The Pitt’s Rape Kit Storyline Is a Quietly Revolutionary Depiction of Sexual Assault

This article discusses the plot of The Pitt Season 2, Episodes 7 and 8

Sexual assault is almost as common on television as it is in real life. Teen dramas take on date rape in “very special episodes.” Genre epics like the Game of Thrones franchise use sexual violence as a tool for character development and world-building, often with controversial results. Survivor stories abound on reality TV; in some horrific cases, cameras have even recorded questionably consensual encounters as they happened. Then, of course, there’s the perennial abundance of cop, lawyer, and doctor shows. Law & Order: SVU is currently midway through its 27th season of case-of-the-week dramatization of sex crimes, with nearly 600 episodes aired.

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Yet for all that the medium has already said on the subject, the two most recent episodes of The Pitt, “1:00 P.M.” and Thursday’s “2:00 P.M.,” prove that these depictions needn’t be redundant. When the Pitt’s heroic charge nurse, Dana (Katherine LaNasa), steps away from her inundated desk to perform a sexual assault examination, the show’s real-time storytelling gives viewers a startling, unabashedly educational look at a process whose slowness and need for precision are rarely captured on TV. Then, once the patient has been discharged, it delivers a devastating reality check that suggests this necessary ordeal can also, too often, be an exercise in futility. 

Speed and overwhelm usually define The Pitt. As exhausted healthcare workers scramble to save the life of one critically injured person, someone else on the verge of death is being wheeled into the ER, amid a din of patients in pain and families freaking out and waves of pandemonium rolling in from a standing-room-only waiting area. The story of Ilana (Tina Ivlev), a young woman who comes in for an exam after a male friend rapes her at a 4th of July barbecue, unfolds at a pace that would feel slow in any series, but on The Pitt stands out as glacial. This isn’t just a stylistic affectation on the part of “1:00 PM” co-writers Kirsten Pierre-Geyfman and The Pitt creator R. Scott Gemmill and “2:00 PM” writer Joe Sachs. As Dana explains to Ilana and trainee nurse Emma (Laëtitia Hollard), whose observation of the process makes her a surrogate for viewers who need help understanding what we’re seeing, the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) cannot leave the exam room while evidence is being collected.

Once they’ve situated Ilana in the most private space they can find, Dana, Emma, and Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), who joins the nurses for the portion of the exam that requires a physician, take pains to make her feel as comfortable as possible. “You are in control now, Ilana,” Dana tells her. “We’re here to help and support you.” While Dana is stuck in the room, Ilana can take a break whenever she’d like. The patient doesn’t immediately look comforted by these assurances, but by the end of the hour, she has confided that she’s hesitant to complete the evidence collection process because her rapist is part of her social circle. Instead of simply leaving it unfinished, she steps out before the end of “1:00 P.M.” to weigh her options and doesn’t return, having decided to continue, until about 15 minutes into “2:00 P.M.”

Though Dana is gentle (a pervasive theme this season is ER staff showing respect to patients too often denied it elsewhere), the exam is arduous and invasive. Every item of Ilana’s clothing is bagged as evidence. There are photos taken of bruises and black lights to detect bodily fluids, wet and dry swabs, specialized containers to store all of it that only Dana can touch. An advocate arrives from Pittsburgh Action Against Rape (a real organization that advised on the making of the episode), ready to supply fresh clothes, indefinite emotional support—anything Ilana needs. The Pitt staff offer her emergency contraception and meds to prevent STIs.

If these scenes feel a bit didactic, hammering home everything from the shortage of nurses with SANE training to the dozens of regulations SANEs must follow to protect evidence, their lessons serve as a corrective for many of us who’ve absorbed decades’ worth of rape-as-entertainment. Ilana’s repeated questions about how much longer the exam will take and ambivalence toward finishing it, whether or not she decides to file a police report, underscore how difficult it can be for survivors to get the care they need, even in an ideal setting. Also apparent is the impact that caring for Ilana has on the women in the room. The Pitt doesn’t use the storyline to add color to their personal histories, but if you’re familiar with the statistics, you know that at least one of these characters is likely to be a sexual assault survivor. They put on brave, professional faces for the patient. When she’s out of the room, though, we glimpse Dana tearing up.

Equally crucial is what the writers leave out. We get only the most basic facts of Ilana’s assault. The show never gives us enough details to apply our own preconceptions about what qualifies as “legitimate rape” or whether this particular victim deserves to be believed. As Pierre-Geyfman explained to the L.A. Times, the decision to avoid a trauma plot was intentional. Without dehumanizing Ilana or making her a blank canvas for us to project on, The Pitt gives us a character who captures a quintessential facet of the experience of millions of rape survivors.

In the end, the examination spans more than an hour and 15 minutes. You’d have to be dead inside not to feel your heart swell when Ilana, on her way out, tells Dana: “I’m glad you were here today.” But the story doesn’t end there. In a coda, we see Dana on the phone with the local police department. “I got a rape kit sittin’ here for two weeks that was supposed to be picked up within 72 hours,” she bellows. “You expect us to treat your officers as soon as they come in? You get a detective to pick up these kits ASAP.” The conversation reflects a shameful reality: In cities across America, thousands of rape kits have sat untested in storage facilities for decades. 

The Pitt surpasses the typical hospital show, in part, because it’s careful not to mistake the successful treatment of a single patient for a cure for the larger social ill that patient’s storyline represents. The bitter final lesson of “2:00 PM” is that it doesn’t always matter how many individuals earnestly attempt to do right by people who have been wronged. To derail justice, it only takes one person—or institution—who can’t be bothered.