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WHEN crusading journalist Chris Hansen told his guests to “have a seat” they really did need to sit down – because they were men who’d been caught discussing having sex with children.

His hit US TV show To Catch a Predator spawned hundreds of copycats across the globe, where online vigilante groups snare alleged paedophiles in similar stings.

Now Hansen is considering suing Robert Pattinson for the way the British actor has portrayed him in a controversial new movie called Primetime.

That’s because the Batman star’s Oscar-tipped film makes the reporter, who confronted potential child sex offenders in front of the cameras, the bad guy rather than the abusers his ground-breaking program exposed.

In the mid-2000s Hansen’s show To Catch a Predator worked with law enforcement and an online vigilante group to reveal the depraved men thinking of having sex with under 16s.

Nearly 200 men were arrested, including an agent for the Department of Homeland Security, a teacher and a firefighter.

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The NBC show ended in 2007 after a district attorney with an interest in teenage boys shot himself before Hansen could quiz him.

To many predator hunters Hansen is a hero.

But Batman star Pattinson depicts the 67-year-old journalist as an ego driven prima donna chiefly interested in ratings and getting To Catch a Predator onto prime time telly.

Emmy award winner Hansen, who is still bringing alleged child abusers to book on a different show, is angry about Primetime, which is in UK cinemas now.

He raged: “I think it’s an insult to the thousands of men and women who work hard every day to protect children from predators. 

“They turn something that is very positive, very challenging and not without risk into what is essentially a horror film.

“I guess it’s not surprising that a Hollywood studio would act in such an exploitative or predatory manner. 

“We’re talking about an industry that was led by perhaps one of the biggest predators to walk the planet, Harvey Weinstein.”

In 2004 when To Catch a Predator set its first trap, Hansen didn’t even know if any child abusers would fall into it.

Back then social media was still in its infancy, with Facebook only available to university students.

But an US online vigilante group called Perverted Justice realised that depraved men were using chat rooms on sites such as AOL and Yahoo to contact minors.

Hansen decided to link up with them to expose this danger. 

Perverted Justice used adult males and females who looked like children to set up profiles as under 15s in the chat rooms.

They then waited for the men to make the first move, with many of the digital deviants quickly sending explicit questions.

Perverted Justice’s decoys strung them along, hoping they would ask to visit them.

Rather than going to the ‘children’s’ homes, though, they were turning up at a suburban house filled with hidden cameras.

The decoy greeted them at the door, led them to the kitchen and made an excuse to leave the room.

At that point Hansen would walk in and ask them to “have a seat.”

He recalled: “In the first investigation, we didn’t know what was going to happen. We had partnered with Perverted Justice and I didn’t know if we were going to get anybody showing up. 

“Yet, there we were over two and a half days in Long Island and 17 guys surfaced, including a New York City firefighter.”

Even more potential sex offenders turned up for the next sting in the capital Washington DC.

One of them was rabbi David Kaye, who was later jailed for six and a half years for trying to solicit sex from a 13-year-old boy over the internet.

Wishing to make sure more of these men were brought to book, the NBC show teamed up with the police.

Cops in Harris County, Texas were waiting to arrest the men after Hansen confronted them in 2006.

This was dangerous work for all involved, because two of the alleged offenders were serving soldiers.

When one of the men did a runner he was tasered.

Hansen was praised in Congress for his work, with the show leading the House of Representatives to investigate the threat of online predators.

As To Catch a Predator’s ratings climbed and climbed, human rights lawyers started to question its ethics.

In many parts of the US it was an offence to attempt to entice a minor to have sex, but there were suggestions of entrapment. 

There were calls for catching criminals to be left to the professionals.

That’s exactly what Hansen’s show appeared to do when Perverted Justice realised that Texan prosecutor Bill Conradt was the man messaging someone pretending to be aged 13.

When Conradt wouldn’t go to the To Catch a Predator house in Murphy, Texas in November 2006 the police chief decided to go to him.

With Hansen’s TV crew following them, the armed officers smashed their way into his home.

But when they arrived Conradt shot himself dead.

The prosecutor’s relatives sued NBC, winning a £75million out of court settlement.

