Chris Hansen , the former host of To Catch a Predator, joins me from his New York City apartment to discuss Primetime , the A24 movie directed by Lance Oppenheim starring Robert Pattinson as Hansen. “It’s offensive,” he tells me of the film which portrays him as maniacal and fame hungry. “It’s a complete fiction.” But he’s not all too worried about it. “Some critic, some freelance guy, or some movie director? I could give a rat’s ass about those people,” he adds with a chuckle. “They’re not even remotely connected to my world.” It’s been almost two decades since the last episode of To Catch A Predator aired, but for predators across the country, Hansen’s face remains among the most unwelcome of sights. He’s now the co-founder of the TruBlue network, which is home to his myriad predator takedown programs; he’s the host of the Have a Seat with Chris Hansen podcast and his youtube channel has hit over 700,000 subscribers. He also just signed on to write a thriller series with Simon & Schuster based on his real life experiences. In conversation, Hansen is disarming and down to earth but deadly serious; Primetime , as it turns out, comprises only a short portion of our chat. Below, Hansen tells me about everything, from the latest sting operations he’s worked, to his opinions on mommy-bloggers. (“You’re pimping your kid out.”) We talk about Hollywood–about Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein–what offended him most about his depiction in Primetime , and about the suicide—yes that suicide—that occured in a late 2006 filming of To Catch A Predator .
CAROLINE REILLY: I’m a lawyer by education and my background, in part, is in gender violence. And I’m sure you feel this way about the predator stuff, but what always stayed with me is: you don’t really realize how pervasive it is until you’re in it. Then, you see it everywhere.
CHRIS HANSEN: It’s just so disturbing. It’s so unnecessary in our society. I spend a lot of time wondering what are the root causes of it.
REILLY: And what have you come to? Are there any throughlines?
HANSEN: These guys come from all different walks of life. They don’t have the word predator tattooed on their forehead.
It’s shocking to me. We’ll do an investigation where a doctor walks in knowing he’s going to talk to a “15-year-old girl,” knowing that he wants to have sex with her, uses language like, “Have you had your oyster shucked yet?” Then, he’ll see this decoy posing as the young girl and go in for a hug, and then go into this conversation about what it’s like to be a kidney specialist, as if he’s going to impress this young girl with his medical expertise! Wearing a fleece that has the name of his hospital and medical practice on it! And then it’s a whole different story when he comes face-to-face with me and the local sheriffs.
But it’s not one guy. I think there are some hardcore, heavy hitter, pedophile predators who you’ll never change no matter what you do. You could incarcerate them, you could castrate them, you could threaten them with a death penalty, and they’re going to do it because that’s what they’re wired to do.
I think there’s a younger group of guys who have normalized saying things that are highly sexualized and inappropriate to underage girls, and it’s fueled by the anonymity of the internet. They wouldn’t say this stuff face-to-face, but they get used to it. When they talk about it online, they think, “Okay, well, at some point this girl’s going to be old enough, it won’t matter. This is what I like.”
And then there’s this third category, this guy fantasizes about it, but wouldn’t have acted out probably without the internet. He’s the 35-year-old stockbroker, the doctor, the cop, or teacher we see from time to time. Maybe they haven’t offended in their school setting, or at least they’ll claim that, but they will go out on a Saturday and try to meet a 13 or 14-year-old girl when they’re supposed to be someplace else.
HANSEN: We had a guy show up in one of our most recent stings in Maryland who was a former Catholic high school teacher who got fired from his job. Apparently, nothing to do with inappropriate behavior with students, at least that’s what he says, and the school says. He was working as a deacon at the Catholic Church at the Archdiocese of Baltimore—his wife worked in the same office!—and he scoots out to allegedly get “Chipotle.” Instead, comes over to the sting house to meet a 15-year-old boy after a sexually-charged conversation and gets caught in the sting!
We had another guy who was a Little League coach, a former tutor at a prestigious tutoring company, leaves his [two children under 12] home alone being watched by a neighborhood kid who’s 12 to meet a 15-year-old boy. His wife is at work; she’s head of the pharmacy at a noted university hospital.
REILLY: We talk a lot about deterrence and what that looks like for crimes like these. But it does seem like, for a lot of these men, being the object of disgust, being humiliated is almost worse than going to jail, and maybe that’s why To Catch A Predator was so satisfying.
