What Does Catching a ‘Predator’ on TV Really Accomplish?

Osit, an editor by trade, uses as one of Predators’ central devices the juxtaposition of longer takes from TCap’s raw footage with the segments that actually made it onto the show, taking them from kooky, trashy slapstick (who could forget Chris Hansen confronting the naked guy?) to unsettling pathos.

All to ask the central question: did anyone believe this was preventing child sexual abuse, or was it all an excuse to act out our most sadistic impulses against the most “deserving” victims imaginable?

GQ: Can you tell me about the genesis of the project?

David Osit: I always had, I think, a general frustration with true crime and not really enjoying the genre very much. Working as an editor, I’ve had to edit true crime projects while being frustrated by making them. So I think somewhere in the back of my mind, I was always heading towards making a film that had to do with true crime and my feelings about it. But with To Catch a Predator, it wasn’t something that I was thinking I wanted to make a film about. It was something that I had forgotten and remembered every so often and learned about what happened with the show and how it ended, and really thought that there wasn’t a movie there. What changed was, at one point I had discovered the online fandom community of the show, that for the better part of 20 years had been collecting all this archival material and clips and things that had never been seen before, and posting them for enjoyment. And then posting the addresses of the men who were caught and showing up at their homes. It was kind of an ongoing source of entertainment for a bunch of people on the internet. Watching the raw footage that they would post was remarkable to me. It did not match my memories of the show.

What were your memories of the show?

I remembered the show vaguely as sort of a darkly comic relic, outdated and the kind of thing you wouldn’t see anymore. And then watching this raw footage was like watching these men’s lives end in slow motion. It was haunting and at times humorous and at times surreal. I just remember thinking, I don’t know how to feel about this. And I thought, what’s the difference between an edited true crime show and the raw footage from it?

You said you have mixed feelings about true crime. Is that just the sort of general skeeviness of it, or the feeling of profiting off of tragedy?

I don’t delight in anyone’s suffering, even bad people. And I think that true crime, if you boil it down to its core, it does two things. It reduces the world to kind of simplified, almost as Chris Hansen would say, Biblical narratives of good and evil. Which is already sometimes fraught because who gets to decide what’s good and what’s evil? Usually in some of these true crime shows, it’s the police who are the good guys and the victims. It’s always pretty black and white who’s a victim and who is not a victim, and I always found that to be a little lacking in nuance. And I think when it comes to the other thing that you mentioned, it’s the idea of taking enjoyment and delight in some of the grossest parts of our human nature. I mean, I get it. I’m not mystified why it’s popular. It’s remarkable to be inside of a crime in this way, but it’s a way to be voyeuristically exploring something that we’re not really supposed to see. And I think that’s where my discomfort sits.

You mentioned the juxtaposition of the raw footage and the finished version, which seems like it makes up a big part of the documentary. How were you able to acquire some of that raw footage?

Well, it’s this fandom community that has been collecting it for 20 years and posting it on YouTube.

Is that just people that may have worked on the show posting it, or—

No, [it’s from] FOIA requests—Freedom of Information Act requests—depositions, defense packages. There’s lots of ways that they would collect the materials. Sometimes NBC would just release it early on and people archived it. Some of the videos came out because there were lawsuits attached, and so a lot of the footage was revealed through defense packaging, but they kind of did all this work, and I just watched it and collected it all.

I think reality show footage is notoriously the hardest thing to get, because it gets logged and then wiped, and people don’t hold onto it because there’s such a tremendous amount of raw material. I think the only reason that we have any raw footage from To Catch a Predator is from some of these court cases where the footage had to be legally preserved and archived. In the other cases, I think there’s an incentive to get rid of it.

When you delve into it, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot to the To Catch A Predator concept other than this sort of Wile E. Coyote slapstick. Maybe the pedophile gets tackled at the end or he gets a pie in the face, and everyone celebrates. Biblical is one way to put it. There’s a simplicity to it, but you wind up wanting more than that, and more is very hard to get from that format.

