVU’s former protagonist, Elliot Stabler.

“There is a kid in diapers whose photo we show,” said Mr. Leight. “We found it on an Internet pornography site. It had 37,000 hits in the last four days.” (Which, it turns out, is the exact line that a government official says during the episode.)

“I mean, a bunch of us on the writing staff have children,” he said. “Nobody really wants to write this stuff. It’s dispiriting.”

The show may upset its own writers, but Law & Order: SVU has outlasted every other show that Dick Wolf created. It’s been two years since NBC nixed the original Law & Order, after 20 seasons. Even after the cancellations of two highly promoted spin-offs, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Los Angeles (not to mention an ill-fated fourth spin-off called Law & Order: Trial by Jury), SVU is still going strong.

It’s one thing to say that violence sells. It’s another to say that gruesome sexual attacks on the most vulnerable members of society, children, can power the remaining show in an unusually successful franchise. Even last season, when its ratings were at their lowest, SVU was still the sixth most watched show on NBC, ahead of 30 Rock, The Office and everything else in the Thursday night lineup. At its peak, SVU was able to topple the original Law & Order when they were on the air together.

What’s clear: people love watching Special Victims Unit, especially young women and mothers. In fact, since the show launched 13 years ago, females age 18 to 34 have been its most consistent viewers. “Two-thirds of our audience are women,” Mr. Leight said. “I honestly don’t understand why, completely. I don’t get it when parents say they watch the show with their kids, either.”

Lisa Friel, a lawyer who spent nearly 30 years in charge of sex crime prosecutions in the New York City District Attorney’s office, understands the impulse. Ms. Friel, who actually oversaw SVU-style prosecutions at work, used to watch the show with her high-school-age daughter, now 18 and a college freshman.

Some of the subject matter they may have encountered: an episode titled “Consent,” in which a young girl is drugged with GHB; the aforementioned “Friending Emily,” in which an older frat brother conspires with a newer pledge to kidnap and rape a high schooler and then broadcast the videos of her molestation on the Internet; and “Brotherhood,” in which a pledge-master is murdered after raping several women as well as the fraternity’s own pledges.

“It wasn’t like I was watching it with her when she was 7,” Ms. Friel told The Observer. “But when the time was right, when she was old enough and when I thought it was appropriate to start dealing with these issues, it was another way to open the dialogue.”

The writers’ lunchroom is plastered with New York Post and Daily News front covers, enough to extinguish one’s creative juices ... or appetite. Every Law & Order installment has a noted “ripped from the headlines” element, and at times the show has even presaged the news. During Mr. Leight’s tenure, for instance, SVU had an episode (“Personal Fouls”) about a basketball coach using his charity as a conduit for kids he could molest. The show aired “two weeks before the Jerry Sandusky story came out,” Mr. Leight noted, with a hint of pride.

As Gothamist asked its readers at the time, “Not to pull a total conspiracy theory here, but this particular story scales pretty high on the ‘just a coincidence’ scale, don’t you think?”

Mr. Leight explained that the story line wasn’t based any on inside information, but that it wasn’t a complete coincidence, either. SVU has a team of rape counselors, crime survivors, detectives and other law enforcement experts who advise the writers on plot points. “Male-on-male sex crimes was just something that people were telling us was happening,” he said. “The show had never really tackled that issue in a substantial way.”

Confessions" Episode 1003 (NBC Photo: Will Hart)

But the show hasn’t always been an easy sell. When Law & Order: Special Victims Unit premiered in 1999, starring Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay as detectives Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson, it was criticized for sensationalism. There was just no TV precedent for a series that tackled not just the rape or molestation of adults, but also, with disturbing frequency, of children as well. It wasn’t unusual to have a scene in which a small boy or girl was found wandering around the city, dazed, with blood running down his or her legs.

The most brutal episodes violated yet another TV taboo: some of the kids were murdered as well. Longtime viewers of the show may have seen a 15-year-old found in the bushes, a dead baby discovered in a cooler and a 14-year-old war refugee with a slit throat.

Lisa F. Jackson is one of the show’s critics. “SVU portrays a universe of sexual violence that doesn’t really exist,” said Ms. Jackson, director of the HBO documentary Sex Crimes Unit. To make the film, Ms. Jackson spent two years inside the Manhattan District Attorney’s office with the prosecutors of sex crimes.

“SVU shows a universe that people prefer over the reality of rape and sexual violence,” she said. “In real life, most victims don’t show physical signs of assault, and it’s a lot harder to identify victims because they don’t come forward.”