HANSEN: We’ve been doing this for 22 years now and, in the beginning, I thought we’d do it three or four times. [I thought] who’s going to show up? I mean, not even considering the criminal charges, which are serious in most jurisdictions, but why would you take the risk of embarrassing yourself and the collateral damage? But the guys don’t think it through. They want what they want when they want it and they act impulsively, and I think that’s the nature of this crime
REILLY: You must get to a point where you think, “Well, surely this time I’ll have scraped the bottom of the barrel. This is the worst of it.” But it’s endless.
HANSEN: I think culturally, obviously, it’s one of the worst crimes you could commit. I think it’s a scourge of society, anyone who goes after children. Yet it keeps happening. So why is that? I would point to the ubiquitous nature of these platforms upon which an adult can reach out to a child. There is a very definitive link between viewing CSAM [child sexually abusive materials] and offending. And this material, it’s very easily accessible.
REILLY: I’m curious then what you make of mommy bloggers, or family content creators who feature their children in their content.
HANSEN: I’ll predict, without fear of contradiction, that if you’re a mommy blogger and you’re putting your 13-year-old daughter on your social media platforms, a certain number of people who are viewing, or paying, or subscribing are predators. That’s where they go, it’s just a fact. And they don’t care, they’re out to make a profit. You’re pimping your kid. There’s no reason to do it unless you’re greedy and irresponsible.
REILLY: Have you seen these crimes evolve in any way as the internet evolves?
HANSEN: The biggest change I’ve seen is with platforms that adults can access children on. When we started this 22 years ago, we had decoys on chat rooms and on MySpace. Now, we can’t even keep up with them. We just did a documentary on Roblox called Dangerous Games and how adults are using this game to corrupt and groom children. Parents and grandparents who see their kids playing a game that looks innocent because the characters resemble Lego characters don’t know the danger there.
REILLY: Well tech is so scary; it’s such a moneyed and male-dominated industry and so much of it benefits predators who thrive on surveillance.
HANSEN: With Roblox, the company, while having made some security changes, doesn’t want to limit engagement because it’s a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. And when you limit engagement, you limit profits. So they won’t let law enforcement go on their platform and conduct an investigation. They won’t talk to me because they don’t want to answer the tough questions. They’ll go in front of a tech group or some sort of a tech magazine that only wants to know about the latest games on Roblox, but they won’t talk to a real reporter.
REILLY: Do you ever get to a point where you think, “Nothing can shock me now”?
HANSEN: You can’t ever take it for granted, you can’t let it become so routine that nothing surprises you. I can’t do a sting without something surprising me; who gets caught, what they’re trying to do. The level of shocking techniques, the language that is used, the things they want to do. I mean we’ve seen people want to involve animals. It’s just the total corruption of a child’s soul for their gratification.
REILLY: Do you think Predator and what you do is so popular among viewers because so often with sexual violence, we don’t really get a satisying sense of justice?
HANSEN: I mean, in the beginning, we did a sting in California and the judges were treating it like reality TV. No, this is a crime. I’ve seen defense attorneys try to wrangle their way through an argument saying something to the effect of, there’s no real child, there’s no real crime, and that’s bullshit. I’ve been criticized for working too closely with law enforcement. It’s the only socially responsible way to proceed. My conscience is clear, and that’s what’s so offensive about this movie.
There seems to be an attempt to create sympathy for the criminal. A DA committed suicide. Well, guess what? That DA had child pornography on his computer! I didn’t put the child pornography on his computer. He had it, and he pretended to be a 19-year-old trying to have sexually-explicit conversations with decoys posing as two 13-year-olds. Nobody will ever know why he committed suicide. Nobody wanted that to happen. But if you go back and look at the stories from that event, there was no crazy wild scene of a decoy singing show tunes to this DA who had been caught.
For them to try to give him empathy or sympathy, or say that we somehow had anything to do with his decision as a grown man in his 50s to take his own life as opposed to face the charges, common sense will tell you that’s just not true. And let me tell you something: if you don’t want to be in the sting, don’t sexually exploit children. It’s very simple. They paint him as some lonely single guy. Well? Join a pinochle club.
