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On the Media
A New Doc Questions The Legacy of "To Catch A Predator"
00:18:32
The beginning of our true crime era.
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Transcript37 lines
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Hey, you're listening to the on the Media midweek podcast. I'm Michael Oinger. To set the scene for this episode, we're going back to November 2004, when the wildly successful To Catch a Predator first aired on television as a segment of NBC's Dateline.
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This 32 year old guy wants to spend a Sunday afternoon chilling with a 13 year old girl after texting her about getting stoned. But Mike Manzie's date is about to go up in smoke.
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The show eventually became one of the biggest and most most influential true crime shows ever, drawing 7 million viewers per episode by its final season in 2007. David Ossett is a filmmaker whose recent documentary titled Predators probes the ugly legacy of the show. How it blurred the lines between justice and entertainment and what it says about us that we watched it. As David Ossett tells it, there was a script to how every bust went down.
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To Catch a Predator would set up hidden cameras in a stinghouse where men who were having online chats of a sexual nature with decoys pretending to be minors would then show up to a house and meet the decoys in person. And then they would talk to the decoys for a minute or two. And then they would meet a journalist named Chris Hansen who they didn't know was a journalist as he'd come out. Hi, sir, how are you? But he would then interview the men, ask them why they were there, then tell them they were being filmed on national television. I'm Chris Hanson with Dateline NBC and we're doing a story and I would and tell them they were free to go. You're free to walk out of this house right now. And they would leave the house and then they would be arrested by law enforcement. This was a cultural phenomenon. It aired for three years, about 20 episodes, made it across the world, and really became a seminal type of true crime entertainment before we really had true crime take over the airwaves.
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Do you think that this show is responsible for kind of introducing the threat of child predators into modern pop culture?
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The threat of predatory behavior towards children has been around for a very long time. This show was one of the first times that we figured out how to, for lack of a better way of putting it, how to enjoy it. This was a show that would delight in the catching, shaming and punishing of these child predators who up to this point in time were kind of without an identity. 90 to 95% of predators in the case of child predation are already known to a victim. The minority of child predation Happens from strangers. But it was a funny moment in time, 2004, when it came to the life of the Internet. We were all online, but we weren't socializing online yet. The idea of these dark corners that children could access was a really new idea, because up to that point, we'd been told the Internet was a place that was just like a really magical world where you could just learn lots of things on websites and really got to think, wow, this is a problem, and we have to open our eyes to it. And that's in many ways what this show was able to do.
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You don't lead with this. It's a fact that kind of caught me off guard as a viewer. It comes out in a conversation you have in the film with one of the experts that you interview, that your renewed interest in To Catch a Predator comes from the fact that you yourself were the victim of sexual abuse as a child, and you were genuinely interested in the question that Hansen always asks these men right before they're arrested. He says, help me understand. What were you thinking? Tell me about what you wanted to understand by investigating this show.
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B
I'll answer that question by telling you what first made me want to make a film about this at all. One day, I stumbled onto some of the online fandom communities for To Catch a Predator, which are small but very passionate. People would post footage that they'd find from FOIA requests or defense packages. They would find the names of these men and try to dox them. And watching some of the raw footage from this show was very powerful for me because it stood very starkly in contrast to what I remembered from watching this show. Watching this raw material was watching these men's lives end in slow motion, and they became really fully characters. Now, that gave me a really complicated feeling, and it became less a film about To Catch a Predator, but about true crime and how we feel about it.
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The footage that you found on the Internet, dug up by Sleuths, showed these alleged predators in a different light because you saw them in a much more vulnerable, reflective, remorseful state than how they were portrayed on the show.
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B
At times, when you're watching an hour and a half long sequence of someone who's slowly realizing that what they have done is real, that they were showing up to try to inflict harm on a child. And I watched the show, I realized as I got into making this film that was far more interested in the repetition of this crime so that more people could tune in and enjoy these men's lives being ended versus thinking about the Fact that child predation is still going to continue, and other lives can be affected by this, these lives of children such as myself. And I kept wondering, how does what happened to me become entertainment for someone watching at home? And that's really what started to motivate the film.
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How did you navigate as a filmmaker, inserting your own experience into this film for the reason that you just mentioned? Did you think to yourself, am I potentially turning my own experience into entertainment?
