(CNN) — The videos come in a barrage: Men — they are almost always men — filmed in closeup, their expressions angry, or confused, or scared.
“Who are you here to meet?” says the voice behind the camera. It’s the moment of exposure, a juncture of dramatic irony: We know — or are told, at least — that the voice behind the camera has chat logs that show the man we’re watching trying to arrange sex with someone he thinks is a minor. If it were 20 years ago, we’d hear Chris Hansen’s refrain: “You see how this looks, right.”
Back then, in the heyday of NBC’s hit show “To Catch a Predator,” what would follow was the network TV host ushering in the police for a dramatic arrest. Now, the sequence is more likely to end in shouted abuse and maybe a scuffle, the video shot on phones and streamed — sometimes live — on platforms like Kick or Facebook.
The film “Primetime,” a critical success that stylishly explores the rise and fall of the one-time NBC hit “To Catch a Predator” and its host Hansen, ends in an eruption of violence borrowed from the program’s actual history. Louis “Bill” Conradt, a Texas prosecutor and the subject of one of the show’s stings, killed himself with a point-blank gunshot to the head as SWAT teams and a film crew surrounded his home.
That incident fractured the real-life Hansen’s image and precipitated the cancellation of the show, as well as a lawsuit that was eventually settled by NBC.
But the story wasn’t over: Hansen, after a few similar failed ventures elsewhere, continues his sting operations on the streaming platform TruBlu, which he co-founded (he described the depiction of him in “Primetime” as “detached from reality” in a YouTube review).
And Hansen copycats are everywhere online, filming their own self-styled sting operations, despite facing occasional restrictions or shutdowns from online platforms and warnings or repercussions from police (Instagram videos of vintage Hansen, too, dramatically emerging in front of supposed predators, have proliferated after the film’s release).
These online videos have at their heart the same ostensibly altruistic mission as “To Catch a Predator”: to protect minors by finding and exposing men who are looking to exploit them online.
But their projects demonstrate that the ethical issues at the heart of “Primetime” are still live questions today: What happens when the quest for justice collides with the entertainment industry and the profit motive? And why can’t viewers stop watching?
A long shadow
Hansen has served as an inspiration, explicit or not, for many of the social media pedophile hunters of today.
Emma Hussey, an Australian criminologist, has focused her research on pedophile hunters in the US. “To Catch a Predator’s” influence has been very clear in her interviews with self-described hunters, she said. “Participants mentioned Chris Hansen directly, compared their activities with the program and talked about his interviewing style,” she wrote in an email.
The show provides a familiar, predictable structure to follow. As Hussey put it, “Someone poses as a minor, a meeting is arranged, the target arrives, and the person conducting the confrontation takes control. The audience already understands the roles and anticipates the reveal.”
For the hunter, Hussey said, taking on the Hansenesque hero role is appealing. They can be “the person who takes control, exposes wrongdoing and earns public approval for doing so,” said Hussey.
Joshua Mundy, an Ohio father of three (soon to be four), said he was only vaguely familiar with “To Catch a Predator” in 2020, when he started the investigations that would later become the online video series “Dads Against Predators.” It started, he said, with a personal experience of injustice: Someone in his family “got messed with” and the perpetrator faced what he viewed as limited consequences. So Mundy said he began following the man around, telling people about what he had done, like a one-man sex offender registry.
“To Catch a Predator,” he said, had offered him what looked like a straightforward trajectory: He and his team would catch “predators” and turn them over to police for arrest.
When Mundy actually started running sting operations of his own, it was a surprise to find “it wasn’t that A-to-B easy,” he said. (Ohio, for instance, has strong entrapment laws.)
Dads Against Predators has sometimes worked with police to provide information that leads to arrests. But most of the group’s videos end with punishment, either in the form of public embarrassment or violence: The vigilantes follow their target around in public, shouting their alleged misdeeds. Or they slap or punch their target in the face, before letting them go.
The idea that online stings would translate seamlessly to arrests is only one of the ways that “To Catch a Predator” presented what experts call a misleading image of how sexual abuse and investigations into it unfold.
“The show was right that the problem was real,” said Scott Berkowitz, the founder and director of RAINN, the anti-sexual violence organization. “But it was wrong about almost everything else.”
“Particularly where it concerns child sexual abuse, the imprint that the show has is undeniable, and I think ultimately extremely harmful,” said Kate Sim, a tech researcher who directs the Children’s Online Safety and Privacy Research program.
The show, launched in the still relatively early days of the internet, capitalized on the “stranger danger” panic that framed unknown outsiders as the greatest threat to children. The newfangled internet granted children almost unbridled freedom — and the ability to wander far afield, digitally at least, of where their parents could protect them from harm.
In the world of “To Catch a Predator” and its descendants, the predator comes from somewhere else, summoned via the internet.
In reality, Sim said, the vast majority of child sexual abuse happens within families — a grim truth that’s more difficult to reflect in a flashy TV show.
“Shows like ‘To Catch a Predator’ offer a really compelling idea that with enough vigilantism, you can just identify these creeps that are in your neighborhood,” she said. “When it comes to child sexual abuse, I think there’s something really viscerally uncomfortable about thinking about the fact that it’s somebody who’s known to you — and usually in a caring capacity.”
