Matt WalshChris Hansen’s show “To Catch A Predator” went off the air in 2007, nearly two decades ago. It was never replaced or rebooted for a primetime audience. Except for a fringe syndicated show, the entire concept disappeared from major networks afterward.
The idea — setting up a decoy house, wiring it with cameras, and luring predators inside so they could be exposed and arrested — went from extremely profitable to verboten, basically overnight. If you want to watch a similar show today, you either need to subscribe to a niche streaming service like TruBlu or follow journalists like Alex Rosen who — while they do brave and important work — have a tenth of the budget (and a tenth of the viewership, and an even smaller portion of the cultural impact) of the old NBC production.
That’s remarkable, when you think about it. At its peak, “To Catch a Predator” was pulling in more than 7 million viewers an episode on average — with some episodes approaching 11 million viewers. Its ratings were consistently high. Then, after a phony scandal that we’ll discuss in a moment, “To Catch a Predator” was abruptly cancelled, much like “COPS” during the BLM craze. But it was not forgotten, particularly in the entertainment industry. The show left a lasting impression among Hollywood elites for reasons you can probably imagine. They never forgave Chris Hansen for making it. “To Catch a Predator” was the closest the industry came to a Harvey Weinstein moment for the worst predators of all — the ones who target children.
That’s why, in just the past two years, there have been two big-budget productions designed from the ground up to destroy Chris Hansen’s legacy and the reputation of his show — which, again, has not been on the air in nearly 20 years.
The first hit job was a production streaming on Paramount+ called “Predators.” The more recent one, out now in theaters, is the Robert Pattinson thriller called “Primetime,” directed by a guy named Lance Oppenheim.
Admittedly, from a purely strategic perspective, you do have to wonder: Why are they doing this now? Why would Hollywood, and an up-and-coming director like Lance Oppenheim, suddenly be so transfixed by Chris Hansen, who’s now 67 years old, and far removed from any kind of mainstream celebrity or influence? Why are they so hell-bent on portraying him as a villain along with everyone else who’s followed in his footsteps? The timing seems almost random, even if you know why these people despise him.
I have some theories about what’s going on here. But first I want to talk, at some length, about these two productions. And we’re going to start with “Primetime,” which is truly a breathtaking film, in terms of its abject dishonesty. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a part of the most recent trailer to give you an idea of how they’re portraying Chris Hansen.
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It was obvious from the trailer that the film would present Hansen as a tortured and somewhat unstable figure, which is why he’s staring ahead into psychedelic, monochromatic red lighting at one point, as if he’s having a mental breakdown. He even jokes with a guy on the plane about how he enjoys torturing predators, rather than simply killing them. He’s screaming, he’s looking insane in the rain, he has a savior complex, and he’s freaking out his wife — all of this comes through in a two-minute-long trailer.
So what’s the message of the actual film? I was actually interested in this question, because by itself, this trailer made no sense. As far as I knew, Hansen wasn’t known to be a lunatic. He certainly didn’t come across on his show as someone prone to emotional outbursts, or even hostility — even when he was in objectively dangerous situations, staging face-to-face meetings with complete strangers who were in the process of committing serious crimes against children.
To provide some contrast with the trailer you just saw, here’s an example of one of his sting operations, from Riverside, California. This is one of the shows where he provides commentary from the studio after the fact, which he didn’t always do.
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He doesn’t exactly come across like a raving lunatic here (all of the clips from the show are like this). But this footage in particular is important because it shows why Hollywood really, truly hated this show. It wasn’t just that he exposed predators (which bothered the predators in Hollywood), although that was a very big part of it.
He was also rejecting the entire mental health/victimization framework that’s now so fundamental to the Left’s ideology. To an audience of millions of people, in primetime, he was explicitly saying that, even if you have some mental health “diagnosis,” an addiction, or whatever, it does not give you a license to commit unspeakable acts of evil. Sorry about your sob story. But that’s your problem. There’s a limit to what society has to tolerate. Once you start victimizing the rest of society — particularly children — then there’s no longer any room for sympathy. At a certain point, people are responsible for their own actions.
