Mariska Hargitay

On TV she's beloved as a relentless, hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners crusader for justice. Turns out her real life work on behalf of abuse survivors is a case of life imitating art and with astounding results.

- MATTIE KAHN

Olivia Benson needs DNA evidence to crack a case, but Mariska Hargitay has known her character long enough to be sure she wouldn't ask like that. It's a sweltering summer Friday in New York, but Hargitay will work until sunset as she shoots the upcoming season of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The show has made her not so much a network television fixture as a patron saint of justice—a badge-brandishing heroine so beloved that Taylor Swift named a cat after her.

Hargitay and I meet at Chelsea Piers, on a set where she is finishing a hospital scene, approaching the bed of a survivor of gruesome violence. It's a staple SVU setup, the kind Hargitay could pull off without thinking. Except just before the director calls action, she has a note.

More than two decades into filming the show, and after almost as much time at the helm of the Joyful Heart Foundation, which she founded to support survivor healing and end the epidemic of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse in the United States, Hargitay has a keener understanding than most of how these conversations tend to go. Her character is supposed to be checking to see whether this victim has old bedding that might tie the suspect to the crime. Now, does that seem realistic? Who's holding on to unwashed sheets? Hargitay huddles with the writers and revises. Pen in hand, she does not wait for permission. What would Benson do? Trust her instincts, of course. She swaps in her preferred line and nails the entire scene in less than 15 minutes.