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After last year’s Predators and this year’s Primetime, I realized that I had somehow never actually watched an entire episode of the notorious 2000s hit To Catch a Predator, or TCaP for short. I’ve seen the clips, the memes, the parodies, and pretty much every infamous moment the show has spawned, but never sat down and watched a full episode. Well, with TCaP having been catapulted back into the zeitgeist, what better time to dive headfirst into the seedy world and troubled legacy of To Catch a Predator?
The Setup of the Set-Up
The setup for To Catch a Predator is simple: an online vigilante watch group run by adults create profiles posing as underage teens on social media and chatrooms and wait for other adults to make contact. Once the conversation turns sexual, the decoys, as they are called, engage in the sex talk and eventually arrange a meeting. The adult then travels to a sting house packed with hidden cameras, expecting to meet an underage person for sex. Instead, he — they are all men — walks through the door and finds Chris Hansen and a camera crew waiting for him. And if that isn’t bad enough, the moment he steps back outside, the cops are waiting too.
It’s genuinely gripping television, and it’s easy to see why millions of people tuned in and turned the show into a cultural phenomenon. You’re watching people who think they’re about to have a good time suddenly realize, in real time, that their lives are about to implode. And these men certainly don’t make much of an effort to argue their case. Among them are married men and people in positions of trust and authority, including teachers and even a rabbi, often 30 years old or more driving for hours to a house where they believe a young girl or boy — in some cases as young as 12 — is home alone and waiting for them.
To establish their intent, the decoys will sometimes ask the men to bring something specific with them, and remarkably often, they do. Plenty arrive carrying alcohol, condoms, lubricant or cameras, along with the occasional seemingly innocent offering like candy. It’s an increasingly damning shopping list for a meeting that was supposedly innocent in their opinion when they are confronted by Hansen.
The moment Chris Hansen walks in is the defining moment of To Catch a Predator. The look on these men’s faces, followed by their increasingly desperate responses, as they suddenly find themselves sitting across from a towering man calmly telling them to have a seat and asking what they’re doing there, is pure television. Especially in the first few episodes, many of them have no idea who they’re dealing with. They often assume he’s the girl’s or boy’s father, and there’s a genuine sense of shame as Hansen starts reading their chat logs back to them. At first, some seem to believe they can still talk their way out of it, perhaps expecting little more than an angry lecture from the teenager’s supposedly furious father.
Then Hansen drops the bomb: he’s a reporter for Dateline NBC. Almost immediately, the camera crew storms into the room, shoving their cameras into the man’s face. Now they realize this isn’t some awkward confrontation they can walk away from. They’re going to be on national television. You can almost see the ground disappear beneath their feet, and from that point on, the reactions vary. Some desperately plead with Hansen not to air the footage, correctly realizing that it could destroy their lives. Others cover their faces, try to hide, or simply make a run for it. And starting with the third sting, there was an even less subtle ending waiting outside: police officers ready to tackle the men to the ground and take them into custody.
The process doesn’t end when the men are taken away. To Catch a Predator follows that part of the story too, showing them being questioned by police, booked and, in some cases, brought before a judge. One minute they’re driving to what they think is a date with a 13- to 15-year-old, and the next they’re standing in court being told their bail is set at $30,000. The only thing missing is the phone call they have to make to their girlfriend, wife, parents or whoever else is going to have to come up with the money to bail them out.
Getting caught on To Catch a Predator doesn’t just destroy one person’s life. It can blow up the lives of everyone around them as well. Imagine the phone ringing and hearing from the police that your husband is in jail because he was caught trying to have sex with a minor. Or, perhaps even worse, having to explain to your children — some of them teenagers themselves — what their father has done. These men made a catastrophic decision, but the fallout reaches far beyond the person sitting in the interrogation room. Their families are left to deal with the shame, humiliation and consequences too, while the television show turned that destruction into entertainment and millions of viewers watched it unfold, often with a certain amount of gleeful fascination.
The sad irony for these men is that they really do get the worst possible outcome. Unlike predators who successfully abuse a minor, these men fail to get what they came for, are publicly exposed on national television and, in many cases, end up serving prison time and being placed on a sex offender registry. It’s also pretty difficult to keep something like this under wraps when your face has been broadcast to millions of people and your friends, coworkers and neighbors can see exactly what you were up to late at night behind a computer.
