LIVINGSTON PARISH, La. — Chris Hansen hops into a gray SUV to head to the sting house. He doesn’t have a driver. He doesn’t have a news network expense account, not anymore. But he has that face, that voice, and so it’s hard to go anywhere without getting noticed.
“Can I bug you for a picture?” a woman asks when he stops at a Starbucks to buy coffee for his crew.
Heather Smith-David watched “To Catch a Predator” religiously on “Dateline NBC.” The segment, which ran from 2004 to 2007, took on added significance for her a few years ago, when she says a man attacked her teenage son and tried to sexually assault him.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Hansen calmly tells her, in a tone somewhere between Edward R. Murrow and Superman. “That’s why we do it.”
During these fan interactions, Hansen will first ask the admirer to hold off on posting a photo for a few days. He doesn’t want to tip off the bad guys that he’s in town. He also usually plugs the successor to the long-defunct “Predator,” his streaming series called “Takedown with Chris Hansen.” But there’s no need with Smith-David. She’s already subscribing to TruBlu, Hansen’s online crime-themed network.
To some, Hansen is an overzealous TV hack, a predator of predators, thrilled to ruin the lives of people who never so much as touched a child. To Smith-David, Hansen is a crusader against evil. He’s confronting the men who walk into a sting house hoping to have sex with minors — and getting them locked up.
This month, Hansen’s subscription base should get a boost. A24’s “Primetime,” in which he’s portrayed by Robert Pattinson, opened in theaters on Friday. Hansen wasn’t consulted by the filmmakers, and his plan to see an advanced screening fizzled when he wouldn’t sign the studio’s nondisclosure agreement. He figured he’d show up at the box office and buy a ticket; he’d agree to have The Washington Post come along. As for A24’s publicity campaign, Hansen figured he’d co-opt it for his own means.
In the run-up to the release, he went on Fox News with Jesse Watters to blast A24, told the Hollywood Reporter that the film is an “insult” and continued the scolding on his podcast, “Predators I’ve Caught.” Shawn Rech, his business partner, urged Hansen to sue, but for now, they’ve settled on an alternative. TruBlu bought ad space so that screenings of “Primetime” will be introduced by a commercial featuring Hansen.
“It’s evil and unethical, what they’re doing,” Rech says. “But I told Chris there’s an opportunity here. We need to come out of this with people knowing you’re still doing this.”
The sting house set up for this episode of his online show is half an hour east of Baton Rouge in a town called Walker. Hansen drives until he’s in a neighborhood with large, scrubby yards and single-level homes. Inside the house, he’s greeted by Capt. Calvin Bowden of Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office, whose detectives and decoys are already stuffed in a back room on laptops and iPads talking dirty with a steady stream of online suspects. Bowden borrowed the place, which is for sale, from a real estate broker. It looks lived in, with corny, lettered sayings on the walls (“This is us”) and appliances and furniture still in place. Hansen’s crew has wired the property with hidden cameras, which two cameramen monitor on a screen in the primary bedroom.
The plan is that when a suspect approaches, the decoy will lure him — and it’s always a him, no woman has been caught in 22 years — into the living room, and then Hansen, huddled in a kitchen pantry with his camera guys, will emerge and deliver his patented command to “take a seat.”
Over the 20 episodes on “Dateline” and intermittently during the two decades since, he’s been part of dozens of busts with men thinking they’re about to meet a minor for sex. Hansen calmly picks the suspects apart with questions about their intentions and, when they inevitably deny that they planned to do anything sexual, confronts them with their own words, reading back the transcripts of the chats. Over time, Hansen says, he’s been involved in more than 500 arrests, watching as religious leaders (a rabbi, a Sunday school teacher), lawyers, real estate brokers and military veterans are cuffed and hauled away.
“We could end up with one guy today, we could end up with six or seven people today,” Hansen says just after arriving at the house. “We don’t choose these guys, they choose us.”
That could also describe how Hansen morphed from a rising network correspondent metabolically drawn to the big story — Oklahoma City, Columbine, 9/11 — into someone forever associated with the pedophile beat. He never planned on this. Hansen, 67, grew up during the golden age of TV news, admiring the way late “60 Minutes” star Mike Wallace confronted wrongdoers. He started reporting while still at Michigan State University, worked in local news for a decade and landed at NBC in 1993.
