Casey Novak

Casey Novak is a fictional character on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), portrayed by Diane Neal since 2003.

Character

As played by Neal, Novak is a young, tough, focused prosecutor who, while sometimes deeply affected by the horrific situations she deals with on the job, does not often reveal her emotions. Novak can sometimes see the world in black and white and follows the law strictly without sympathy for the suspects and their situation, unless she is convinced otherwise by the detectives in SVU, or by extreme mitigating circumstances. Her idealism becomes especially clear in situations involving abuse of power. Although she quickly lost her innocence when dealing with sex crimes, she still shows uneasiness when dealing with the gray areas of human involvement, preferring the letter of the law to the messiness of each individual reality.

The season 7 episode "Influence" revealed that, in her final year of law school, Novak was engaged to a man who suffered from schizophrenia. She ended the relationship when his symptoms became so severe she felt she no could no longer be intimate with him. He eventually became homeless. While she developed a deep compassion for the mentally ill afterward, she still feels guilty for not being able to help him.

As the SVU Prosecutor

Novak prosecuted white collar crimes before being assigned full-time to the 16th Precinct (also known as the Sex Crimes unit) in 2003, after Alexandra Cabot, transferred into the Witness Protection Program. Following her first case, Novak asked the District Attorney (DA), Arthur Branch (played by Fred Dalton Thompson), to reassign her because she felt she couldn’t handle the intensity of prosecuting sex crimes, especially those committed against children. Branch refused, saying that he had been eyeing her for the job for some time, and thought she was a perfect choice for the position. She stayed on, and after nearly three years in the position she has become more at ease, even as the acts of sexual abuse she sees daily still repulse her.

Novak arrived on the scene with guns blazing, intent on leaving her mark on the bureau, and immediately approached Detectives Elliot Stabler (played by Christopher Meloni) and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) by taking a hands-on approach, second-guessing their detective work and interfering with their interrogation of a suspect. It took a few months and a candid conversation with Capt. Don Cragen (Dann Florek) to understand the necessity of working as a team. Not until spring of 2004 did Novak connect on a personal/professional level with Detectives Benson, Stabler, and John Munch (Richard Belzer). By September 2004, her relationship with Stabler in particular had developed to a level of professional respect and friendship. Before, the detectives had made little or no contact with her, partially because they strongly respected Novak's predecessor, Alexandra Cabot.

In May 2004, she went after Judge Oliver Taft (Tom Skerritt), when she became convinced that he was biased in the cases he presided over. Taft was eventually removed from his position after she proved he communicated ex parte with a wealthy woman accused of murdering her child, and had wrongfully convicted another, poorer woman of infanticide 10 years earlier.

Like Cabot, Novak also became a crime victim while on the job. In early 2005, the brother of a Bosnian rape victim that Novak was helping assaulted her in her office, sneaking into Novak's office while Benson goes down the street for coffee. Though not fatal, the attack was apparently meant as a form of honor killing because the sister, an undocumented immigrant, was required to disclose her rape in order to qualify for a "U visa" under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000. The brother, a fundamentalist Muslim, believed the assault was a disgrace upon his family. Novak helped the rape victim earn a permanent visa, but is forced off of the case by Arthur Branch in favor of Tracy Kibre (Bebe Neuwirth), who wins conviction of the rapist, Gabriel Duval (Alfred Molina).

Novak has a mentor-student relationship with former judge Mary Conway Clark (Marlo Thomas), for whom she clerked after law school. In "Poison", Novak helps Clark win freedom for the woman wrongly convicted of poisoning her daughter, and Novak and Clark then team up to remove Judge Taft from the bench.

As was the case with Cabot, Novak has a snarkily adversarial relationship with her former supervisor, Elizabeth Donnelly (Judith Light), who has since been appointed a judge. Novak often finds herself at odds with Judge Donnelly, and in one case ("Rockabye"), Novak forces Donnelly (acting upon a directive from Arthur Branch) to recuse herself from a case. Occasionally, she finds herself opposing attorneys with whom she has worked before.

Novak and Benson often share secrets that their collegaues are not aware of. Novak first told Benson in "Influence" of her failed engagement, and in the Season 6 episode "Intoxicated", Benson reveals to Novak that at age 16, she accepted a marriage proposal from a 21-year old senior at Siena College, where Benson's mother, Serena, was a professor. When Serena Benson found about Olivia's affair with the older student, Serena flew into an intoxicated rage after a night of drinking, and Olivia was forced to strike her mother to defend herself, similar to the incident that led Carrie Eldridge to kill her mother, Denise.

Trivia

• Novak plays softball in a law enforcement league on the ADA team and likes to visit the batting cage. Stabler first recognized her from having played her in a game (which her team apparently beat Stabler's team of police officers), and Cragen found her in the batting cages to discuss a case. When she is attacked in her office in the Season 6 episode "Night", she uses her bat in an attempt to ward off her attacker.
• Novak rides her bike to work, even during rush hour.
• Novak's father was a door gunner on a Huey helicopter in Vietnam who was shot down three times and earned a Purple Heart.
• Neal appeared in Law and Order: SVU (Season 3, Episode 10 "Ridicule") in which she portrayed a female rapist, Amelia Chase, who was convicted by Alexandra Cabot.