Mariska Hargitay Helped To Solve Real Crimes
Mariska Hargitay is best known for her role as Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU, but she’s got a role in fighting real-life crime. She joined forces with prosecutor Kym Worthy of Michigan’s Wayne County to address a staggering backlog of over 11,000 untested rape kits.
NBC News journalist Andrea Canning explained on Today while promoting her new Dateline True Crime Weekly podcast that Worthy made it her mission to get through them all. The problem was funding because testing requires money. That’s where Hargitay stepped in, “and it’s having a ripple effect across the country. It’s making changes everywhere — for police departments, for prosecutors’ offices,” Canning said. “So hats off to Kym Worthy…. She deserves the biggest pat on the back for this. Thousands of cases were solved. They found 22 serial rapists among these kits.”