Especially during the final Christopher Meloni years, SVU seemed intent on pumping up ratings with increasingly outlandish crimes and plot twists. Stabler’s own children were kidnapped, a hackneyed plot recycled from 24.

“I think people are remembering stuff from season 10, season 11,” said Mr. Leight carefully, when asked about the more exploitative aspects of the show’s story lines. “I think toward the end of the Meloni era, it got a little ... fetishistic. It was like anything else: you had these great writers on the show for 10 years working with the talented [original showrunner] Neal Baer, and they keep pushing the limits, pushing the limits. When we came in two years ago, our whole idea was to bring the show back to the basics.”

SVU has sailed past its 300th episode, is well into its 14th season, and has survived the loss of one of its two stars. It might be worth considering that there is something in it besides cheap thrills. It’s hard to think of SVU as entertaining. Riveting, perhaps.

Mr. Leight would have us believe that SVU exists as a public service, and that the writers get no pleasure in creating these dark stories, especially if they involve children. Like SVU’s relation to real-life sex crimes, his contention probably has some element of the truth, but isn’t the whole story.

During our interview, Mr. Leight asked us what we thought of the recent accusations that Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo, had once been sexually involved with an underage teen.

We said we thought it wouldn’t be too long before an episode about a child-molesting puppeteer would make it onto SVU.

Mr. Leight coughed and was quiet for a moment. “Yeah ... probably not for a while.”

That night, Mr. Leight would write on @warrenleightTV Twitter account, “Memo to: FBI/CIA/NATO/SesameStreet From:SVU Writers’ Room—Please slow it down, we’re having a hard time getting this all down.”

The six-bedroom, nine-bathroom mansion, which resides near Central Park, was originally placed on the market for a $11,495 million asking price. The place was bought anonymously last month, but the Post was on the case and ID'd the actress as the buyer.

In addition to enjoying its stark white palette, Ms. Hargitay, her husband Peter Hermann and their three children can now indulge in an 18-foot-wide home elevator, eat-in chef’s kitchen, double-height ceilings, a sun room and built-in barbecue grill. Did we mention it's all white?

sgrothjan@observer.com

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

"Doug Belkin was wrongfully arrested and charged with petty offenses for nothing more than routine newsgathering," the spokesperson wrote in an email. "We stand behind our reporter, and will aggressively fight these unfounded charges."

Mr. Belkin was arrested for putting his hands on a security guard, who was asking him to step back from a subject he was interviewing.

Douglas Belkin, a Wall Street Journal reporter covering the Ron Blagojevich trial in Chicago, was arrested on the job this morning. Based on a report on the Chicago Sun-Times media wire, it seems like Mr. Belkin was trying to interview one of the attorneys and then "put his hands on" a security guard who was trying to get him to back up.

"I told him three times to back up and he didn't,'' the security officer said. "He put his hands on me."

Based on the way things look on the scene, it's not hard to imagine everyone getting a little testy.

1)      City presents plan for big development/rezoning.

2)      Angry neighbors mount grass-roots campaign against it; lobby local council member to vote against plan.

3)      Local council member negotiates a compromise and declares a "win-win;" project advances.

4)      Neighbors, still upset, file a lawsuit to stop development, usually challenging the environmental review and approvals process.

5)      Neighbors lose lawsuit; development proceeds.

Occasionally this plan gets off track early on—sometimes the city doesn't proceed if it feels it is going to lose—but rarely does the plan ever get defeated at the lawsuit stage. (The 1970s Westway plan to sink the West Side Highway was a very notable exception, in that a lawsuit stopped a gigantic project that was ready to go, forever altering the future of the West Side as a result).

So it came as something of a surprise last week when a judge ruled that a lawsuit challenging a Bloomberg administration's affordable-housing development in Brooklyn—Broadway Triangle—could proceed.

Based on the ruling by the judge, Emily Goodman, it seems the opponents may have a decent case challenging the city for racial discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. The ruling, which went online in the state courts' Web site Wednesday, threw out most of the claims from the set of community groups known as the Broadway Triangle Community Coalition, but, notably, allowed a claim to move forward that alleged the city specifically designed the development to favor tenants who are Hasidic Jews.

If this is indeed illegal, it doesn't seem like it should be all that difficult to prove.

The fight over Broadway Triangle has long been the topic of criticism given its appearance of political jockeying and favoritism affecting the development itself. The politically powerful Hasidic group United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg was given a contract to manage some of the affordable housing at the site, and its units would be shorter and with more bedrooms than a typical affordable unit. The Broadway Triangle Community Coalition points to these attributes to illustrate the discriminatory intent: the Hasidic families in the area tend to be far larger than typical families, and need three- and four-bedroom apartments. They also prefer low-rise buildings, so there are fewer floors to walk up during the Sabbath. By favoring Hasidics, one group was favored over other groups that dominate the area.