If this approach had taken hold in America, it goes without saying that, for example, Lindsay Clancy would’ve been convicted of first-degree murder in about five seconds. Her case wouldn’t have even made the national news, or at least would not have been a national controversy. A controversy requires two coherent and opposing sides. We would have recognized that there is only one coherent side to the Clancy case. She’s evil scum and deserves the gas chamber. And that’s all there is to it, or should have been, or would have been.
More to the point, if Chris Hansen’s position had gone mainstream, there’s a chance that violent black criminals would actually have to serve meaningful prison sentences — instead of getting released immediately, so they can stab a random white woman on the train, or sucker-punch a random white woman walking down the sidewalk, or stab police officers, or mow down a random white guy running in the street, or rip off a random convenience store in Minneapolis before resisting arrest.
Instead, under the Left’s ethos, all of these black criminals were victims of circumstance — of systemic racism and oppression. Therefore, none of them are ever held accountable for anything.
On the other hand, Hansen, in a very rational and calm manner, told viewers — directly and unapologetically — that some crimes simply cannot be excused. Along with the investigators he was working with, he documented all of his work exhaustively. There was never any allegation that he fabricated evidence or provided any kind of illicit incentive for any of these predators to show up to his decoy house.
So where exactly is the movie “Primetime” getting the idea that Chris Hansen was losing his mind while producing “To Catch a Predator”? Why are there psychedelic monochromatic red lights swirling around his head in the trailer? Why is he acting like a nutcase in the rain?
Lance Oppenheim provides two answers to these questions. And both of his answers are total fiction, to the point that Chris Hansen should sue Lance Oppenheim and the studio for defamation. This is character assassination to an unbelievable degree. For starters, they claim Hansen was worried about his ratings going down and was under a lot of pressure as a result. That’s clearly not true. The show was always wildly popular throughout its entire run.
More egregiously, in no uncertain terms, the film also asserts that Hansen was losing his mind because he was supposedly worried about an upcoming tabloid article, which was going to expose the fact he was having an affair. We’re told that the journalist was extremely rattled by the prospect of his infidelity coming to light — and we’re told that this caused immense strain in his marriage once his wife learned that the tabloid article was imminent.
There’s even a scene where Hansen’s producer, watching him on-air, states “he’s off” (or something to that effect), illustrating that he’s rattled by the reporting on his affair — and that it’s affecting his work. Then, at the film’s climactic moment, when Hansen’s team is about to bust an assistant district attorney by going to his house, Hansen is still fielding calls from his wife about his infidelity.
The implication — which is laid on pretty thick — is that Hansen has become so deranged that he’s now hunting down the predators at their own homes (as opposed to luring them to decoy houses). We’re told that Hansen is now throwing caution to the wind and ignoring protocol, all because he’s furious about the reporting on his affair.
The problem here — other than the fact that there’s no moral equivalence whatsoever between Hansen’s behavior and the predators’ as much as the film would like to pretend otherwise — is that the timeline is completely off. Hansen did not even meet this “other woman” until 2011 — which is several years after his show went off the air. In other words, there was absolutely no connection between Hansen’s affair and his behavior on the show (on-set or off).
Never mind the fact that, again — as much as I obviously condemn adultery — there is absolutely no comparison between child predators and a man in a sexual relationship with an adult woman. Frankly, I don’t care how many mistresses Hansen had. He was still doing important, noble work. In any event, there was certainly no connection between Hansen’s affair and the raid on the district attorney’s house in 2006. So the whole premise of the film — that Hansen was losing his mind at the height of his popularity because his dark secrets were being exposed — is completely, unequivocally wrong.
And it’s deliberately wrong, too. There’s a point to this deception. They’re trying to sell a narrative that Hansen committed some egregious crime by taking his production crew and going to the home of assistant district attorney Bill Conradt, in Terrell, Texas. They had already established that Conradt was a predator with chat logs. But Conradt was refusing to come to the decoy house, so the police — who determined that he had already committed a crime with his chats — decided to go and arrest him at home. Here’s what happened next in the following video from a Dateline broadcast in 2006.
