The identity of who turned in Mike Ross has finally been revealed!
In tonight's episode, Mike and Harvey discover that Sheila Sazs, Louis Litt's ex-girlfriend, sent an anonymous email to the feds letting them know Mike might be a fraud. (You can read the full episode recap here.) EW spoke with showrunner Aaron Korsh about why he picked Sheila, who else the writers considered, and what this reveal means for Louis and the case going forward.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you decide that Sheila was the one who turned Mike in?
AARON KORSH: The writers' ideas of whodunit, so to speak, were more along the lines of Logan Sanders trying to get back with Rachel, or Robert Zane or Laura Zane trying to break Mike and Rachel up once they found out. We've seen so many people learn Mike's secret over the years, and most of them have either used it to get back at him, like Trevor, or have used it for their own selfish, self-serving ends—like Louis using it to get his name on the door. I thought, in real life, if you would find this out and you were a responsible person in most positions, you would just report it. You would call the authorities because it's the right thing to do. And, I thought, what better person to do that than Sheila? She's straight, on the up-and-up, and this is an affront to her beloved Harvard Law School. She did it because it was the right thing, and I like that motivation better than someone trying to stick it to him.
What about Gretchen? Why was she the one who got this ball rolling?
That was literally in the rewrite of the episode. It just came out. Also, last year, there was a woman in Pennsylvania who got promoted to partner at a law firm, and it was the promotion that ended up giving her greater scrutiny, and they realized she may have committed fraud. The writers came up with Mike getting nominated to junior partner, and then it was sort of like "Woah, what if it was ultimately the promotion [that gets him caught], and what if Gretchen calls a magazine to get this article?"
Does Harvey find out Gretchen's role in all of this?
That remains to be seen—by me even. We're sort of working on season 6 now, and we haven't figured that out yet.
Okay, but how does Sheila apparently breaking her word affect Louis going forward?
The biggest thing it affects is his relationship with Sheila. He's certainly not going to do nothing about this. It will affect his relationship with her more than it will his attitude toward Mike. But, it's going to have a little snowball effect. Some of the actions he's going to take are going to affect the case. Sheila's involvement in this thing is not limited in any shape or way to us finding out she was the one who wrote the email. It's going to have ramifications that last through this season.
Before you go, can you tease what we can expect in next week's episode?
We've seen that Anita Gibbs is not to be trifled with and that she'll do certain things to win. One of our writers contacted a lawyer friend of his who was a prosecutor that said this is what he would do if he found out a kid was a fraud at a law firm: He would go with the assumption that they knew. He would start from the bottom up, trying to get people to turn on those above them and to say that they knew this person was a fraud. That's what would happen in real life, and that's what Gibbs is going to do. She starts with Donna and then goes up the ranks after people to get them to turn on each other. That's going to happen through the end of the season, and next week is the next step in that.
Suits airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET on USA.
