Law & Order: SVU season 19 spoilers: Quantico, Homeland alum join ‘Harvey Weinstein episode’

There is an upcoming episode of Law & Order: SVU season 19 that is inspired in part by the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Yet, it takes a slightly different form than you would at first expect.

As reported previously, this episode is going to actually take place within the confines of the airline industry and focus on some of the abusive ways in which pilots can take advantage of flight attendants and other people working underneath them. It was planned even before the Weinstein allegations came out, but some of the horrific accusations there have led to SVU touching on even more of the subject matter there while moving it to a different industry.

Per Deadline, we now have a little bit of news in terms of the episode’s primary guest cast.

Martin Donovan – Best known for Homeland and Weeds, Donovan is going to play a commercial airline pilot, one of the characters at the heart of this story.

Yasmine Al Massri – Meanwhile, the former Quantico actress is also jumping on board as the co-pilot to Donovan’s character. During the episode, she will accuse him of sexual assault and the case will unfold from there.

We imagine that for Benson and the rest of the Special Victims Unit, there are going to be a number of different challenges that they have to face here. For one, the airline industry can be, (much like Hollywood) a boys’ club at the top with machismo, misogynistic people who do whatever they want and refuse to squeal on other people. Trying to find people to talk and collecting evidence in this case could be difficult because there may not be all that many people willing to cooperate. It’s unfortunate and terrible but we’re going ahead and preparing for that now.

Beyond that, there’s another issue here when it comes to jurisdiction. How much authority will the NYPD have over this case if there are assaults that happen at other places in the country / the world? Airplane pilots and other employees often find themselves in a strange space given that they are often in different parts of the world — we’re not a legal expert so we’re not entirely sure how the process will work for people who are accused of doing a number of different assaults in different places.

(Photo: NBC.)