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There is no universe in which Chris Hansen, NBC, or the police did anything wrong here. This was not a case where they were going after some random schizophrenic homeless guy who had no idea what he was writing online or whatever. This was precisely the kind of case that all reasonable people would agree is a matter of public interest. They caught a public official — a prosecutor, no less — engaging in serious criminal behavior. You can’t have a predator working in the DA’s office. So obviously, they were correct to go to his home and execute the search warrant. At that point, if the prosecutor chooses to off himself, rather than face accountability for his actions, that’s his problem. It’s not Chris Hansen’s fault.
Personally, I have no sympathy for the guy, and neither should you. He was a total scumbag who died in the most cowardly and selfish way a person can die. The suicide is just one more mark against him. You’d have to be very morally confused to come to any other conclusion.
That’s especially true because, as Chris Hansen notes, the DA was not simply guilty of soliciting a minor on the internet (although, by itself, that should be a death penalty offense). Detectives who searched the DA’s computer found evidence of other more serious crimes as well.
“Primetime” and Lance Oppenheim never bother to mention the other crimes this DA committed, for the same reason they spend the entire movie lying about Hansen’s motivations. Hollywood’s goal is transparent: They want to make it seem like Hansen was behaving recklessly when he investigated this DA, so they made up a fake motive (his affair, which didn’t actually happen for several years, and his allegedly declining ratings, which were actually extremely good).
The point is to make sure that no one else investigates powerful people who are engaging in behavior like this. If you do — if you bring down someone important — they’ll defame you. They’ll make multiple big-budget movies in which they lie about you.
They’ll also sue you. In that clip, Hansen mentions the settlement that NBC reached over this case, which was truly one of the low points in this country’s modern history. To be very clear about what happened: This scumbag DA committed multiple serious felonies involving children. He then shot himself instead of facing the consequences of his own actions. The DA’s family decides to sue for $100 million — and in the end, she extracts a massive settlement from NBC in the process (we can assume it was in the tens of millions of dollars, easily). She got enormously wealthy because her brother was the absolute scum of the earth.
The people who exposed her brother, meanwhile, have to shut down their show and pay millions of dollars. The more you think about this case, the more you’ll genuinely feel like you’re losing your mind. From a legal perspective, it’s easily one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in the history of television.
What happened is that a Clinton-appointed judge named Denny Chin refused to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that NBC might have applied some kind of indirect pressure on the police to bring a SWAT team to arrest the DA. The idea being that the police wanted to put on a show for the cameras and, in doing so, they somehow became responsible for this guy shooting himself. This is from an article that CBS published at the time:
U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said a jury might conclude the network “crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement.” … In the lawsuit, Patricia Conradt said NBC “steamrolled” police to arrest her brother after telling police he failed to show up at a sting operation 35 miles away. … Chin said the lawsuit contained sufficient facts to make it plausible that the suicide was foreseeable, that police had a duty to protect Conradt from killing himself, and that the officers and NBC acted with deliberate indifference. … In his ruling, Chin said the network “placed itself squarely in the middle of a police operation, pushing the police to engage in tactics that were unnecessary and unwise, solely to generate more dramatic footage for a television show.” Chin wrote that a reasonable jury could find there was no legitimate law enforcement need for a heavily armed SWAT team to extract a 56-year-old prosecutor from his home when he was not accused of any actual violence and was not believed to have a gun. … “A reasonable jury could find that by doing so, NBC created a substantial risk of suicide or other harm, and that it engaged in conduct so outrageous and extreme that no civilized society should tolerate it,” Chin said. … In her lawsuit, Patricia Conradt claims a police officer at the scene of the shooting told a “Dateline” producer: “That’ll make good TV.”
As you saw in the posted Dateline episode, the police did not initially bring a SWAT team to arrest the DA. That only became necessary when he refused to come out of the house, creating a barricade situation. At that point, they had reason to believe that, if they walked into the house without a ballistic shield and body armor, they might get shot — because this guy was clearly refusing to comply with their commands to exit the house. Secondly, as Hansen pointed out, arresting him at his home was actually seen as the moderate, humane option. The alternative would be to arrest him at the DA’s office, which would’ve humiliated him even more. And then he’d have even more reason to kill himself, if we’re taking their reasoning at face value.