While the city contends this does not prove any discrimination, it is, of course, well known that the Jewish groups in Williamsburg prefer larger affordable units. In the recent zoning approval for a development named Rose Plaza, groups such as the UJO pushed for more three- and four-bedroom, below-market-rate apartments before they were willing to support the plan. The expectation there was clear to any lobbyist and lawmaker involved: The three-bedroom apartments were intended to give more Hasidic families subsidized housing.

The full ruling can be found here.  Below, a few excerpts:

As part of a discussion on demographic statistics that show the general population does not need so many large apartments:

Although the statistics do not reflect that only white or Hasidic families desire the larger apartments, they do indicate the overwhelming need for smaller apartments, at least at NYCHA projects.'" With such negligible demand for large apartments as compared with smaller ones, it is questionable why in such a daunting housing crisis, there is such so powerful a commitment, with funds, to construct only large, and, therefore, fewer, apartments.

And on the city's citation of the UJO-managed Schaeffer Landing development, suggesting it illustrated nondiscriminatory practices:

Moreover, although Plaintiffs have not cited any statistics regarding City sponsored projects in Williamsburg, such as the one at issue, the City has cited to Schaeffer Landing, a UJO project, as an example of diversity. However, Schaeffer Landing is not a shining example since residents at Schaeffer Landing are 42% white, while the Citywide application pool, at least for NYCHA housing, is overwhelmingly non-white. "

And on why there will be a hearing (scheduled for June 14):

Accordingly, the current submissions are sufficient to warrant a hearing based on claims of discrimination, segregation, and favoritism in Williamsburg (see JA. Preston Corp. v Fabrication Enterprises, Inc., 68 NY2d at 400, supra). If through clarification and testimony, Plaintiffs establish a likelihood of success under either the Fair Housing Act or the Human Rights Laws, as to the preference, then the equities would lie in Plaintiffs favor and the harm resulting from the lack of an injunction would be irreparable-i.e., a deprivation of housing financed with public  (City and State) funds, as a result of discrimination.

ebrown@observer.com

"What a shame. A perfectly good franchise flagship, cut down in its prime."

"Yeah well I think it's fair to say that this ship has run aground. Specifically, in Los Angeles."

"Maybe it was all those reruns. Nobody needs new episodes when the show's on five times a day."

"I'll be sure to check that the TiVo has an alibi."

"What are all those New York actors going to do? Everybody's been on that show."

"Maybe I missed something. Is there an overabundance of waiters in this town?"

"Boy they sure had a good run, though."

"Tell me about it. We've had a hard time collecting evidence because all the witnesses won't stop talking about Gunsmoke."

"I'll miss those episodes that are 'ripped from the headlines'."

"Here's a headline: NBC Continues Its Goodwill Campaign."

"They had all kinds of competition these days. CSI, The Mentalist..."

"My ex-wife used to say that police procedurals are like the opposite of my ties: always in style. Wait, no. Networks treat police procedurals the way I used to treat booze: they can't get enough."

"Vulture was saying that Dick Wolf might have just been playing chicken."

"Yeah, right. Looks like this goose is cooked.

"There was speculation that TNT might pick it up."

"Dynamite. Let's go get something to eat."

For a while it looked as though executive producer Dick Wolf and NBC may have been able to come to some kind of agreement, but it looks like that’s fallen through. NBC’s press release said they will continue to work with Mr. Wolf on the spin-offs, including a new one set in Los Angeles.

‘Law & Order’ has been one of the most successful franchises in the history of television, which is why it is so critical that we continue this important brand and our relationship with Dick Wolf and his team with ‘LOLA’ and ‘Law & Order: SVU.'

The death of the flagship show means Mr. Wolf will just miss his goal of defeating Gunsmoke for the title of longest-running TV drama. We reached out to him for comment and he offered a terse statement via email: "Never complain. Never explain."

What will New York's actors do without Law & Order? [WSJ]

Lloyd Blankfein paid cash for his new $26 million apartment--before his old place even sold. [NYP]

At Carnegie Hall, Lady Gaga performs "sober version of one of the most earnest pop songs of all time: 'Stand By Me.'" [NYDN]

The Wall Street sequel has its Cannes premiere. [Bloomberg]

Obama hangs out downtown. [NYT]

NPR investigation shows gulf oil spill to be at least 10 times larger than previously believed. [NPR]

Union Square bomb scare interrupts Buzzcocks show. [NYDN]