And the consequences don’t necessarily end when the episode or prison sentence does. Their appearances on To Catch a Predator have made some of them recognizable figures years after their arrests, albeit for all the wrong reasons. There are still websites and online communities dedicated to tracking the whereabouts of some of the men featured on the show, occasionally even posting candid photographs of them in their everyday lives. A convicted predator might eventually serve their sentence and try to move on with their life, but for the men who became part of the TCaP archive, the internet never quite lets them disappear.
The Predator Becomes the Prey
To Catch a Predator works because it operates in a world of black and white, and because the law often does too. The show needs these men to be portrayed as one-dimensional monsters. The moment the audience starts feeling sympathy for them, the whole formula begins to fall apart. That’s why every man is treated essentially the same, whether he’s 18 or 60. The show can get away with this partly because the law provides a similarly stark framework. While the age of consent varies from state to state, the decoys consistently present themselves as younger than 16, leaving very little room for the show to explore the legal grey areas surrounding age and consent.
Chris Hansen never shows much sympathy on camera either, because he knows exactly what role he is playing. He frequently asks the men to “help him understand” what they were thinking, but he isn’t really interested in exploring their motivations. He already knows what the story is supposed to be. As a viewer, however, you can’t help but notice the nuances, because these men really do come from all walks of life.
It’s easy — and entirely understandable — to condemn a man in his 40s who drives to a house believing a 13-year-old is home alone and waiting for him. But an 18-year-old showing up to meet someone who claims to be 15? That’s a very different situation, and in some states the law itself recognizes that difference through so-called Romeo and Juliet provisions. To Catch a Predator, however, has little interest in those shades of grey. Once the show became a hit, nuance simply wasn’t part of the formula. Everyone was a predator, everyone was treated the same, and everyone was there to be caught and paraded in front of the entire nation.
The first episode feels much more like a serious piece of investigative journalism than the sensationalized TV phenomenon To Catch a Predator would eventually become. It sets out to shed light on online predators, warns parents about the dangers their children can encounter online and even offers practical advice, such as keeping the family computer in a common area rather than a child’s bedroom. Experts are brought in to explain why these men behave the way they do, and interestingly, the episode makes a point of explaining that the men they are catching aren’t technically pedophiles, since pedophilia refers to an attraction to prepubescent children. It’s an interesting distinction considering the show would eventually become almost synonymous with the word “pedophile”.
Despite running for three years, To Catch a Predator produced only 20 episodes, which makes binge-watching the series surprisingly manageable on paper. In practice, however, it can become a bit of a chore. The basic setup remains largely identical from episode to episode, and eventually even the excuses start to sound like a greatest-hits compilation: it was their first time, they weren’t really going to do anything, they were just curious to see if the boy or girl was real, they would never do it again, they had learned their lesson, and so on. The biggest changes come from the introduction of the police and the evolution of the decoy operation.
The decoy evolution
In the first few stings, the decoy is a member of Perverted Justice. The setup is remarkably casual, with the men being told to simply walk into the house through an unlocked door when they arrive. The decoy will call out from another room, telling them to help themselves to a drink in the kitchen. At this stage, the operation also relies on photographs of actual 13- to 15-year-olds, often pictures of the decoys themselves when they were at that age, to establish who the men believe they are meeting. Add the occasional phone call and that is essentially all the reassurance they get. So these men are knowingly walking into a stranger’s house, by themselves, believing that a minor is home alone and waiting for them, with little more than a photograph and some online conversations to go on. And somehow, they still walk through that door.
Later on, the show would start hiring actors to play the decoys: attractive 18-year-olds who looked young enough to pass for a few years younger. It’s their photographs that are used to lure the men to the sting house, and the show occasionally gives us a glimpse behind the scenes, showing the decoys actually talking to the men on the phone and trying to convince them to come over. In one particularly noticeable moment, we even see one of the decoys sitting in front of a webcam and pulling up his shirt to show his stomach to one of the men they are trying to lure over.