Charges against 23 other men in Murphy, Texas were dropped because the online chats had not taken place in the county.

To Catch a Predator was scrapped.

It is the build up to Conradt’s death that forms the tense finale to Primetime, which has been a hit at the US box office.

It depicts Hansen as desperate to snare the powerful district attorney at all costs.

Pattinson’s version of the veteran journalist sneers, snarls and shouts at his team.

Variety magazine described the actor’s portrait of Hansen “as a horror villain” and Hansen thinks it is “unhinged.”

Primetime shows little interest in the sex offenders and focuses more on the journalist’s alleged affair with a younger woman.

In 2011 the paparazzi caught the married father-of-two meeting TV news reporter Kristyn Caddell, who was 21 years his junior.

Hansen denied cheating on his wife Mary Joan, who divorced him seven years later.

He has talked about suing the film’s producers, which include Pattinson, but isn’t keen to get caught up in a legal case.

The actor defended his movie, commenting: “The fact that people are still discussing the ethics of it, of a 20-year-old TV show, it’s absolutely insane.” 

The reason the ethics of To Catch a Predator are being discussed so keenly is that predator hunting is even more relevant today than it was two decades ago.

According to the children’s charity the NSPCC over 9,000 child sex abuse offences in the UK a year “involved an online element.” 

Hansen continues to name and shame such offenders on an online TV channel called TruBlu.

It is estimated that 140 vigilante groups in the UK are also trying to snare paedophiles online.

Cambridge University academic Mark de Rond, who last year appeared in a documentary titled Predators about the impact of Hansen’s show, spent time working with these secretive organisations.

He questions the way that To Catch a Predator “commercialised” the “public humiliation” of the men the show caught.

But he defends the groups which are trying to expose online sexual offenders, telling The Sun: “Paedophilia is a crime, it’s kind of the lowest of the low and it’s the kind of crime that really almost any means can justify when you are trying to stop it.

”Because what can be more important to keep a kid safe?”

That, though, is not the perspective of Primetime.

Near the end of the film, Pattinson says to one of his doubters “your definition of bad and my definition of bad are vastly different.”

Many cinemagoers watching the movie are likely to think the same thing, but for different reasons.

HE stole the show on last night’s opening episode of Celebrity Traitors, honestly announcing to the group that he was, in fact, a traitor.

Alongside his comical moments on the BBC show, actor Richard E Grant also gave some touching references to his late wife Joan Washington.

After host Claudia Winkleman selected the Withnail & I star as a traitor alongside presenter Maya Jama, Richard spoke about “love of his life” Joan, who passed away in 2021.

Delighted at being a traitor, he told viewers: “My wife said to me four days before she died, she said Richard try and find a pocketful of happiness in each day, and I feel like I’ve got a wheelbarrowful and then some.”

Richard’s heartfelt confession came just minutes before his now legendary Celebrity Traitors gaffe revealing his traitor status.

The relationship between Academy Award-nominee Richard, 69, and his wife of 35 years was so romantic it could have played out on the silver screen.

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Richard met dialect coach Joan at a London studio, called The Actors’ Centre, in 1982, where she had been teaching an accent class.

At the time, Joan was married to someone else, and had a son called Tom, but Richard could not take his eyes off her.

In 1994, he told The Independent he was captivated, saying: “She was wearing a boiler suit and had fairly short, cropped hair and Kicker shoes, and was chain-smoking, which I thought was insane.”

But he added: “I thought she had the most wonderful voice and huge, sort of monkey eyes. She seemed fairly frenetic. I thought that she was really cute and all that.”

Joan gave Richard a lesson in developing an Irish accent and he says they “instantly” clicked.

But initially, and amusingly, Joan found him “annoying”.

She said: “I used to take a class of about 20 people and I actually used to find him quite annoying because he’d get the giggles at quite the wrong moment and I was a strict teacher.”

Giggling aside and getting to know Richard during private lessons, Joan quickly realised she was falling for him.

She previously described her then-marriage as “extremely bad at the time” and slowly found herself smitten with the handsome actor in her class.

Recalling the way she was feeling, Joan told The Independent that she soon realised she was “madly in love with him”, adding: “I do believe that there’s one person on the globe that’s meant for you.”

