To Catch A Predator’s Chris Hansen nailed paedos on TV before shock suicide ended show… now film paints HIM as ‘villain’
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.
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.