Last week, five Assumption University students in Massachusetts were arraigned on charges of conspiracy and kidnapping. The group, all aged 18 or 19—a sixth student was charged separately in juvenile court—was alleged by police to have used a Tinder profile of an 18-year-old woman to lure a 22-year-old active-duty military service member to a basement lounge. (They pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and kidnapping.) The Guardian cites the police report, which describes how, after arriving for the meetup, “a group of people came out of nowhere and started calling him a pedophile.” When the alleged victim tried to escape, dozens of young people chased after him, he told police. The alleged victim was able to drive away, but only after he says he was punched in the head and had his car door slammed on him.
The alleged crime is not the only such incident to lead to arrests in the last month; in Illinois, teenage boys were accused of luring men with a dating app. The alleged perpetrators of both circumstances were following a formula similar to one established on To Catch a Predator, NBC’s popular hidden-camera series, which aired 20 episodes from 2004–2007—and has since become a phenomenon on social media, as amateur copycats try to recreate the show’s signature lurid sting operations. Hosted by broadcast journalist Chris Hansen, To Catch a Predator worked with law enforcement to track down and arrest alleged pedophiles. Hired “decoys” posing as minors would convince adult men to meet up with them at a house where they’d secretly be filmed. Once the men allegedly made clear that they intended to have sex with a minor, Hansen would appear out of nowhere to expose them and chat, before police would arrive to put them in handcuffs. The popularity of the show could be attributed to its success as a televised sting operation—if also, more queasily, a reliable showcase of grand public humiliation.
“This was a film set that you walk onto and it ends your life as you know it,” says
David Osit, director of Predators, a new documentary premiering at the Sundance Film Festival that grapples with the show’s legacy. “The actual television episodes are edited as a comedy, even though some of the material—like with a lot of reality television—is quite tragic and horrifying.”
The show’s righteous formula—real-life villains behaving badly and getting punished—drew a devoted following. Its online fandom is still passionate, driven by concerned citizens who have spent years collecting raw footage of the show’s production and of subsequent official interrogations, some of which appear in Osit’s movie. “I would watch this raw material, of some of these men having said or done atrocious things, and feel disgusted. But then I would see their interrogation videos and feel bad for them,” Osit says. “Then I’d go back and read the chat logs, or hear the decoy phone call, and be furious again—and then come back and feel bad for that.”
That complexity informs Predators, which is divided into three acts. The first reexamines To Catch a Predator itself, and the show’s ugly, abrupt ending. The second follows a popular copycat, one of many who have amassed huge internet followings. The third won’t be spoiled here, as it takes unexpected turns ranging from memoiristic to investigative.
“Are we perhaps, as human beings, made of both empathy and cruelty?” Osit says. “Is this the central thing that defines us as a species and helps us survive? And what if that gets turned into a formula for an entertainment program?”
To Catch a Predator concluded in the wake of a shocking tragedy. The show had zeroed in on Bill Conradt, an assistant district attorney in Texas, as its next target. He’d been caught communicating inappropriately with a decoy posing as a 13-year-old boy, and NBC and the police had arranged to have his impending arrest caught on camera. But when officers and a film crew entered his residence, leaving him publicly exposed, Conradt shot and killed himself. The episode still aired, though Conradt’s sister later sued NBC for $105 million, and settled out of court. A few more episodes followed before the show stopped altogether. Hansen has maintained that Predator ended because they had “run their course,” according to a 2015 Time profile.
Osit explores Conradt’s death from various angles, interviewing law enforcement officials associated with the sting gone awry, as well as those who worked on the show. “I learned throughout the course of making this film that the idea of heroes and villains, and good guys and bad guys, only benefits the people who get to author the stories and get to hold power,” Osit tells me. “A lot of the story of this movie is about who gets to have power over other people—and how can that be turned into entertainment and into capital.”
Dan Schrack was the decoy involved in that episode—he was in his early 20s, playing a 13-year-old—and had been on site for the production as the tragedy unfurled. “You could offer me $10 million to film that episode in Texas again, and I wouldn’t take it,” he says in the documentary. “I would not take it, and be happy about that decision.” Now a local morning news anchor, Schrack tells Osit in the movie that he has “blocked [the show] out,” expressing a need to move on. “This was something I had started to pack up as nicely as I could, and bury as far back as possible. And then I heard from you.”
Osit also speaks with other decoys, many of whom joined To Catch a Predator as young actors happy to simply book a job. “I don’t think I had any idea how big the show was. To me, it was like, ‘A couple random people are going to see this, but it’s probably not my big acting break,’” Dani Jayden, who was 19 when she was cast for To Catch a Predator, says in the film. “Little did I know that it was going to live on my whole, entire life until I die. I will probably always in some universe be known as the decoy.”
Osit’s presence in Predators evolves in the second act, as he links up with Skeeter Jean—a “professional Chris Hansen impersonator” whose YouTube channel counts 1.89 million subscribers. Most of Jean’s videos are directly modeled on To Catch a Predator—albeit, crucially, with a looser relationship to actual law enforcement. Most also have millions of views. “A video that he posts on YouTube today will have more views than a segment from SNL on the official NBC YouTube channel,” Osit says.