The pair became a couple a year later and their relationship went from strength-to-strength, even though their jobs often meant they spent great chunks of time apart.

Richard said he never believed in marriage until he met Joan.

“My parents were divorced when I was 11 and it made such a profound impression on my life that I suppose I thought that by not getting married, you could avoid your life being carved in two. But that changed,” he told The Independent.

Although they were often apart, Richard and Joan would speak on the phone regularly and write to each other daily.

Eventually, Richard decided it was time to make an honest woman of his girlfriend with a proposal that could have been straight out of a movie.

Arriving home to London for Christmas following six weeks away in Africa, he couldn’t wait any longer and popped the question at the airport.

Richard previously recalled: “So I came back and went on bended knee with my trolley at 6.30am at Heathrow Airport – and, luckily for me, she said yes.”

Richard, who was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and Joan married in 1986.

Richard once described their marriage as “the story of my adult life”, saying they began a conversation when they met and never really stopped.

Following their marriage, the newlyweds were keen to start a family together. Sadly, their journey was a difficult one.

Joan suffered three miscarriages. They were then left heartbroken when their first child, a daughter called Tiffany, died very soon after she was born.

Richard later told YOU magazine: “Until that time I had no idea how common it is to lose babies and what it actually meant.”

Thankfully, the couple later welcomed their rainbow baby – a second daughter, who they named Olivia, in 1989.

Richard has since described Olivia as his and Joan’s “miracle baby”.

In 2019, the devoted father looked proud as punch as he walked the red carpet with Olivia on his arm at the Oscars.

Speaking to ABC, he said at the time: “My daughter, absolutely gorgeous, she’s 30 and she works in casting so I’m guaranteed a job for life, hopefully.”

Richard and Olivia run a unisex fragrance company together, called JACK.

Speaking about her life with her dad, Olivia added: “I’m just proud. It’s been the best ride to go on together.”

Unlike dozens of other Hollywood stars, Richard and Joan’s beautiful relationship lasted the distance and their love for one another was unbreakable.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2015, he described their marriage as “gold dust”.

Tragically, in 2021, Richard confirmed on Instagram that his wonderful wife had passed away at the age of 74, following a battle with lung cancer. 

Sharing an emotional video of himself dancing with Joan, Richard wrote: “Joan – Love of my Life, giver of Life to our daughter Olivia.

“Our hearts are broken with the loss of your Life last night. 35 years married and 38 together. To be truly known and seen by you, is your immeasurable gift. Do not forget us, sweet Monkee-mine.”

The actor was left devastated at the loss and said experienced further heartbreak how some friends reacted to the news, claiming a couple stopped speaking to him and even crossed the road to avoid speaking to him about his grief.

He shared: “Subsequent to her death, I have had people cross the road rather than talk. Whether they think you’re going to fall apart and you’re an emotional wreck, I don’t know. But I will never speak to them again.”

Before she passed, Richard admitted she gave him a “hilarious” list of women he must never date after she passed – although he said he does not expect to fall in love again.

Two years ago, he admitted he still writes her letters every night to stay in touch. 

He told The Guardian: “I write to her every night. [I write down] everything. Stuff I know would amuse her… I have no spiritual or religious delusion that I’m ever going to get a reply.

“But after 38 years of marriage, I can hear what her response would be. It feels as close a connection as I can have. And I’ve found it very hopeful, that at the end of the day I’m having a conversation.”

In early September, Richard marked the fifth anniversary of her death with a touching tribute.

On Instagram, he wrote: “Five years ago today, my beloved wife Joan died at 7:30 in the evening. We were holding each other’s hands when she drew her last breath.”

In June 2026, Olivia and husband Florian Herbst – who wed in 2024 – welcomed their first child, a son, making Richard a grandfather for the first time.

The proud actor referred to his late wife on Instagram when he announced the news, calling the baby “our grandson.”

In an Instagram video in June 2026, an emotional Richard said: “I’m so grateful for the safe arrival of our grandson. Life truly is miraculous.”

In addition to this, in September he shared a clip of him carrying his grandkid on a walk, saying: “No better way to start my day bobbing our sleeping grandchild along Petersham meadow with Annie Lennox playing in my head.”