Most importantly — even if you buy into all of these arguments, and even if you believe that a cop said “that’ll make good TV,” the logic still falls apart when you realize that the presence of a SWAT team — and the statements of the officers after-the-fact — does not have any logical relationship to the question of whether or not someone should (or will) kill himself. These are two totally unrelated concepts. If NBC wants more dramatic footage, and the cops want to look really badass with their SWAT vans, then — at most — you can accuse them of being a little vain or immature. You could even throw around the word “unprofessional” if you wanted to.
But it makes absolutely no sense to say that the police shouldn’t bring a SWAT team to a criminal’s house because it might freak the suspect out and make him shoot himself. That is absurd on its face. The reason this prosecutor was suicidal had nothing to do with NBC or the SWAT team. It had to do with the fact that he had just been exposed as a predator, and his entire life and career — which depended on his reputation — were about to fall apart, solely because of his own crimes and depravity. That’s the reason he shot himself. He is solely responsible for that decision.
Even if the police had gotten on the bullhorn and relentlessly mocked him for being a disgusting, degenerate pervert — which they didn’t do — they still would not be liable, in any way, for his suicide. Neither would NBC nor Chris Hansen, for the simple reason that people are responsible for their own actions. It’s the central message of “To Catch a Predator.” And the point of films like “Primetime” is to defame and destroy anyone who spreads that message.
There’s a host of other fabricated details in this film as well, including the idea that Hansen’s producer demanded that the SWAT officers outfit their rifles with cameras for the raid on the DA, which didn’t happen. There’s a scene where a cop who’s organizing the raid says something like, “Let’s get this Democrat DA,” which makes it seem like a political operation. Again, this didn’t happen. They also have one of the decoy actors singing a song from the musical “Rent” over the phone to the DA during the raid, which is also totally made up.
In the film, the raid happens at night during a storm, when in reality it took place in broad daylight. It’s all designed to make the operation look as unprofessional and cruel as possible. And obviously, the fact they have to lie constantly about what actually happened is a pretty big clue that the operation was actually completely legitimate. And it’s also a sign that the demons who made this movie, very clearly, are sympathetic to some of the worst people in society.
There were many other malicious fabrications throughout the film. For example, in the real show, Hansen and NBC partnered with a group called “Perverted Justice,” which was staffed by people who were committed to the mission. But the film portrays Hansen as a cunning trickster who wines and dines the decoy (and inflates his ego and promises him that he’ll be a real actor), even when the decoy has to endure all kinds of psychological trauma as a result of the show. Again, it’s all fabricated.
There’s even a ridiculous scene where, after Chris Hansen is told by NBC president Jeff Zucker (who, bizarrely, plays himself in the film) that he’ll be moving to primetime (which also didn’t happen, since the show was already in primetime), Hansen goes home and forces his children to watch an episode of his show, while he brags to them about his new time slot — even as the kids are visibly uninterested in the whole thing. Not only that — the scene he shows his children is extremely graphic and inappropriate. So they’re portraying Hansen as a weirdo who doesn’t care about his own children. And it’s all totally made up. Hansen spoke specifically about these scenes in a recent interview.
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Chris Hansen on why he’s not a fan of the new Primetime movie⁰⁰”In a way, it’s a hit piece on me and the series, which is weird bc all we do is expose bad human beings who try to hurt children..I think it’s so far over the top, that it’s hard to come to grips with what they’re… pic.twitter.com/HI7fiR7F8N
— yeet (@Awk20000) September 26, 2026
Source: @Awk20000/X.com
The way the film is structured, for about the first half, Hansen is portrayed as this ratings-obsessed narcissist. And then, once his “affair” is exposed and his ratings supposedly begin to slip, he convinces himself that he’s really on some spiritual quest to rid the world of evil.
