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Italian-born actor Franco Nero guest-starred as an arrogant diplomat "tipped to be Italy's next prime minister" who is accused of sexually assaulting a Sudanese hotel maid whose credibility soon comes under scrutiny.
The plot mirrored Dominique Strauss-Kahn's brush with a Guinean chambermaid who alleged he had raped her in a New York hotel suite, only for the case to fall apart when prosecutors questioned her truthfulness.
"Another DSK," shrugged one of the Law & Order detectives as Nero's character faced interrogation, after Nero's character was pulled off a flight out of New York - just as Strauss-Kahn had been.
The show also recreated a "perp walk" in front of press cameras like the one that Strauss-Kahn - a potential challenger to Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency - made in handcuffs.
Entirely fictional
But the series' producers insisted at the outset of the show that the story was entirely fictional.
The Law & Order franchise has a reputation for ripping its plots from the headlines, with the original series, cancelled in 2010 after a 20-year run, borrowing freely from the Tawana Brawley rape case in its early episodes.
Brawley, an African-American teenager at the time, alleged in 1987 that she had been raped by six white men, including police officers, but her claims were rejected by a grand jury that concluded she made up the story.
Set in New York, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit started shooting its new season in July, two months after then-IMF director Strauss-Kahn was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting chambermaid Nafissatou Diallo.
With criminal charges dropped, Strauss-Kahn appeared on French television recently and acknowledged "a moral failing" on his part. He still faces civil proceedings that are set to begin later in September.