At the network, Hansen earned a slew of Emmys, but it was “To Catch a Predator” that made him famous. The Pattinson film takes its name from NBC’s decision to run “Dateline” in prime time, where it sometimes competed with ABC’s science-fiction drama “Lost.” By then, Hansen was appearing with Oprah Winfrey, Conan O’Brien and Jon Stewart as well as dropping into “The Simpsons” and “South Park.” One night in 2009, he sat in the audience at “Saturday Night Live” as Bill Hader delivered a perfectly modulated impression in a sketch called “Late Night with Chris Hansen,” which found the host springing on his celebrity guests and ending their appearances with a police tackle.
The real life Hansen was only a little less theatrical. As the show developed, it fed on the absurdity, all the better as his voice rose to ask, “What were you thinking?” In one episode, a man told a decoy he wanted to watch her commit a sex act with a cat and Cool Whip and stripped off his clothes as he entered the house. “Do you want to explain yourself?” Hansen mugged as he confronted him.
The whole thing was masterful as sensationalistic TV, cringe-inducing, hilarious and horrifying, which is why chuckling YouTubers still make a habit of splicing commentary between reposted segments. What these encounters weren’t, says Kelly McBride, the chief ethicist at the Poynter Institute and NPR’s public editor, was journalism.
“Advocacy pretending to be journalism,” says McBride, who has watched Hansen’s work for decades. “And there’s a level of shame and humiliation as entertainment that is core to what he’s doing.”
One of McBride’s main complaints is Hansen’s cozy relationship with law enforcement. Journalists are taught that while it’s good to have a communicative relationship with police, they are not themselves a policing force. There needs to be a firm line between the reporting and the investigation and arrest. The criticism that Hansen blurs that line has hounded him since a disastrous 2006 incident in Murphy, Texas, that led to a suspect, Rockland County assistant district attorney Bill Conradt, killing himself as police moved in on him.
“Primetime” is adapted, in part, from a 2009 Esquire story detailing the incident, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die.”
“A hatchet job,” Hansen says of Luke Dittrich’s story. (Dittrich, as well as Pattinson and director Lance Oppenheim, declined interview requests through A24.)
Oppenheim also consulted David Osit, who made a 2025 documentary, “Predators,” that Hansen felt left out key information about the Conradt case, specifically the child sexual abuse material found on his computer.
That operation led to the arrests of more than 20 men at the sting house. But Conradt, who had chatted with one of the decoys, never headed over. So instead, the police and “Dateline’s” team went to him on a Sunday afternoon. They gathered outside as a SWAT team entered to find Conradt standing in a hallway, holding a gun. “He told them he wasn’t going to hurt them and shot himself in the head,” Lt. Adana Barber told Hansen on camera.
In the Esquire story and an investigation on ABC’s “20/20,” Hansen is portrayed as so thirsty to capture Conradt that he and Perverted Justice, which styled itself as a computer watchdog group, worked in sync with police to confront him. At one point, video shows Hansen reading Conradt’s phone number to a police officer so he can make contact within the house. Conradt’s sister, Patricia, sued NBC for $105 million. The case was settled; she told The Post that she could not comment.
In the end, none of the others arrested in Murphy were prosecuted, as prosecutors dismissed the investigations conducted by Perverted Justice.
McBride points out that studies show the majority of cases are committed by adults the victims know, not strangers showing up to a sting house.
“I am not going to deny that it happens, and I’m not going to deny that it’s horrible,” she says. “But focusing on that does not help us reduce the incidence of child sexual abuse.”
The whole thing started with a call from a friend in Detroit. Kevin Dietz, an investigative reporter for an NBC affiliate TV station, had partnered with Perverted Justice, which was using volunteer decoys as part of its advocacy-slash-vigilante operation to engage men on the internet looking to have sex with minors. WDIV (Channel 4) ran the piece during sweeps early in 2004 and scored big ratings. “There’s something here, Chris,” Dietz remembers telling Hansen. “And he knew there was something there. He just didn’t know what it was and if [the network] would go for it, quite frankly.”
But Hansen doesn’t remember much resistance.
He was 44, a decade into a respected career at NBC. By the time he pitched his bosses on confronting possible predators on camera, hidden-camera reality shows were thriving. “Survivor” and “Big Brother” documented the sociological drama of groupthink, HBO’s “Taxicab Confessions” talked dirty, and Ashton Kutcher’s “Punk’d” let “That ‘70s Show” star prank his fellow celebrities. TV newsmagazines were also changing from the “60 Minutes” model. Neal Shapiro, installed to oversee “Dateline,” moved the show from one night a week to five in 1998. He was impressed by Hansen’s doggedness but also his gift for the two-camera interview.