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I absolutely did. In fact, I realized that I couldn't be critical of that genre unless I could be critical of myself and what I was doing. I also think that the fact that I'm saying that I'm also myself a survivor of a sexual abuse that I endured as a child. But I'm sitting here saying that I don't think that this is something that's going to make me feel better or bring me healing, and it might for other people, But I think that there's a difference between healing and something that feels like it's healing at times. I found this type of entertainment for survivors to be sort of the picking of a scab versus what a scab looks like when it heals, which is that it takes far more time. And I felt that having my own story in this film is kind of meant to be a surprise, because the journey of this film makes you confront certain biases that you have. I really wanted this film to be one that is quite challenging. And maybe you feel differently by the end, maybe you don't. But I felt changed by the time I finished making this film, and I felt like my opinions were challenged.
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The first part of your film ends with an episode of the show gone horribly wrong. A male actor lures a predator who turns out to be an assistant district attorney in Texas. The guy ends up not wanting to show up to the house. So NBC and law enforcement, they do something different. They go to his house, and when law enforcement opens the door to apprehend him, he ends up shooting himself in the head. To Catch a Predator ends six episodes after this debacle. This is how Chris Hansen and his team rationalized what happened right after this disaster.
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Everybody on the scene would have rather have had Bill Conrad tell his side of the story and, if necessary, have his day in court. But that's not the choice he made. Chris and his team were able to say, well, yeah, the worst thing you do is prey on a child. So, of course, he took his own life. And it's a shame that that had to happen. Basically, the argument is always when it comes to these types of crimes. Well, if they don't want what happens afterwards, then they shouldn't do the crime. If they take their own life, they take their own life. It's a complicated thing for me to accept that we can decide that a TV show's execution is kind of more important than someone getting help.
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The second part of your film brings us more into the present years after To Catch a Predator is off the air. Now there is this massive ecosystem of Chris Hansen copycats, content creators, who've revamped the template of the show for the live streaming era. You spend time with a YouTuber who goes by the name Skeeter Gene and Skeet Hansen. Tell me about this guy. How did you choose him as a subject?
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I chose Skeet because he was clearly the direct scion of Chris Hansen. He's named after him. He's doing a sort of impression of Chris Hansen. He's got a suit, he's got a clipboard. He's speaking in this low, sonorous voice as he's talking to the men that he's catching. What I have to let you know is that I'm Skeet Hansen with the Predatorial Investigation Unit. And you've just been Skeeted. And I felt like that would be an interesting way to explore how this genre has evolved into some sort of a form of entertainment. Because Skeet is very clear about the fact that he's using the trappings of To Catch a Predator for a humorous value and to get more views. And his show has been very successful.
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There's a scene in your film when you and your film crew and Skeeter Jean's crew are both crammed into this motel bathroom, and you're waiting for this child predator to come into the motel room to find the kid that he's looking for. When he arrives, the man is visibly shaken to realize that he's now been caught in a sting. He starts crying. He's expressing suicidal thoughts. In that moment, your producer approaches him and asks him to sign a release form. I'm wondering if you would sign an appearance release form for us. We can't use your face unless you sign it. They can, but I'm just curious if you sign it for us. So wait a second. I'm kind of confused.
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Yeah, yeah. I'm a documentary filmmaker in that moment. I'm thinking to myself the way a lot of documentary filmmakers are of, you know, I might want to speak to this man afterwards. I might follow him as a character. My cameras are rolling. We ask for A release form. He decides not to give the release form. So we blur his face in the film. And then at some point I get back to the edit room and I watch that material and I have a really visceral reaction to it as I'm watching it. It feels like the film kind of is changing in front of me. And I'm realizing that for this moment, as far as this man is concerned, there are two camera crews in that room and they're doing the same thing. But I'm standing there saying, you know, I'm trying to treat him a little differently than how Skeet's interested in treating him. He's not getting a release form. But it all felt the same and it felt really complicated to me. And it became a moment where I started to realize some deeper threads of what I was interested in doing here, which is that I don't think that any of us are exempt from the cycles that this type of entertainment helps spawn. I don't think that audiences are exempt from it. I don't think that documentary filmmakers are exempt from it. I don't think that journalists are exempt from it. Because we're all basically finding a way to make our stories more interesting by using people's lives.
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In the third and last act of the film, you return to current day Chris Hansen, who's in the process of rebooting his show under a different name now for a different network, True Blue, which is a YouTube channel and a streaming service dedicated to true crime shows. You got this really remarkable access to Chris Hansen's editorial process. You watch him and the president of True Blue discussing an episode they're about to release in which Chris exposes an 18 year old alleged predator. Tell me about that episode.
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B
They were in the middle of a conversation about an episode they were debating whether they should continue making or not, which was an episode featuring a 18 year old man who was caught up in one of their stings, who was chatting with someone he believed to be a 15 year old. There's a debate about what to do in the situation that we filmed. And one of the moments that really stuck out to me was that they were saying, well, in the next state over, it wouldn't have been a crime. An 18 year old and a 15 year old is not illegal.
