Simone Bryce is a lawyer specializing in child advocacy, namely protecting children from abusive parents.
Background[]
According to Casey Novak, she is the "Mother Theresa of children's rights". One of her first clients was Olivia Benson, who was 16 at the time. Benson was facing criminal charges after accidentally putting her mother Serena in the hospital during a fight where the older woman was heavily intoxicated and outraged upon learning her daughter was dating someone. Bryce helped Benson to avoid doing hard time for the assault. When Benson later became an officer in the Manhattan Special Victims Unit, she occasionally referred abused children to Bryce.
Intoxicated[]
Sometime later, the two old friends were on opposite sides of a case when Benson gave Bryce the name of 15-year-old Carrie Lynn Eldridge, whose mother Denise was abusing the SVU and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in a borderline-psychotic attempt to break up her daughter's relationship with 21-year-old Justin Sharp. Benson was just hoping that Bryce would defuse the older Eldridge's efforts, but this backfired when Carrie apparently murdered Denise and fled from the city with Sharp. It would later emerge that Carrie had been trying to protect herself from her mother, whose erratic behavior had been caused by years of heavy drinking.
On the day of her death, she assaulted Carrie, but Carrie initially refused to talk about these circumstances. Bryce went with an extreme emotional disturbance defense, claiming that Carrie's actions had been caused by Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. When Benson later discovered that Carrie had been taking birth-control at the time of the murder, indicating that she was not experiencing symptoms of PMDD, Bryce convinced Carrie to come clean about what had really happened. Soon after, Carrie plead out to manslaughter and received a five-year sentence in a juvenile corrections center. (SVU: "Intoxicated")