“That’s what makes newsmagazines different from other kinds of journalism,” Shapiro says. “This is a skill all of its own. You can’t stumble around, you have to be quick, you have to be fast on your feet and on the investigative front, really listening and drawing people out. He was very good at that.”
Still, doing the undercover pedophile stings was a departure for “Dateline.” Hansen remembers his boss, David Corvo, questioning how the network could possibly promote the segment.
“How about, there’s a guy standing in your back porch with his d— in his hand, he wants to stick it in your daughter, and tonight we’re going to show you how to prevent that from happening,” Hansen says he told Corvo.
The first episode was called “Dangerous Web,” opening with anchor Stone Phillips framing the segment as a wake-up call to parents about the dangers of web surfing and internet chatrooms. “Dateline” rented a white house on a main street in Bethpage, New York, and installed a pair of Perverted Justice decoys and hidden cameras. The men caught included a New York City firefighter, who was fired from the department and pleaded guilty for sending obscene photos to a minor.
But the firefighter was an exception. Most of the people caught in the first sting were not prosecuted, largely because the police weren’t involved yet.
That was also the case in the second episode, filmed outside Washington, D.C., which introduced a slightly softer version of what would become Hansen’s catchphrase, as he walked into the room and confronted the visitor with, “Why don’t you have a seat?” The segment also featured a man who took off his clothes before entering the house. Hansen handed him a towel and later delivered one of his signature lines: “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?”
By that point, other networks were trying to lure Perverted Justice away from NBC, and Xavier Von Erck, the organization’s founder, remembers being flown first class to Los Angeles for a steakhouse dinner with NBC chief executive Jeff Zucker. In “Primetime,” the former executive — playing himself — tells Hansen he doesn’t like the show. In real life, Von Erck remembers “not a single word other than, ‘We love you guys, this is so important, and we want you to sign a deal.’” (Zucker did not respond to an interview request.)
In fact, NBC invested plenty in Hansen’s franchise, which was becoming a ratings bonanza. Under Zucker, the network began paying Perverted Justice $100,000 for each sting. It also approved partnering with police, which led to the arrests and the dramatic finales for the stings — and ever more viewers. After Hansen finished his interview, the suspect would invariably ask whether he was free to go. Hansen would nod or signal toward the door with his hand. And outside the police would be waiting, often to tackle the man and cuff him. The televised setup was still entrapment, defense attorneys and critics would argue, but with law enforcement now making arrests, the conviction rate improved.
There would be 12 undercover operations in total before “To Catch a Predator” was canceled in 2008 after the negative scrutiny and legal pressure that followed the Conradt case. Hansen says that the show had “just run its course.” Von Erck thinks there was another reason. As popular as “To Catch a Predator” was with viewers, advertisers were spooked.
“We used to have guys bring a product called Mike’s Hard Lemonade to the houses because they were advertising all the time back then,” Von Erck says. “Usually, product placement is a wonderful thing for most TV shows. Mike’s Hard Lemonade sent a cease and desist to ‘Dateline’ asking them never to mention their product again.”
When Hollywood wants to really deliver the nuance and the authenticity, the flaws and the understanding, of a living character, it tends to reach out at least minimally to the party being portrayed.
To research her role in “Selena,” Jennifer Lopez stayed with the singer’s sister in Corpus Christi, Texas, and even slept in the late pop star’s bed. Christian Bale spent months in Lowell, Massachusetts, walking the streets with Dicky Eklund as he prepared to play him in “The Fighter.” Margot Robbie flew out to meet figure skater Tonya Harding before filming started on “I, Tonya” and invited her to walk the red carpet for the film’s premiere.
“Primetime” did not take this approach.
Pattinson and Hansen have never met and never exchanged so much as a text message.
It was only in May, a day before A24 released “Primetime’s” first teaser, that the studio reached out to Hansen. Sure, he had heard rumblings. Kevin Balfe, one of the founders of Red Seat Ventures, which represents Hansen, had even heard from director Oppenheim, who told him that the film was a “love letter” to Hansen.
The man at the center of the film had his doubts. He wanted to see a script. He was eager to watch an early version. Then he learned Osit, who had made the 2025 documentary, “Predators,” which Hansen considered unflattering, was pals with director Oppenheim and had seen a cut — without signing an NDA.
In August, A24 contacted Hansen, inviting him to see the film at its offices in New York City. But the studio wanted him to sign the NDA before “Primetime” screened. He showed up that day and, as he’d intended, rejected its request. That set his real plan into motion. After a lot of haggling and no compromise from either side, he headed to Fox News to blast the filmmakers.
At lunch in New York next to Red Seat’s offices, Hansen talks about what he considers A24’s disingenuous approach.
“The press woman calls, ‘I talked to Robert, he’s in London, and I talked to Lance, and they really want you to be happy,’” Hansen recounts. “‘And Robert’s going to come on your podcast if you want to go to London, where he’s shooting the next Batman movie.’ I mean, they talked to me like I’m a little kid. You know, ‘Oh, God, my name’s going to be in a movie.’ I’ve been in this business for 45 years. The least they can f—ing do is if you’re going to take somebody’s name, image and likeness, have the courtesy of showing them the film without making them sign an NDA. They didn’t sign any permission to use my name, image and likeness.”
Was he “furious” as the New York Post reported soon after in a headline?
No, Hansen insists.
“I’m busy being the real Chris Hansen every day,” he says. “I don’t have time.”
When you see the film, it’ll be clear why Oppenheim and Pattinson didn’t want Hansen hanging around the set or writer’s room.
“Primetime” is a dynamic, visual feast, with a stellar performance from the actor. The director soaks the atmosphere in the video age, the shots fuzzy and often marked with time codes as if you’re watching through a camcorder’s viewfinder. But the script plays loose with the facts. Von Erck is a central character, present at all shoots and driving the decision-making as much as Hansen’s NBC producer. In reality, Von Erck says he wasn’t on a single sting.
Equally unflattering is the portrayal of Hansen’s producer. The real producer, Lynn Keller, is turned into a character named Andie Bender, a careerist whose main response to a man killing himself is to offer, “I think I can use this.” (Keller, still at NBC, did not respond to an interview request.)
And the film is certainly no “love letter.” Hansen is driven by insecurity as he interacts with snooty anchor Phillips and Zucker. He’s also a mess at home. He wakes his arguably too-young-to-watch-this boys so they can screen “Predator.” He lies to his wife and has an affair that lands him in the National Enquirer. As “Primetime” presents it, Hansen’s mission is simply to rule his time slot, a slick, self-absorbed philanderer trying to become a star. In the Conradt case, he’s not simply a bystander. He’s the protagonist.
So is Hansen driven by ego? Is he too close to the police? Is this high theater or advocacy? And is he helping parents or merely helping himself?
Osit believes that Hansen and the slew of copycats who emerged after him weren’t interested in solving the root cause of child sexual abuse.
“The way that the show operates is that we can see that these people are irredeemably sick beyond help,” he says. “And then as a result, we don’t really care what happens to them as a society.”
But Hansen says he’s not a counselor or a therapist. He is a “working reporter” doing “enterprise journalism.” He made the decision long ago to work with police for what he calls “a greater good — to be socially responsible and ensure these guys face justice.”
There are times, he says, a suspect’s sad life story can elicit sympathy.
“But at the same time that doesn’t excuse somebody trying to exploit a vulnerable child,” Hansen says. “He knows better. He’s an adult. There’s a hundred places he could be.”
After NBC canceled the show in 2008, Hansen remained at “Dateline.” But in 2011, the National Enquirer’s hidden cameras caught him in an affair with a younger TV reporter in Florida. In 2013, that woman, no longer with Hansen, told her story to Radar Online and included a photograph of the two kissing. Hansen was laid off from NBC soon after, and he and his first wife, Mary Joan, separated and eventually divorced. For a few years, Hansen bounced around, doing a show on Discovery, a series, “Hansen vs. Predator,” for Crime Watch Daily, and in 2019, launching a YouTube channel. He also hit some bumps that landed him in the tabloids again for bouncing checks and defaulting on his rent.
This is the one chapter that Hansen tightens up over. His explanation is limited.
“It’s a time when a lot of things were happening, a divorce, a lot of transition and it’s not even worth analyzing,” he says. “You fix it, you take care of it and you move on.”
On his own and free of network oversight, Hansen doesn’t pretend there’s much of a wall between him and the police. In Louisiana, he’s greeted in the sting house as both a peer and folk hero. Other detectives bring items to Hansen — custom-made medallions, handcuffs, a mug — that he can autograph during downtime. They need each other. Without the police, he can’t gather more sting content. Without Hansen, they can’t get much buzz beyond articles in local newspapers.
