Last night on The Newsroom season 3, episode 5, “Oh Shenandoah,” Aaron Sorkin stepped into the rape debate with one foot firmly in his mouth.

With Will (Jeff Daniels) languishing in jail, Maggie (Alison Pill) and Jim (John Gallagher Jr.) finally getting together, and Charlie’s (Sam Waterson) sudden – but not surprising – death, The Newsroom showrunner Aaron Sorkin may not have expected Don’s conversation with a college student to be the focal point for fans watching season 3, episode 5.

But, rightly, it has been.

Related: The Newsroom season 3, episode 5 recap: “Oh Shenandoah”

In this episode’s subplot, executive producer Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski) is tasked with tracking down a female college student who says she was raped by two of her peers. After reporting her rape to the authorities but receiving no justice, the student established a website that allowed herself and others to anonymously report sexual assaults. ACN’s new man-in-charge, Lucas Pruit (played by the convincingly repulsive B.J. Novak) wanted to bring the younger demographic to the network by putting both the victim and one of her accused in the studio together for a live debate.

In a typical The Newsroom twist, Don tracked down the accuser – Mary (Sarah Sutherland) – in order to talk her out of the debate, rather than into it. And for this, he is celebrated as a hero. But more on that later.

Don has been one of the only tolerable characters across The Newsroom‘s three seasons, but Sorkin’s character assassination knows no bounds. In a single scene, Don goes from the sarcastic voice of reason to a smug, rape culture participant, who manages to “mansplain” rape to a rape victim. Yes, really.

Don, reasonably, has some concerns about the spectacle a public debate between victim and accused would inevitably become. He is certainly correct in assuming that such a debate could quickly and easily descend into chaos. But that is where the reasonableness ends.

For one, he inexplicably believes his voice to be of equal value to a rape victim when discussing her own rape (Sorkin gives us no reason to doubt the accusation to be false – indeed, Don points out that Mary has no reason to lie, while her accused is “sketchy”).

But possibly the most damaging aspect of this plot – and there were many – was Don’s insistence that accused rapists be presumed innocent until proven guilty by a court of law. He didn’t think this because he needed to retain his objectivity as a journalist, but because he believed he was “morally obligated.” Obligated, it seems, to believe the accused is innocent of rape, but not to believe the accuser is innocent of lying. Nice one Sorkin.

Then there was the frankly bizarre and appalling choice to applaud Don’s almost stalker-like tactics to track down Mary. Yes, Sorkin – who wrote the episode – actually made Mary congratulate Don for managing to find her; this a woman who later told him “when you came in here, you wanted to go to a public place because you were scared I’d cry rape. I’m scared of getting raped. I’m scared all the time. All the time.”

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This is Aaron Sorkin, so there are still some good lines. I was almost tricked into believing Sorkin was on the right track when, in response to Don’s comment that “the kind of rape you’re talking about is difficult or impossible to prove,” Mary snapped back, “It’s not a ‘kind of rape’.”

For the most part, however, this story arc is a means to an end. For Sorkin, it is another way to attack internet culture (a thread that pervades the entirety of “Oh Shenandoah”) and to prove Don a hero. Don’s main concern with Mary’s website is that is could, and would, be used to level false attacks by vengeful women, who feel “rejected”. “The law can acquit, the internet never will,” Don tells her, knowing full well she has not, and will not, receive justice in a court of law. He is telling a survivor of rape that as no legal action has been taken, she should really be quiet and get over it.

Let’s remember that just last week, Hallie (the underused Grace Gummer) and Jim’s relationship came crashing down when the former wrote a scathing account of their relationship and posted it online. Women, it seems Sorkin is saying, are just waiting to tear down powerful men, and the internet is their weapon of choice.

The rape plot line becomes nothing more a tool for Don to prove his heroism; a way for him to demonstrate that while Charlie may be falling apart, his ethics and morals remain strong. Mary is forgotten, her needs and wants ignored. She has specifically told Don that she wishes to participate in the debate, even after he has warned her of the spectacle it is likely to become.

Mary insists on going ahead with the interview. She is the victim, it is her choice, and her voice. But Don – or, we presume, Sorkin – knows better. Rather than allowing Mary the agency to make her own choice about confronting her accused rapist, Don lies and tells his boss that he could not locate her. By doing so, we are supposed to believe Don to be some kind of hero, or saviour. He is protecting Mary from herself.

The timing of such an appalling episode could not possibly be worse. Accusations against Bill Cosby and Woody Allen have resurfaced. A recent Rolling Stone report about college gang-rape has been retracted due to the outlet’s journalistic failures.

We are expected to believe Don’s idealism is equivalent to that demonstrated by the other characters in this episode: Will, for taking the fall and staying in jail; Sloan for risking her job by taking on the Gawker-esque app ACN has launched. Don, let’s remember, who sided with the accused rapists over a rape survivor because of his morals.

By the end of the episode, the entire subplot is swept under the rug. After Don’s lie, Charlie suffered a heart attack (accompanied by the worst The Newsroom music montage to date) and Will was released from prison. Mary’s story is quickly forgotten, and is unlikely to even warrant a mention in the series finale next week. Once again the sexual assault of women – in this case young women on American college campuses – is forgotten, ignored, and rendered unimportant.

What a sorry, if not inaccurate, reflection of our society.

‘The Newsroom’ series finale “What Kind of Day Has It Been,” airs next week, Dec. 14 at 9 p.m. on HBO.

Editor’s note: A writer for The Newsroom, Alena Smith, took to Twitter on Sunday night to address the controversial sequence. She says that she was kicked out of the writer’s room when she questioned the scene: