Elliot Stabler
Fictional character on Law and order
Elliot Stabler Sr. is a fictional character, played by Christopher Meloni and one of the lead characters on the NBC police procedural series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Organized Crime.
Stabler was a main character for the first 12 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. As a result of Meloni's sudden departure from the cast at the end of the show's twelfth season, Stabler abruptly retired from the police force off-screen. Meloni later reprised the role on the spin-off series Law & Order: Organized Crime.
Synopsis
Stabler was an NYPD detective 1st Grade with Manhattan's Special Victims Unit, which investigates sex crimes. He joined the NYPD in 1986 and was promoted to detective in 1989. In show continuity, Stabler became a detective with SVU in 1992. By 1998, Stabler held the prestigious rank of Detective First Grade and was assigned to mentor his new partner, Detective Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), a police officer with six years of experience who was transferred to the SVU as a newly promoted detective. The first episode of Special Victims Unit takes place one year into Stabler and Benson's partnership.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Elliot Stabler” as fictional character on Law and order. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as fictional character on Law and order. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3051495. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1989, 1992 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elliot Stabler” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.