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| “ | How can you think for a minute that I would let my own child die? What kind of mother do you think I am?! You don't know what I did for her. For 10 years, I stayed in a nightmare marriage, just so she could have a real home. I fought for custody for her, but he had more money, more lawyers. He turned me into an addict, and then used it against me! That bastard! He stole her away from me! He told her lies about me! He made her afraid of me! I loved her! | „ |
| ~ Karen protesting her innocence. |
Karen Gaines is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Bitter Fruit". She is a drug addict who has her own daughter kidnapped to punish her ex-husband for taking custody away from her, only for the scheme to backfire and result in the girl's death.
She was portrayed by Ellen Greene.
Early life[]
Karen was a buyer for Bloomingdale's who was once married to a wealthy businessman, with whom she had a young daughter, Jodie. Their marriage was a rocky one, however, and it worsened when Karen became addicted to prescription medication. Eventually, they got divorced, and spent the next few years making the divorce as painful as possible for each other; they both used Jodie as a weapon, each telling the girl that the other was a bad parent who didn't really love her. The family dynamic got so bad that Jodie had to be put in therapy, and was forced to make the decision to cut Karen out of her life after she refused to let her go home following a visitation.
Karen sought help at the Gardner Clinic, a substance abuse rehabilitation center, where she met recovering alcoholic Frank Sullivan and started a relationship with him. Obsessed with getting back at her ex-husband for taking custody of Jodie away, she asked Sullivan to help her kidnap Jodie to "teach him a lesson". Sullivan puts her in touch with one of his glaziers, petty criminal Nick Capetti, who agrees to kidnap Jodie for a fee; neither Karen nor Sullivan is aware that Capetti has two criminal convictions for attempted rape.
"Bitter Fruit"[]
Capetti kidnaps Jodie, but he panics when she screams for help and hits her over the head with a bottle, killing her; glass shards end up embedded in her scalp and hands. He wraps her body in draping cloth and dumps her in a junkyard, where she is soon found by a homeless man.
NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis investigate the murder and track down Capetti from security footage of a glazier's truck in the area of the kidnapping and talking to Sullivan, who tells them that he sent Capetti to do a job in the area on the day of the murder. Briscoe and Curtis arrest Capetti after searching his delivery truck and finding shards of the same glass found in Jodie's scalp and hands and the same kind of sheet that she was found wrapped in. Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy and Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid charge him with felony murder. During his arraignment, however, Karen shoots him twice in the back, killing him.
McCoy tries to charge Karen with murder to discourage similar acts of vengeance, even though the media hails her as a hero and the prospects of her being convicted are dim. Kincaid, who feels some sympathy for Karen, talks McCoy into charging her with first-degree manslaughter with a sentencing recommendation. During her trial, Karen's ex-husband testifies that she was a loving mother and that she was out of her mind with grief when she killed Capetti; he also says that he wishes he had killed Capetti himself. Karen is found guilty, but the trial judge gives her a lenient sentence of two years spent in a halfway house.
While reading about Karen in a newspaper, Briscoe, himself a recovering alcoholic, discovers that she was treated at the Gardner Clinic along with Sullivan. Suspicious, McCoy has Sullivan arrested as an accessory to murder and sits in on his interrogation, eventually getting him to admit that he paid Capetti to commit the kidnapping at Karen's behest. He and Kincaid talk to Karen's ex-husband, who says that Karen used Jodie to get back at him for divorcing her, and that he only said that she was a good mother because her lawyer told him to. Jodie's therapist, meanwhile, tells them that, while both parents were emotionally abusive, Karen was so obsessed with punishing her ex-husband that she was willing to harm her own child to do it.
McCoy ultimately charges Karen with felony murder, arguing that, because the murder occurred during the kidnapping that she orchestrated, she is responsible for it. Karen's lawyer, Bud Greer, tries to get the charges dismissed, but McCoy block that attempt by persuading Capetti's mother to say that she heard him talking on the phone to Karen, who forbade him to take the girl to a hospital; it is implied that she is lying, but McCoy stops short of suborning perjury by declining to call Mrs. Capetti as a witness. Karen denies telling Capetti not to help Jodie and insists that she loved her daughter, but she bursts into remorseful tears when McCoy replies that she hated her ex-husband more.
McCoy and Kincaid work out a deal with Greer in which she will once again plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter, but that this time she will serve a sentence of six years and go to prison instead of a halfway house.
External links[]
- Karen Gaines on the Law & Order Wiki