Once the men arrive, the decoy will often greet them at the door and simply tell them to come inside. Most do without much hesitation, but not everyone takes the bait. There are several instances where a man suddenly gets cold feet and turns around before entering the house. It doesn’t save him, though. The police are waiting nearby and quickly jump out of the bushes to make the arrest anyway.
For those who do follow the decoy inside, there’s usually a brief and incredibly awkward conversation. The decoy asks whether they brought whatever they were asked to bring and what they intend to do once they’re alone together. After a little back-and-forth, or whenever the man gets a little too close for comfort, Chris Hansen makes his entrance. And just like that, the date is over.
Sympathy for the devil
In the final few stings, the female decoys are played by particularly attractive young women, Samantha Cope and Casey Mauro, and by the final episode, the whole setup starts to feel increasingly like a setup designed to make these men walk straight into the trap. Casey, for example, spends much of the sting walking around in daisy dukes, showing off her tanned legs. At this point, the “underage” part of the operation is almost entirely confined to a single mention in the chat. Perverted Justice will have the decoy mention once or twice that she is 14, but otherwise the men are talking to an adult, looking at photographs of an adult, being invited to a house by an adult and ultimately meeting an adult.
That makes some of the later cases considerably more uncomfortable to watch. The show is built around treating every suspect as a predator, but the circumstances aren’t always equally damning. Take a 21-year-old who has been chatting relatively innocent with a girl who claims to be 14, but is in reality an attractive 18-year-old. He can still have made a serious mistake by believing he was communicating with a minor, but watching him completely break down as he realizes his life may be destroyed over that decision is a very different experience from watching a 40-year-old man drive across state lines with condoms and alcohol to meet a supposedly 13-year-old girl home alone.
Another young man breaks down crying and explains that he has never even been with a girl, and from that perspective, it isn’t difficult to understand how he became infatuated with a supposedly 14-year-old girl who seemed completely comfortable talking about sex online. When you consider that some of these chats stretch over days or even weeks, it becomes easier to see how someone could become increasingly entangled in an online fantasy. Some of the men even acknowledge that the girl’s supposed age is a problem, yet eventually ignore their own instincts — and the law — and follow either their heart, their penis, or perhaps both.
The final episode even features a man with cerebral palsy. Watching him struggle his way to the sting house on crutches is genuinely uncomfortable, and you can’t help but wonder whether someone in the Dateline editorial meeting ever stopped to ask, “What exactly are we doing here?” There is a difference between exposing dangerous predators and setting up a situation where the spectacle itself starts to feel cruel.
This is where the show’s black-and-white approach starts to show its limitations. The entire premise depends on the audience accepting that every man who walks through that door is essentially the same kind of predator. But once you start looking at the circumstances surrounding each case, there are clearly shades of grey that the show has little interest in acknowledging.
Many of the men also lie about their age, particularly the older ones. Some will shave ten years off their actual age when asked, creating an interesting irony because Perverted Justice is doing essentially the same thing. What you have are two parties operating behind screen names and false ages, both pretending to be someone they aren’t. The crucial difference is that one of them claims to be a minor, and that single detail is what transforms an otherwise ordinary chatroom conversation into a potential crime scene.
There is even a rather obvious way to turn this setup on its head: simply claim to be 16 or 17. If the Perverted Justice decoy continues steering the conversation toward sex after being told they are talking to someone who is themselves a minor, the legal and moral equation suddenly becomes considerably more complicated. They can always argue that they knew for sure the man was actually an adult, but I’ve heard that excuse from some of the predators on the show as well: I didn’t really believe she was underage. That could make for a very different kind of interaction between Hansen and the man:
“I told you I was 17, and you didn’t believe me. You still lured me to this house. I never believed I was actually chatting with a minor either. I thought you were an adult pretending to be one, just like I was. So here we are: two adults in one house after a conversation about sex. Either we both broke the law, or neither of us did.”
It would certainly put a rather interesting wrinkle in the show’s carefully constructed concept.