What’s also interesting about the sting is how little Hansen is involved. He spends most of the time in the kitchen or living room, scrolling on his phone, talking to colleagues about upcoming recordings or warming up yet another cup of coffee in the microwave. The action takes place in a cramped back room, where half a dozen detectives and decoys sit under mounted deer heads as they bounce from laptops to iPads. The engagements usually start by posting a basic photo of the decoy on a social media site. Then the detectives juggle chats with anywhere from 15 to 20 men at a time. The male officers wear tight blue golf shirts with their names sewn in. The female decoys wear sweats and tank tops. At any moment, they may have to repair to one of the two bedrooms and go into decoy mode, chatting with a suspect.
There are rules on this day, meant to make prosecutions fairer and smoother. The law enforcement decoys engage only with men 21 and older. They have to depict themselves as being younger than 17, which is the age of consent for sexual activity in Louisiana. They aren’t allowed to entrap the men by suggesting sex acts first or inviting them over. The men have to suggest the visit.
The sting nets two men on this day. One arrives wearing an ankle bracelet from another case. He insists, when Hansen confronts him, that he merely wanted to come and watch the budget-core horror flick “Obsession” with the 15-year-old because he has no WiFi at home.
The other person caught in the sting is a 21-year-old diesel mechanic. He gives fair warning as he drives up; his bright yellow pickup truck roars as he makes his way down the driveway. He walks in with a loaded gun tucked into his pants. Because of that, Hansen has to abandon the standard approach. Instead, Capt. Bowden of the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office approaches first, disarming the suspect with ease. Now at the couch, Hansen approaches him and begins to run through his questions. The man has only an eighth-grade education. He’s upset because he knows he’s going to get fired from his job.
Hansen starts by asking him why he came here.
“Originally, I came over here just to meet somebody new,” he says. “If we were friends, I didn’t find anything wrong.”
“But you talk about … touching her butt and taking showers together,” Hansen says. “Do you see how this looks?”
“Horrible,” the man says.
“What do you think should happen?”
“I don’t know,” he answers. “I can’t afford to leave this job.”
Here, Hansen leans in.
“You should have thought about that before you came over here to have sex with a child,” Hansen says. “You’re a man. You should be out doing man things. Taking out women of appropriate age. Working on diesel. Drilling for oil. Stuff men do. Not raping a child.”
When he’s done, Bowden steps in, on camera. He’s got a few lines before the scene wraps.
“What we don’t like is people coming to this parish to exploit our children, and Sheriff Jason Ard, he don’t put up with that,” Bowden says. “And you know what, he’s here today.”
Ard, waiting in the wings for his cameo, steps forward.
“We’re going to bring you down to my hotel motel,” Ard says, “and you can do all the rub-a-dub-dubs you want in that jail. We got plenty of showers for you.”
“Holy s—,” a woman shouts as she exits the 7:10 p.m. showing of “Primetime” in Times Square. “It’s Chris Hansen.”
This wasn’t quite the red carpet premiere at the Venice Film Festival. At the Regal, the escalator is busted, the air conditioning seems to be on the fritz and Hansen has to throw down $24.68 for a seat in row G.
His wife, Gabrielle Hansen, has come along, but this isn’t a date night. A small crew tails him to capture his reaction to the movie, which he is seeing for the first time.
When the lights come on, he acknowledges he didn’t know what to make of Oppenheim’s film. There were occasional moments of truth, but most of the script was fiction.
Outside the Regal, a crowd assembles. They watch as the real Chris Hansen starts conducting interviews.
“I’m interested in seeing how he feels about seeing that,” says one man, Eric Ingram. “He did not look good in that film. I found it really disturbing watching it.”
Anyone expecting an emotional response from Hansen wasn’t going to get it.
“It was so dark and so twisted, it was hard for me to take seriously,” he says.
For 45 minutes, he does what he came here to do: gather content. Video would be posted all weekend by his social team. Interviews were cut for his podcast. Then there was another Fox News appearance with Watters.
After her husband wraps up a last selfie, Gabrielle Hansen complains that the film had been insulting. Chris Hansen seems unconcerned. “I’ve been in this business a long time, and I knew what this was going to be,” he says.
As the couple begins walking, heading to get a bite to eat, he shrugs.
“I’ll sleep fine tonight.”
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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