A violent business
Last year, Nicholas Attalla, an influencer who goes by the name “Niky Sal” online, arrived at a Tim Hortons in Jamestown, a small city just on the edge of New York’s border with Pennsylvania.
Attalla was there on a mission: He’d been posing as a 14-year-old girl online, scheduling a meetup with a person who claimed to be a 16-year-old boy, according to CNN affiliate WGRZ. What followed was a confrontation that ended with Attalla stabbed and facing criminal charges after police say he started a fight with a man he accused of trying to meet up with a 14-year-old, reported WGRZ.
It wasn’t the first time that an attempted vigilante sting operation ended with violence. Mundy was charged with affray in 2023 after he and several Dads Against Predators collaborators confronted a man in a North Carolina Target, according to WGHP. Co-founder Jay Carnicom was shot in the leg during the fight.
For Mundy, it’s proof of how far the group is willing to go to expose the men they think of as predators. Among a sea of other online vigilantes, he said, “we are the only ones that are actually like taking a bullet because of this.” (Attalla, for his part, pleaded not guilty and was released, and he’s still posting content about supposed predators on social media).
Police aren’t so happy about the whole thing, with some saying the vigilante tactics are dangerous and reckless. In 2020, a group of Ohio police chiefs and other law enforcement officials issued a statement warning Dads Against Predators to stop., They cited two cases of suicide and another possible suicide by men who had been filmed by the group, according to CNN affiliate WTVG.
“Local law enforcement agencies and prosecutors of Sandusky County and the City of Fremont cannot and will not sit back anymore and watch as DAP continues to parade its form of vigilante justice,” the letter reads. “Its intentions may be well-intended, but their methods and outcomes are improper and unacceptable. The ‘exposed’ individuals may be exactly what DAP says they are, but they also may not be. DAP’s careless and reckless regard for law and order and due process has resulted in the loss of life, and the situation has gotten out of hand.”
The statement didn’t stop Dads Against Predators, who now claim they’ve caught predators in 40 states (on their website, you can click onto an interactive map to watch encounters in the state of your choosing).
Mundy is still proud of the work he does. It’s police, he said, who are “creating dangerous situations by just allowing these men, like, in public and not doing anything about it.”
“The work has to be done,” he said. “If a house is on fire, you can’t be mad at me for going to try to run in there and get somebody when nobody else is, you know?”
Elusive justice
Have the efforts to publicly identify men seeking sex with minors made life safer for young people?
In the case of “To Catch a Predator,” Joe Fischel, a Yale professor whose research has included the show, is unequivocal about its failures: “I don’t think the show made the world one iota safer in terms of sexual violence for children,” he said.
“It is a kind of sad state of affairs that a show purportedly to address sexual violence really did nothing to address sexual violence,” Fischel said. The show worked with local police, but many of the criminal cases later ended up being thrown out due to issues of entrapment or jurisdiction, per Fischel; none of the other men arrested in the sting that included Conradt’s suicide were prosecuted. And, as Fischel put it, the more mundane work of preventing sexual violence, like providing children with robust education about sex, intimate relationships, and sexual violence, and supporting them when they report actual harm, is left out entirely of the original show and its imitators.
Sim, the internet safety researcher, reads the appetite for online vigilantes as a symptom of a system where it feels like even after greater awareness about the prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse, not enough justice has been done.
But the shows also feed a more basic impulse: “this idea of the spectacle of punishment,” as “Primetime” director Lance Oppenheim said. He traces the publish punishments of Hansen back to “the town whippers thousands of years ago, who would be publicly punishing someone, publicly shaming someone, and thousands of people would show up.”
Mundy claims that his group’s work has led to multiple convictions, despite his at-times contentious relations with police. But he said that they don’t measure their success in arrests or convictions (and they don’t track the men they’ve “exposed” after the videos come out, either). Instead, they measure success in “changing the culture, changing the attitudes that people have towards pedophilia,” he said.
“This is to educate the audience, to show the audience these people are right next to you,” he said. “It’s really like an alarm clock to society.”
But still, there’s an aspect of fame involved. He said he’s become a small-town celebrity in Fremont, a point of pride for his own children. Almost daily, he gets recognized on the street, he said. It’s hard not to think of Hansen as portrayed by Robert Pattinson in “Primetime,” who’s depicted as enamored with his own burgeoning fame.
Mundy said that the pressures of balancing the drive to produce entertaining content with what he sees as a public safety mission weigh on him daily. Dads Against Predators charges $15 a month to stream its content, and it’s been so successful that it’s now his full-time job. He draws a distinction between his organization and some of his competitors, who might confront their subjects while wearing a Santa suit, or pour cayenne pepper in their eyes as punishment — algorithm-courting clickbait that he says compromises the integrity of the stings.
Oppenheim and Ajon Singh, the screenwriter of “Primetime,” are aware that the public spectacle of punishment they captured hasn’t gone away.
Instead, they said, it’s gotten worse.
“The main difference with ‘Catch a Predator’ in 2006 was that you had the option to change the channel,” Singh said. “It feels like you don’t even have the ability to change the channel anymore. You just keep swiping and keep getting more and more upsetting and deranged things.”
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