Thankfully for the producers, plenty of the men featured on the show do fit the stranger-danger mold. Men in their 40s, 50s and 60s driving to the home of a supposedly 14-year-old girl, sometimes at night, while sharing increasingly bizarre sexual fantasies with her online. Men who barely make it through the door before going after the decoy. These are the cases that give the show its raison d’être and make it easy to understand why To Catch a Predator became such a phenomenon in the first place.
But the show’s willingness to push the sting operation further and further would ultimately become its undoing. Nothing demonstrated that more starkly than one man taking his own life during a sting.
The downfall
As To Catch a Predator became more popular, the men being targeted became increasingly aware of the show and, understandably, more suspicious when talking to the decoys. Some still showed up anyway because the decoy had managed to convince them that she wasn’t a cop and had nothing to do with TCAP. By the later stings, plenty of men simply didn’t show up at all, while others arrived at the house only to get cold feet and turn around. This forced the show to make the decoys a much more prominent part of the operation, with them having to actively lure the men out of their cars and through the front door.
One of the most infamous men who never made it to the sting house was Louis William “Bill” Conradt Jr., a 56-year-old Texas assistant district attorney. Conradt had posed as a younger man online and had been communicating with someone he believed was a 13-year-old boy. In reality, the person behind the computer was a Perverted Justice decoy, while actor Dan Schrack handled the telephone calls. Because Conradt was such a high-profile target, there was considerable pressure on the Dateline crew to get him to the house, sit down with Chris Hansen and deliver the kind of television they had come for.
There is footage of Schrack essentially begging Conradt to come over during their phone conversations, along with text messages trying to keep the meeting alive. But eventually Conradt stopped responding altogether, much to the frustration of everyone involved. The problem was that the sting operation had become as much about the spectacle as the arrest. The chats themselves were already considered sufficient grounds for an arrest, so the police could have simply arrested Conradt at his office, on the street or wherever they happened to find him. But Dateline was there, the cameras were rolling and they wanted the arrest on tape.
Things escalated when someone from Perverted Justice claimed that Conradt was deleting evidence, including his MySpace page. That information would later prove to be incorrect, but by then the wheels were already in motion. Police hastily obtained a warrant and the Dateline camera crew accompanied them to Conradt’s home. When they arrived, they were unable to establish contact with him inside the house. Then, with the cameras rolling outside, Conradt shot himself in the head in front of police officers who were there to arrest him in his house.
It was the moment when the To Catch a Predator formula stopped being a TV stunt with real-world consequences and those consequences became impossible to ignore. A man was dead, and the cameras were there to capture it.
You can read a much more detailed account of the events here, but this was the moment that would ultimately contribute to the show’s cancellation. The episode itself is filled with questionable editorial choices that make it feel like the show is exploiting the tragedy almost as much as it is reporting on it. They even tease “deadly consequences” in the opening, and the resulting segment is easily the heaviest and most memorable in the show’s entire run, if only because it differs so dramatically from everything that came before it.
The documentary Predators gives us a glimpse of some raw footage that didn’t make it into the episode. At one point, Chris Hansen acknowledges that the events are going to stir up controversy. Even more bizarre is a moment immediately after the suicide, when Lt. Adena Barber walks up to Hansen with a smile on her face and asks, “We having fun?” It’s an incredibly jarring moment, particularly given what had just happened, and one that only adds to the uncomfortable feeling surrounding the entire sting.
Throughout the earlier episodes, plenty of men make comments about suicide, particularly once they realize they are about to be publicly exposed on television as sexual predators who came to meet a minor. One man even hesitantly tries to jam a pen into his neck, only for it to be quickly taken away from him. At the time, it comes across as almost theatrical, but in hindsight it was an early indication of just how devastating being exposed on the show could be.
By the time the Conradt sting happened, the possibility of suicide should surely have been on everyone’s mind. This wasn’t some anonymous online chat anymore. A camera crew had parked outside Conradt’s house while dozens of police officers surrounded the property, all because of conversations he’d had with someone he believed to be a 13-year-old boy just days earlier. The potential consequences of that kind of confrontation should have been obvious. Yet getting the footage — and getting the dramatic conclusion the show wanted — appears to have mattered more to the people involved.
