Alexandra Cabot

Alexandra Cabot is a fictional character within the Law & Order universe. She is a primary character in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Conviction. Cabot is portrayed by Stephanie March.

Character overview

Cabot first appears in the SVU episode "Wrong is Right", when she hired to work with SVU as their permanent ADA to oversee the legality of its arrests, following a rotating mix of ADAs (among them Abbie Carmichael of the original Law & Order). While she empathizes with the sexual assault victims she deals with, her strict code of legal ethics often forces her to make harsh decisions and judgments that go against her personal feelings. She does occasionally bend the rules to suit her own notions of the meaning of justice, however, often with unpleasant results. In the episode "Guilt", she lies to detectives about having a search warrant in order to convict a serial child molester, and aggressively pressures one of the molester's victims to testify against him. The victim later attempts suicide, leaving him with severe brain damage. She is let off with a one-month suspension, but never truly forgives herself.

Departure from SVU

Cabot was taken out of the show in the episode "Loss", in which she was prosecuting a powerful drug dealer named Rafael Zapata Gaveria, one of Colombian drug lord Cesar Velez's top lieutenants. Zapata had brutally raped and murdered an undercover DEA agent. Cabot received a threat on her life, as well as that of her mother. Despite warnings from her colleagues, Cabot continues the case, unwilling to let Zapata scare her. A key witness is murdered in a car bombing right before Cabot's eyes. Cabot initially wants to try Zapata, even with no witness and her own life on the line, but after pressuring from the SVU detectives and District Attorney Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson) that her losing case wasn't worth dying for, she drops the charges. However, Zapata is immediately arrested by Federal Agents for the witness' murder. At the conclusion of the episode, she is gunned down in a drive-by shooting while saying good-night to SVU detectives Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay). Proclaimed dead in the newspapers, Cabot disappears into the Witness Protection Program, assuming the identity of an insurance agent named Emily in Wisconsin. She insists on telling Benson and Stabler the truth the night she leaves the city, however. She is replaced by Casey Novak (Diane Neal).

Reappearance

Benson and Stabler are the only ones who knew the truth about Cabot's "death" until nearly two years later (Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Ghost"), when she comes out of hiding to be a witness in a case against the assassin who tried to kill her. The hired killer goes to prison, having been found guilty under two counts of attempted murder (Cabot and an eight-year-old boy), plus four counts of murder. Cabot quickly disappears again under a new identity.

In Conviction

Her departure from witness protection and return to New York as a Bureau Chief in Conviction are not explained, as March was a last-minute addition to the cast and most of the early episodes had already been written before she was added. There were plans in a later episode to explain Cabot's departure from witness protection, and a greater exploration of her personal life and past was planned, but the cancellation of Conviction means that this will not be pursued. ^[1]

References