A new documentary raises questions about the true crime TV show ‘To Catch A Predator’ : NPR

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

Before we hear this next interview, a heads-up – it includes a discussion about child sex offenders and a mention of suicide.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RASCOE: If I say ‘To Catch A Predator,” most of you know what I’m talking about.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “TO CATCH A PREDATOR”)

CHRIS HANSEN: How you doing?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: All right. How are you?

HANSEN: Would you have a seat over in that chair, please?

RASCOE: That’s journalist Chris Hansen confronting a man who’s about to get arrested for using the internet to solicit a child for sex. “To Catch A Predator” was lurid, controversial and very popular.

DAVID OSIT: I can’t think of anything else that aired under 20 times over the course of three years and is still something that multiple generations talk about.

RASCOE: That’s David Osit. He’s the producer and director of a new documentary that’s in theaters now. It’s called “Predators.” It’s an unsettling look at “To Catch A Predator,” which first aired in 2004 as a segment on the TV news magazine “Dateline NBC.”

OSIT: The program would begin with online chats with a man and someone that they believed to be an underage boy or girl, who was in fact a nonunderage person who was pretending to be underage. They would set a time to meet. It would be at a sting house. The men would show up.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “TO CATCH A PREDATOR”)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Hey. I’m glad you could come.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Hey, girl.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) How are you?

OSIT: There would be an actor or an actress there pretending to be the underage child. There’d be hidden cameras filming this interaction.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “TO CATCH A PREDATOR”)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: You going to have a seat, too?

OSIT: The decoy would leave, and Chris Hansen would then walk out…

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “TO CATCH A PREDATOR”)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Yeah.

HANSEN: You seem pretty comfortable there.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Hi, sir.

HANSEN: How are you?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: All right. How are you doing?

HANSEN: What’s happening?

OSIT: …And interview the men…

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “TO CATCH A PREDATOR”)

HANSEN: So what are you up to tonight?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Not a whole lot.

HANSEN: Well, I’ll tell you. For the last several days, you’ve been up to a lot. You’re a pretty prolific chatter there.

OSIT: …Have excerpts from the chat log to read out loud to them. The men would respond in various degrees of humiliation or denial and then be told they were free to go. At which point, they would leave the house and be arrested at gunpoint by law enforcement.

RASCOE: And it became a pop culture thing to like, oh, Chris Hansen’s coming out. Oh, what did – you know, it became something that was, like, a joke, almost.

OSIT: Very much so, yeah, I think because this is before social media. So there’s a generational shift at this moment in 2004, 2005, where we’re all on the internet but we’re not yet socializing on the internet. So you have this bizarre mix of schadenfreude and horror at watching what you should never be allowed to see, that we’re never in a room for, which is the worst day of someone’s life, and we get to have a front row seat to it. And that’s what the show really was, and that’s why it captivated a whole generation.

RASCOE: There’s some uncomfortable questions that you raise in “Predators.” And they start with one of the decoys – the male decoy – talking about a sting in Texas that ended very tragically.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “PREDATORS”)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: You could offer me $10 million to film that episode in Texas again, and I wouldn’t take it. I would not take it and be happy about that decision.

OSIT: That was a sting in suburban Dallas. The identity of one of these men happened to be that of an assistant district attorney in a neighboring county. They wanted to make sure that he showed up. He drove by, but he didn’t come in, so they decided to bring the show to his home. They had a warrant for his arrest. And the “Dateline” camera crews, as well as the local police, arrived at his home, where they realized that this man had in fact committed suicide after seeing the assembled group of law enforcement and media outside of his home.

RASCOE: “To Catch A Predator” eventually aired some footage of that incident. There was a lawsuit, and the program ended about six episode later. What you get into in the documentary – and obviously, you have this horrible situation where this person, you know, killed themselves – there is this tension, right? Child abuse is abhorrent, full stop. There’s no question about that. But is there any room for empathy for these men? Should there be? Or do they deserve whatever happens to them, no matter what happens, because they were engaging in something so horrible?

OSIT: I’m of the mindset that empathy shouldn’t be offered based on who someone is. It should be offered based on who we are. I don’t think that the film I made is asking you to feel bad for these men or feel bad for predators. I certainly don’t feel that way. It – I feel like it’s more about caring how we treat people in a society that we all share. This is a situation where we don’t know exactly what’s going on in the mind of somebody. And very frequently, it’s a situation where someone is a sex offender because they themselves were victims as children. I’m not sure that the only answer in these situations is police. I’m not sure that the only answer in these situations is incarceration. It might, at times, very well be. But I am asking to consider a world where we think about, how do we treat people? Because if we can decide that one group of people is a villain and beyond redemption and not deserving of humanity, as we see all the time in society, it’s very easy to say that about any other group of people.

RASCOE: Chris Hansen – he has a new show on TruBlu called “Takedown.” He told you he makes these kinds of programs for survivors of abuse. But your documentary kind of asked, who are these really for? Why is this entertaining?

OSIT: It’s a great question. And there’s no easy answer, except I think all of us carries this sort of mix of empathy and cruelty and we’re capable of both. There’s also times when we watch TV to feel good, and sometimes it’s other people’s suffering. Sometimes it’s the knowledge of knowing we’ll never have it as bad as those people. And what I think a lot of true crime television helps people feel is a little bit more authority over their lives. I think if you feel like things aren’t going well and you don’t have sort of the services that you need or the money that you want, you can, at the very minimum, kind of enjoy the fact that bad guys are getting put away.

RASCOE: You included in this documentary that you were abused as a child. Did you know that you were going to include your own, or at least some of your own story in this?

OSIT: It wasn’t my plan, no. It took even me by surprise. I started to think about what I was making in terms of asking people to consider the humanity of all people – victims, predators. I think that when you’re a victim, as I was, you really can feel like you’re not a human being. When you feel that way, for me, at least, my reaction was that I never want someone else to feel that way. I felt like it was worth including some element of my story in the film in a way that wasn’t trying to make anyone feel indicted, but as an organic revelation over the course of the film’s runtime that, you know, all of us are part of the cycle of hurt – content creators, filmmakers, journalists and audiences.

RASCOE: Well, there’s this idea, though, of protecting children. But I guess – is it your view that these sorts of stings – are they a way to do that? Are they a way to protect?

OSIT: Personally – this is just my opinion – but I think that if these stings were a way to protect children, we would have seen a fall in numbers of people showing up for them over the 20 years or so that these things have been happening. But of course, the numbers have gone up. My issue is less with the idea of catching child predators, which of course is important and vital. It’s more, how does it become entertainment?

RASCOE: Yeah.

OSIT: How does it become something that’s basically grounded in the idea of, can this become a commercial, viable enterprise, to do this kind of work and to catch people who might need some sort of other help to make sure that these cycles get broken?

RASCOE: The camera changes everything. The act of it being there makes it into something different, and then it brings us into it. We’re now a part of it, right?

OSIT: We become sort of the active ingredient in the chain reaction, so to speak. You know, the source of the humiliation of these men isn’t really Chris Hansen. It’s not the police. It’s us.

RASCOE: That’s David Osit, producer and director of the new documentary “Predators.” Thank you so much for talking with us.

OSIT: Thanks for having me.

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