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Say in Ohio, the law is sort of making room for a senior in high school dating a freshman in high school. However we feel about that, it is legal in some states in the US Precisely.
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And this thing happened to be in a state where that was illegal and if we're looking at a sort of genre that is predicated on flattening people into as evil as possible or as just saying, look, you are a child predator, what happens when there's gray area introduced to something that is so binary? Of course, the answer is that the gray area gets removed. The show can't work without flattening its subjects.
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You interview the mother of this 18 year old who talks about the effect it's had on their family. The son can no longer be in the house with his younger brother who's a minor. He has to drop out of school. We hear him sobbing off camera. It's a sort of heartbreaking moment where we see the aftermath of a crime that so often is not put on screen. That said, when I was reading letterboxd reviews of the film, Reddit posts about the film, I saw a common critique which was that some viewers felt you were too sympathetic to some of the so called predators that you feature in the film. I'm curious to hear what you think about that critique. I mean, in some ways we spend much more time in your film thinking about how these so called predators are portrayed and far less time confronted with the harm that these people are attempting to do.
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B
That's right. Well, I think it's important to note that no children are harmed in my film. There are no actual moments where there are children being victimized in To Catch a Predator. If the criticism is that there's not enough voices of victims, there are a couple victims in the film. I'm one of them. I would also say that the entire landscape of true crime entertainment is full of the voices of victims. That's great that people feel like they can get their voices heard in that way. I have not seen many films that deal with the consequences of this type of entertainment on our society. And that was the goal of my film. I'm fine with the criticism because it's true. I don't give a lot of airtime to victims. I give some. But this film is not really about what happens when a child is victimized. This film is about that if we can decide that a group of people are not worth humanity, we can do that to other people too. And we see the whole history of the last several decades of our society littered with stories of how we can just decide that some people are not worth humanity. We can decide that about immigrants, legal migrants, and we can decide that to enable a genocide. And my question really is, where do we go next from that? I haven't met anyone who can convince me that we can't hold two things at the same time. We can't have people receiving punishment and treatment for their crimes while also having empathy for what got them to become criminals in the first place. No one has convinced me yet why we can't have both of those things in a functional society. But I can tell you, having spent enough time with this issue over the last several years, that this is about men who live in a society that has been basically grooming men to find minors attractive. We talk about pedophilia, which is in its clinical definition, an attraction to very young children. More often the case. And this show is dealing with kids who are 15, 16 being presented as adults, basically who are living and growing up in a society that is prizing the sexuality of 15 and 16 year old girls. It's horrendous that we allow that, but we don't interrogate how we allow that. We instead just want to punish the crime without thinking about how the crime is something that we are ourselves fostering.
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A
What's the solution then?
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I'm a filmmaker. If I knew the solution, I would have come out with it. I wouldn't have spent two years making the film. My job is to try to move people towards some deeper understanding about what kind of entertainment we've decided is okay to consume. That basically is predicated on that dynamic not becoming fixed, but becoming worse so that we can continue to enjoy it on tv.
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I don't want to give away the end of the film. You land in a really powerful place. Without spoiling it, can you explain to me what you wanted to achieve?
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I wanted to use the genre of true crime to address this idea that a lot of true crime typically demands an answer. You find the bad guy, the bad guy gets punished. You're affirmed because you've watched this show and you can leave this documentary saying, I get the issue now, but this isn't a true crime film. And I don't think that you get that satisfaction from the ending of this film. Because I don't think we can get that satisfaction in a system where we're really just watching these stories of good and evil to find entertainment. And I'm saying that films about topics like this can also be predatory. Films like this can also be reductive. There's something more honest and true than the typical arc of Crime and Punishment, which is, I think, how we've convinced ourselves the world has to spin. The ending of this film, without giving much away, is that it's a look at the idea of complexity and what role again. We all have in these cycles of pain and inability to heal, I think we all carry this sort of mix of empathy and cruelty. We're all capable of both. When that becomes the basis of a television program, I think we gotta watch out.
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David, thank you so much.
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Thanks for having me.
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David Ossett is a documentary filmmaker. His newest movie, Predators, is available to stream. Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. Brooke and I have been doing something a little bit new for us. We're making videos on Instagram and TikTok. Some of these are clips from interviews you hear on the show. Some of them are kind of like reflections on things happening in the media. We'd love to hear what you think. Go over there and drop us a line, please. I'm Michael Olinger. Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've
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