REILLY: And sexual violence is so pervasive. I mean, just this week I was sitting preparing for an interview about domestic violence; on my phone, updates were rolling in about the Cornell case, and then on the TV the news was talking about a political ad with some language that was like, “Lie down and take it.” Then, it cut to commercial and it was a sexualized ad for sports betting. You think, maybe it’s not the moment to draw sympathy for someone like that.
HANSEN: I don’t know whether it’s a bunch of Hollywood people sitting around going “Guys, guys, guys, you want to be really cool? Let’s take something that’s really good and twist it into something that’s dark and a fever dream. Let’s do that. We’re A24, we can do that. We’ve got a hot actor.” The director’s been on a streak of some interesting films…
And what does it get you at the end of the day? I mean, people want to see it. I guess they’ll make money from this movie, but people walked out of there shaking their heads. I went to go see it with my wife here in New York, and I looked at her, I said, “It was so bizarre, disconnected from reality, and over the top that it was hard to even be upset about it.” It’s got commercial value because I’ve built a brand for over 45 years that makes money, even if that’s not the goal of my work. And now, they’re exploiting it. They are preying upon my name, my image, my likeness to profit.
REILLY: It’s interesting because I feel like one of the primary critiques made in the film is that there’s always been this financially or ego-driven motive behind what you do, and you’re saying that’s essentially what the film is doing.
HANSEN: Well even the name Primetime , which suggests there was somehow a show that wasn’t on primetime. Dateline has been on primetime since its inception. And to suggest that there was some rivalry with Stone Phillips? Stone Phillips was a lovely guy. We were good friends, we played tennis together.
REILLY: What about people in your social circle or colleagues from To Catch A Predator ? Was anyone you know involved?
HANSEN: They didn’t reach out to me, they didn’t reach out to my producer. They didn’t reach out to anybody significant in the film because they didn’t want to hear, “Chris Hansen’s a good guy!” They didn’t want to hear, “He’s a good dad, he’s a good colleague, he treats his producers well, and he’s generous.” They wanted a guy with Frankenstein makeup in his alleged dressing room, or shirtless in the mirror of a predator house. As if that would ever happen!
Anybody who was ever involved in the show is upset. I mean the script is based on a hit job by a freelance writer for Esquire magazine which focused on the DA’s suicide and never mentioned that there was child pornography on his computer.
And this fake nobility of Hollywood. Initially, when we heard the movie was in the works and they hadn’t reached out, I had a friend of mine, a colleague who could reach out to Lance Oppenheim, do so. He related back to me that, “I talked to Lance, and he said, ‘It’s a love letter to Chris Hansen, and it takes a couple weird twists and turns, but he’ll be fine with it.’” I said, “If this is a love letter, I hate to get a poisoned pen letter from this guy.”
REILLY: Is there a falsehood in the film that you feel most offended by?
HANSEN: I’m most offended by the notion that I was an aloof father. I’m close to my children today. I was close to them every moment of their life. I had a very good relationship with my children, and I do today. To suggest that I would wake them up in the middle of the night to show them excerpts from a sting operation. But it goes again to their sensibility.
REILLY: And look, sexual violence, this kind of predator behavior, it’s not partisan. But we are living in a Jeffrey Epstein world. How do we contextualize all this with the current climate?
HANSEN: I mean, there were, I’m told, dozens and dozens of [Epstein] cases that were settled quietly and quickly that never made the news with NDAs where people can’t come forward because they would be in trouble. And that’s just horrifying to think about. I guess, if you’re talking about [the entertainment] industry that was ruled by one of the most prolific predators to ever walk the planet and Harvey Weinstein, maybe this isn’t surprising. Maybe we should look at Lance Oppenheim’s chat.
REILLY: When you take a step back and look at the film, obviously we’re here today talking about it. You’ve got an ad buy in theaters that runs ahead of the film. Does it fall into that old adage–there’s no such thing as bad press?
HANSEN: This will be a net positive at the end of the day. You don’t last as long as I’ve lasted and hope to continue to last in this business by being thin-skinned. You know what you do is right, you care about your family and your spouse and your children. I work for the people who consume my content. I care about them deeply. But some critic? Some freelance guy or movie director? I could give a rat’s ass about those people.
HANSEN: I’ll be asleep by 10:30 if I last that long.
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