The show wasn’t abruptly cancelled or put on hold. It continued with three more stings, resulting in five additional episodes. These were the episodes where the decoys became the literal definition of jailbait. There were certainly some of the most memorable predators in the show’s entire run, but by this point, the shadow of entrapment had fallen over To Catch a Predator. And when you actually start feeling sorry for some of the men being caught, the show begins to undermine its own premise.
To Catch a Predator needs monsters. It needs the ugly, middle-aged men who could easily be the decoy’s father or grandfather. The scruffy guys who roll up in a truck. The married men, teachers and fathers who send these supposedly young teenagers increasingly disturbing proposals. That’s the kind of predator the show was built to expose. When you have to resort to virgins, 18-year-olds or a man with cerebral palsy struggling his way to the sting house to meet a minor who has been eagerly chatting with him about sex, the whole thing starts to feel rather different. Sure, these men may still be breaking the law; there is no discussion about that. But they aren’t necessarily the predator this show has spent its entire run telling us it is out to catch.
The Predator next door
The only message To Catch a Predator claims to convey is the danger children face on the internet and therein lies the problem. Stories about strangers sexually abusing, abducting and/or killing children receive plenty of media attention, but child sexual abuse is far more often committed by someone the child already knows. Family members, teachers, coaches and other adults in positions of trust or authority account for a significant part of the problem. Warning parents about the dangers their children might encounter online is certainly worthwhile, but focusing almost exclusively on strangers creates a distorted picture of the threat and risks giving parents a false sense of security about the people already in their children’s lives. If the show’s real priority had been preventing child sexual abuse, perhaps it should have been called To Catch Uncle Bob instead of To Catch a Predator.
By repeatedly showing complete strangers, sometimes traveling for hours, to meet a child, the show reinforces the idea that the greatest danger comes from some creepy guy lurking in a chatroom. Had To Catch a Predator been a one-off special designed to warn parents about online dangers, that would have been perfectly understandable. But across 20 episodes and 13 stings, the focus barely shifts from men lured into a sting house after chatting online. There is little attempt to explore the wider problem of child sexual abuse or the ways it can be prevented beyond warning parents about online strangers. At that point, it’s difficult to see the show as a serious effort to educate the public. The formula was simply too effective as entertainment: confrontations, desperate excuses, public humiliation and arrests, all packaged into compelling television. The uncomfortable question is whether To Catch a Predator was ever as interested in preventing child sexual abuse as it was in catching men on camera — and selling advertising around the spectacle.
Conclusion
To Catch a Predator is certainly a show with a troubled legacy. It was adored by millions when it first aired, but over the years it has become increasingly clear that it was a far more problematic product than many of us originally saw it as. Part of that is down to Chris Hansen, who has never really seemed interested in reflecting on the show, acknowledging its shortcomings or confronting some of its more problematic elements. When interviewed for the documentary Predators, he falls back on the same carefully rehearsed responses rather than offering much self-reflection. At the same time, we see that Hansen is still loved by many and, remarkably, is still doing these stings today, albeit on a much smaller scale for his YouTube channel.
Despite never having watched an episode in its entirety before this binge, there was a surprising sense of nostalgia in watching the show. Instead of social media or even MSN, there are constant shots of chatrooms, screen names, bulky personal computers and CRT monitors, along with the outdated gifts these men bring, like webcams and those first digital cameras. It all takes you back to a simpler time on the internet. Maybe even a safer internet, which is saying something considering the subject matter. But nowadays, children under the age of 12 are widely represented online, especially on social media and platforms like Roblox, with many parents apparently having no problem with it. So it’s not like people have learned much of a lesson from this show.
To Catch a Predator is an interesting watch and a cornerstone of early-2000s reality television, where the lines between journalism, law enforcement and sensationalist entertainment became increasingly blurred. It was a show that created news instead of simply reporting on it, making it an active participant in the stories it covered. I’d like to conclude that there has never been anything quite like To Catch a Predator and that there never will be again, but that simply isn’t true. Nowadays, there are plenty of self-proclaimed “pedo-hunters” online pretending to be minors and meeting men in real life, with some even taking things into their own hands and beating them up. If that is part of the legacy of To Catch a Predator, then perhaps the show ended up sending the wrong message after all.
