When Mariska Hargitay accepted her honor at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards on November 8, it was an emotional moment.
Hargitay is best known for her on-screen performance, but once the cameras stop rolling, her work does not. She’s spent years bringing attention to the enormous number of rape kits in the U.S. criminal justice system that have been unjustly shelved, instead of law enforcement processing them and using the evidence to find rapists. Hargitay produced the 2017 documentary I Am Evidence, which helped reveal the shocking national backlog. And through the Joyful Heart Foundation, she has worked for years to serve survivors of sexual and domestic violence and the trauma professionals who help guide them. The foundation’s mandate is also to work on the cultural conversation around assault, very much including men, not just women and gender minorities.
Hargitay, the longtime star of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and founder of Joyful Heart, is so beloved for her characteristic mix of toughness and heart that a star-studded list of names lined up to pay tribute to her in a video at the Women of the Year event.
“She’s drop-dead gorgeous and the nicest woman—outside of my wife—that I’ve ever met,” Ice-T crowed of his costar. Melissa McCarthy called her “funny, weird, and wonderful.” Ali Wentworth named her “the life of the party.” And Tarana Burke said exactly what we all want to hear about celebrities we love: “It warmed my heart to see that she was who I thought she would be.”
But of course, there is just person who we all really, really want to see honoring Olivia Benson, and that's Christopher Meloni, a.k.a. SVU’s Elliot Stabler himself. And Stabler came through. “I have been trusted with one task tonight, introduce someone who needs no introduction, who I’ve been working with for 13 years, and been friends with for 22,” he started. “Because tonight, I am here to right a wrong that has festered for far too long. Twenty years ago an interviewer asked me about Mariska, and I said, ‘She has great energy.’ She read the article, she brought it to me in hair and makeup, she goes, ‘What is this?’ I go, ‘What do you mean? You have great energy.’ She goes, ‘You don’t say someone has great energy, because what that means is you have nothing nice to say about them, you have nothing original or truthful, you might as well say I have a great personality.’
“And to be truthful, have you ever met Mariska?” Meloni continued. “She’s got great energy, great personality. So tonight, I say this: Radiant. Charming. Funny. Generous. Elegant. Bawdy. Honest. Appreciative. Inclusive. Direct. Vivacious. That’s my favorite word; it comes from the Latin, to live. Which is what she does with great passion, every day, with everyone that she engages, be they friends, family, strangers, or commitments.”
He continued, “She’s fearless, without the bravado of the warrior stance, but always with the open arms, the open heart. She’s a connector of people, because she knows we’re all better when we’re working together. She is as comfortable in the sacred as she is in the profane; she is a soul in the constant search of the beauty and the truth that she knows that this world holds, but she also knows requires vigilance, persistence, and insistence to pry magic from the often times mundane reality. Her first instance is to always react with compassion and empathy. She sees hope in the hopeless; she sees the potential in the you, and me, and us.”
Hargitay was emotional as she accepted her award. “My husband and my kids will tell you that one of my go-to responses when one of them asks me to do something is, ‘I decide!’” she said. “I will admit that I can overuse it—say, at the dinner table one of them will say, ‘Will you pass the spaghetti sauce?’ And I’ll respond with, ‘I decide.’
“But it’s very much who I am, and a part of me, and it actually ended up as one of the pull quotes in the beautiful piece that Marisa Meltzer wrote to accompany this incredible award,” she continued. “Right there, in the middle of the page, it says, ‘I decide.’ So in that spirit, I want to talk about the word glamour.
“The dictionary says that glamour is ‘an exciting and often illusory and romantic attractiveness,’ or in another dictionary, ‘an attractive or exciting quality that makes certain people or things seem appealing.’ What’s the obvious implication? That glamour covers, that glamour is surface, and that the real is underneath.”
She went on, “So to that I would like to say: No, I decide. Glamour isn’t surface. I’m a girl who likes to put on a pretty dress, who likes to put on makeup, who likes to glam it up. I love glamour. I love it. But it’s not illusory. It’s not so I seem appealing. It’s not to cover anything. I love glamour because it expresses, not because it hides.
“I’m going to be so bold as to say that for those you’ve chosen to honor tonight, and for that matter, for the billions—billions—of women we stand for and fight for, that our glamour is something that lives and shines and breathes deep, deep within us.
“It’s our deep desire for change. It’s our insistence on the good. It’s how we show up for our daily battles, big and small, public and private, the ones that last only a moment and the ones that stretch a lifetime. Inner beauty. Inner poise. Inner strength. That’s glamour to me. Truth and authenticity, radiating outward.
“So you don’t tell us what our glamour means. We decide. And is it attractive? Hell, yes. I’m crushing on the other honorees like you wouldn’t believe. I just said to Samantha, ‘I’m not being greedy, but in addition to the award I would like to have dinner with the other honorees.’
“I also want to say, Samantha Barry, and Glamour, that you’ve given me a bigger gift than you know: an evening that for me is very much about my mother. We have many pictures of her in our house, and my God, she is just so unbelievably glamorous. But I think that her glamour, her real glamour, the glamour of her luminous, tender, searching heart, was deeper and more beautiful than she ever knew.
“She would be 88 now, and I think she would have liked this evening very much. I also think that she knows more now than when she died. She is here with us, and she is here with me, sitting with us and sitting with me, and I am so happy and grateful that we get to learn these things together. Thank you for this incredible honor.”
The Glamour Woman of the Year Awards ceremony was held in compliance with local health and safety guidelines.