There’s a scene where Pattinson overacts in a rather flamboyant fashion, which you can see here:
Screenshot from the film, “Primetime.”
They actually play it for laughs. Again, the point is to portray him as a highly unstable, unsympathetic figure. But if you actually watch the show Chris Hansen made, you’ll find that over and over again, he demonstrates extraordinary restraint, even in some very difficult circumstances. Here’s one of them.
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If Chris Hansen were demonically obsessed with ratings, he could’ve let that scene play out. But he recognized what a horrible situation this was, and he shut the whole thing down immediately. Most importantly, he helped the police arrest a man who was very clearly going to do unspeakable things in that house. That is heroic. It’s the kind of thing an honest movie about Hansen would celebrate.
Instead, in “Primetime,” they have a scene where they bust some quadriplegic who we’re supposed to feel sorry for. It’s embarrassingly obvious what these filmmakers were trying to do. It’s also strange on a fundamental level — which explains Chris Hansen’s reaction the moment he left the theater.
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Well….I saw Primetime. My reaction tonight 7p eastern on my podcast/YouTube channel Have A Seat With Chris Hansen ! pic.twitter.com/dMEErgVriH
— Chris Hansen (@chrishansen) September 25, 2026
Source: @chrishansen/X.com
You can make the case that Hansen’s personal motives aren’t entirely pure, and that he might have made some mistakes in the process of making the show. I’m certainly open to the possibility that he had some unfortunate character traits. Most successful people who are obsessively committed to anything are going to have some parts of their character that you can criticize. It comes with the territory. Anyone who works in front of a camera for a living is susceptible to becoming vain, greedy, and self-obsessed. Anyone who doesn’t work in front of a camera is also susceptible to those things. That’s called being human. But when someone is doing good and noble work, and also turning that work into entertainment to be consumed by the masses, there is a natural tension that arises between these two goals. You could make an interesting film exploring that tension. Maybe someone will. But “Primetime” isn’t it.
The fact remains that these kinds of predators typically don’t get harsh prison sentences — if they get sent to prison at all. Often, they don’t suffer any significant consequences, even when men like Alex Rosen manage to prove that they’re guilty on-camera. The idea that Hansen (and other predator hunters) should just let the cops handle everything, frankly, does not hold up.
Police departments were not sufficiently addressing this problem. They weren’t doing much of anything, in many cases. So if someone like Hansen comes in and gives them an incentive to actually do their jobs, that’s a good thing. If these predators are not going to be thrown in prison for life — and most of them will not be — then at least they can be publicly exposed and shamed. For some of them — like that DA — the public exposure alone is a fate worse than death. So, again, what Hansen was doing was objectively noble and necessary, and just.
Besides, of all the attention-seeking fame whores on TV — and there are a lot of them to choose from — it’s very revealing that Chris Hansen is the guy the media and Hollywood have decided to single out. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not just “Primetime.” There’s a whole campaign to take down Hansen and everyone like him. The documentary “Predators,” which is streaming on Paramount+, broadens the attack to the whole “predator hunter” genre, which has become popular in recent years. It also features interviews with Hansen’s weepy decoys, two of whom now sympathize with the predators — saying they couldn’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
The documentary also features some of the more sympathetic interrogation footage of the predators (where they cry and apologize for what they did). This is footage NBC didn’t air, and the implication is that the show was deliberately offering a dishonest portrayal of the predators to dehumanize them. Of course, if you actually watched the show, you’ll recall plenty of examples where these people would break down once they got caught. Some of them are even depicted in “Primetime.”
“Predators” also demonizes police officers for voluntarily wearing cameras during the production of some episodes of “To Catch a Predator” (not for the DA raid, but other episodes) — even though pretty much every police officer wears cameras today — they’re called body cameras, and they’re universally recognized as a good thing.
I’ll concede that, in some very extreme cases, these “predator hunter” videos can verge into vigilantism and mob justice, which is bad and irresponsible, largely because it jeopardizes and undermines the mission of exposing these guys and hopefully having them prosecuted. “Predators” includes some of that kind of footage as well. By and large, though, these videos are doing the same thing Chris Hansen did. Actually, in some cases, they’re producing even more remarkable footage.