I agree. I think that’s one of the things I found interesting about the show and looking at it and seeing what people do get from it. But it’s a Rorschach test. You can see a lot of different things when you watch that show. And for some people it is enough. I think, for example, for T Coy who’s in the film [as Skeet Hansen’s decoy], she and I have a somewhat similar history [as abuse survivors], but we go about our lives in a very different way. And I would say that sometimes there are things that we do that resemble healing that may not in fact be healing—but that’s my perspective. There’s a thousand different ways to think about everything in the world, and that’s why I didn’t end the film with an answer.

One thing that I feel like never gets brought up in relation to this phenomenon is that the decoys aren’t actually children. And so the attempted pedophiles or whatever you want to call them, they’re not actually reacting to a child. You could argue that they believe it’s a child, but at the end of the day, they’re reacting to an adult person doing this sort of weird cosplay, and it’s almost like they’re creating this sort of mutually fulfilling fantasy. And I thought that the scene you found where the decoy and the attempted pedophile are around the same age, both these college kids, and you sort of see that through a different lens. Is that something that Chris Hansen or some of the copycats online, or even some of the police or the lawyers in the court cases, ever reckon with? There doesn’t seem like there’s an acknowledgement that they’re creating a weird fantasy scenario.

I think the thing they always go back to, it’s an argument that you hear for other things, it’s kind of a fungible argument, which is, Well, if we didn’t do this, it could have been a real child. Obviously, there’s a whole debate about whether these shows are entrapment or not, and it’s always a very complicated question, but I actually don’t think that it’s entrapment. I think entrapment is a legal defense, that is something that you say that is implying that the crime is implanted into someone’s mind and they wouldn’t have done the crime without that. What I would argue is that the show creates a scenario that is so appealing to a man who feels this way about a minor, that they create the circumstances where the crime becomes very easy to commit. And again, it’s worth noting that the crime for all the states where they did this show was just the online chat in the first place. So these men are guilty before they show up at the house in terms of the crime. They could be arrested before they show up at the house. Everything that the show films is theater. It’s for us. It’s for fun. And that’s it.

So when Chris Hansen at one point goes up in front of Congress and says, oh, there’s been 93 court cases because of the show or whatever, that’s what he’s talking about, specifically, is just the online chatting part?

Yes. But of course, their goal is that they get people to come to the house, they want to film it for the show.

I have a friend who works as a prison psychiatrist who said something about one of the actual convicted pedophiles she works with getting caught up in one of these at one point, so I know that it is certainly possible that they catch genuine pedophiles. But it also feels like they’re inventing this thing that may or may not exist, like this fantasy of the sexually available child who is seeking out just random men on the internet.

Early on in the show’s life, there was a number bandied about where they would say that any given moment, there are 50,000 online predators on the internet. Journalists looked into that number and realized that that was the same exact number used to indicate how many Satanists were actively practicing Satanism in the eighties, and how many kidnappings there were in the nineties. It’s called a Goldilocks number. It’s not too big as to seem impossible and not too small as to not frighten people. But it’s a number that just was created. It’s not built on anything. There’s no source for that number. The source is Dateline NBC. Obviously the case is that the vast amount of child predation is committed by people who are known to the child and vice versa, family members, colleagues, friends, teachers. This is the bigger problem, and it’s the thing that it’s much harder to admit and talk about. Because it means that someone has failed when that happens. Whereas in an online chat, there’s just a pure villain. The harder truth is that we have created a culture where we’ve kind of accepted that this happens to children in our own families, and there’s no show for that.

One of the things that surprised me watching the old tapes is realizing what a hard sell the decoys seem like they were doing at times. Where they’re almost using salesy tactics on the predators, like, Oh, if you’re not going to meet up, then I’m walking out of here. Did that surprise you as well?

It didn’t surprise me at all. I mean, their job is to get the men to be on TV, so you’ll do what you need to do to do that. A lot of negging, a lot of reverse psychology techniques, which makes sense. I mean, it’s their job in that moment. I’m not debating whether it’s ethical or not, to answer the question.

It seemed like most of the decoys that you interviewed had a lot of conflicted feelings about doing this.

I think to a degree. Some did, some didn’t. I think some look back on it with conflicting feelings. I don’t think any of them had conflicting feelings about doing it in the first place though. I think they all were quite convinced that it was a righteous endeavor because it was, on its surface. I think that the issue becomes how many degrees can it be removed away from the original righteous cause and what happens when you slowly find the thing that you’re doing drifting more towards entertainment. And is the goal to get audiences to affect change or to improve the situation that’s being documented? I never quite believed that the goal of the show was to try to put an end to child predation. Just as I say in the film, it existed to kind of help us enjoy child predation. And I think that if that’s the case, I find that there are more questions.

What do you make of the resurgence of this phenomenon? Do you think people just sort of forgot some of the reasons that it fell apart at the end of the show?

I don’t think so at all. I think the resurgence makes a lot of sense. I think that when society is eroding around you, seeing bad guys get caught, you like seeing punishment. You like seeing the world of, there’s good and evil, and there’s bad people who are basically just the worst people as far as the show is concerned, who just get to go away and we get rid of them, and we get to stay safe and we’re righteous because we’re watching the show. That’s a very appealing idea. I think, especially in times when things are falling apart around us and we don’t trust our politicians and we don’t trust the newspapers, but we can trust that the cop’s going to put away a bad dude, and I think that’s again, the appeal of true crime. I’m not surprised at all that this is back. It’s like a failproof way to align yourself with goodness, to find the bad people and punish them.

It seems like the show sort of ended around the time of that prosecutor in Texas killing himself during the filming of the show. How long after that was the end of To Catch A Predator?

Six more episodes.

Do you know if there are people that have come forward since that DA committed suicide, like were there other victims of his that had come forward to say that this guy abused them or did anything like that ever happen?

Well, no one, to my knowledge. It’s very possible that he had never done anything before.

One of the things that I was thinking about watching the documentary is that the show created this net that catches people at this sweet spot of desperation and possible mental illness and maybe also pedophilic tendencies or whatever. It reminded me of the amount of people that get driven crazy or suicidal by talking to Chat GPT. There’s this external mirroring force that’s yes-anding their worst tendencies. It feels like there is a certain subset of people who are susceptible to this, whether they are genuine predators or not. Were you thinking about that parallel at all?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean you said it perfectly. I don’t have anything to add to that, but it’s true. There are people who are caught on the show that might not have ever done anything, but the [potential] crime was too perfect [to resist].There are people who are caught on the show who are probably serial offenders, and it’s a good thing that they are punished, or are rather prosecuted. And then there’s people in between, of course. I mean, that’s the spectrum.

There’s that moment where you’re tagging along with Skeet, and then you have to ask the predator who’s just been trapped in this hotel room whether he’ll sign a release. Was that included as this moment where you are working through whether you yourself are complicit in this now because you’re filming Skeet Hansen?

I don’t want to say too much of what it is because it’s a lot of things, and I think people take different things from it. But it’s a moment that I think is really challenging. It’s a moment where you’re not supposed to really like what you’re seeing, and I think that the question has to then be, well, why? What’s the upsetting thing about this? That he’s being filmed at all? That I’m asking for something that no one else asks for and show his face anyway? Is it upsetting because this man’s at his lowest point and I’m doing what every documentary does, which is basically extract something from a human being? It’s a moment that really challenged me when I watched it back and I wanted to give that experience to an audience too.

Were there documentaries that you were consciously being influenced by when you were making this?

For the first time in my career, no. There wasn’t a film that I had in mind. I felt like I was truly lost in terms of what my references were. This film, I really just felt like I was just creating something I had not done before, and I had no frame of reference for. It was very frightening. It definitely felt like that moment with Indiana Jones walking across the chasm and you can’t see the ground, and I just did not know what the ground beneath my feet was. I think it’s structured in a pretty linear way in the film, and it’s modeled after the very real steps of production. The first people I interviewed were the decoys. The last person I interviewed was Chris Hansen. It goes kind of in a pretty linear way from how the film felt to make.

Did you hear that A24 is making some sort of scripted movie involving Chris Hansen, who I think Robert Pattinson is playing?

It went into production while we were filming.

Have you had any contact with those people or heard anything?

I can’t really talk about it.

Will you be interested in seeing that movie?

I mean, I’ll be interested to see how it comes out, sure. Maybe in the future. But right now I’m kind of… I need a break. It wasn’t always the most pleasant experience to be inside of this world, and so I’m grateful that I’m now on the other side of the Rubicon.