Just a few weeks ago, Alex Rosen said he identified an alleged predator on the faculty at the University of Houston. He was briefly put in a police car, on camera, in front of visibly stunned students. This is from the local ABC news outlet:
A University of Houston faculty member and graduate student has been suspended after being confronted on campus by a child predator fighting group. UH confirmed the suspension Thursday afternoon after Eyewitness News inquired about a Kick livestream showing him confessing to buying child porn and messaging minors in a conversation with Alex Rosen of the group Poaching Predators. Sources told Eyewitness News that UH police have turned the case over to HPD, which will investigate the educator for online solicitation of a minor. HPD has yet to return a request for comment. “He’s a danger to society,” Rosen told Eyewitness News.
I don’t know whether this professor is guilty or innocent — that will be adjudicated in a court of law, as it should be — but I do know that it’s extremely disturbing to think about the number of teachers who are actually predators. And there’s probably quite a few of them. Men like Alex Rosen — who are risking their lives every day to conduct investigations like this — deserve enormous credit for what they do.
Instead, documentaries like “Predators” are demonizing them. They actually managed to interview Chris Hansen for this documentary and, as you’d expect, tried to make him look as morally bankrupt as possible. But even The New Yorker admitted in a recent article that it backfired. Hansen held his ground. Here’s footage from his interview at the end of the documentary.
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Again, he’s the exact opposite of how they want to portray him. He concedes that his critics have a valid point, in a sense — it’s true that many people who watch these kinds of shows, at some level, are often trying to feel better about their own lives. That’s true. It’s also one of the reasons people watch “COPS” and “LivePD,” which is now called On Patrol: Live, post-BLM hysteria.
But the question is not, “Are some members of the audience getting the wrong message here?” At least that’s not the interesting or important question. If that’s the only issue we care about, then nothing would ever get done. The real question is: “Does the content serve an important and morally righteous purpose?” And the answer to that question, in the case of nearly all of these predator hunter videos, is a resounding “yes.”
It’s anyone’s guess as to why Hollywood elites like Lance Oppenheim, seemingly out of nowhere, are now reviving their campaign against Hansen and the other predator hunters. It could be related to the mass migration of the past decade, which has led to a new wave of abuse (most notably in the UK). Certainly, the Left has a vested interest in running cover for this abuse and the people who commit it. Alternatively, this could also be related to the rise of AI content these predators use. Maybe we’re seeing an effort to “normalize” this kind of behavior in the eyes of the public by demonizing anyone who objects to it.
Fundamentally, though, it’s clear these people simply do not believe the predators are doing anything wrong. For similar reasons that they support abortion, they truly believe that adults should suffer no consequences whatsoever for engaging in this kind of conduct. They don’t see anything wrong with it.
That’s the unspoken evil underlying the attacks on Chris Hansen and the cottage industry of predator hunters that he helped create. You can mock “Pizzagate” and the conspiracy theorists all you want, but the fact remains that Hollywood just put out a big-budget movie that exists for the sole purpose of defaming and destroying a man who exposed how common this sickness is.
The day they set up their first sting operation, they had more than a dozen people walk into their decoy house in just two days. It was like moths to a flame. And in every neighborhood Chris Hansen went, it was the same story. Even after his show became a nationwide phenomenon, and people knew Chris Hansen might be lurking in the home, they still showed up by the hundreds.
This is why Hollywood figures like Lance Oppenheim want to ruin Chris Hansen. It’s the same reason they want to ruin anyone — he was effective. He still is effective. And with “Primetime,” like “Predators” before it, they have tried and failed to take him down. All they’ve accomplished — and this is clear to anyone who watches these films — is demonstrating that they are deathly afraid of being exposed for what they are.
They saw what happened to Weinstein and Epstein, and they don’t want it to happen to them. The fact that they’re desperately producing hit pieces like this is the strongest proof yet that, after many years of waiting, they might soon get exactly what they deserve.
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