The Michael Knowles Show - "They Lied About Everything" Michael & To Catch A Predator | Chris Hansen

Episode Date: October 18, 2026

Michael Knowles sits down with legendary To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen to reveal the untold stories behind one of television's most controversial shows. From shocking predator confrontations to the behind-the-scenes drama, Chris opens up about what really happened during the making of To Catch a Predator. Plus, Chris discusses the controversy surrounding "Primetime", the movie based on his life starring Robert Pattinson, and why he says Hollywood got the story completely wrong. Watch the full conversation and let us know what you think in the comments! - - - Learn more from Chris Hansen at TruBlu! Subscribe to TruBlu at: https://www.watchtrublu.com Or Watch on Youtube at: https://youtube.com/@watchtrublu Takedown with Chris Hansen drops new episodes every Thursday. Available on TruBlu streaming and Amazon Prime Video. Subscribe to Have a Seat with Chris Hansen at: https://youtube.com/@ChrisHansen - - - Today's Sponsors: Tecovas - Right now get 10% off at https://tecovas.com/KNOWLES when you sign up for email and texts. Good Ranchers - Go to https://GoodRanchers.com/KNOWLES and get $50 off plus free meat with every order when you start a plan. Good Ranchers,  American meat delivered. - - - DailyWire: Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dailywire.com/subscribe 🇺🇸 Get 3-Months of DailyWire for just $17.76 📜 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 🍿 Watch Run Hide Fight: Infidels https://www.dailywire.com/videos/run-hide-fight-infidels 📘 My book "Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/Speechless 📗 My book "Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/ReasonsToVoteForDemocrats 🕯️ Get your Michael Knowles candles: https://thecandleclub.com/collections/michael-knowles 👕 Don’t dress like a squish. Shop my merch here: https://dwplus.shop/MichaelKnowlesMerch - - - Socials: YouTube — https://youtube.com/@MichaelKnowles Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/michaelknowlesshow Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/michaeljknowles TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@notmichaelknowles X — https://twitter.com/michaeljknowles - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm driving out there and I'm thinking, you know, what if nobody shows up? I produce your calls and said, look, there's two guys in 45 minutes, you know, get here. That's where the rabbi showed up, military intelligence officer, lieutenant from the Washington, D.C. Metro Police Department. who was in charge of motorcades, including the presidents. Those were the second sting. Right. You leave the movie, which is supposed to paint you as basically the devil himself. You leave the movie thinking, this movie is about as connected to reality as a Scooby-Doo animated cartoon movie.

I mean, it's so crazy, fictional. Are you going to sue them? Chris, thank you for being here. Michael, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for the pizza. That is identical to the pizza. Jeff Sokol brought to our Stinghouse in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Should I have some pizza during our interview? If you'd like, it didn't work out so well for Jeff. I think it'll be fine for you, though. So just to set the stage, Chris, only Hollywood could make a movie about a journalist exposing child sexual predators and have the journalist be the villain. I just saw the movie yesterday.

Yeah. You're the bad guy. I don't understand the purpose of it. I mean, maybe I'm not sophisticated in the ways of Hollywood. I'm just a working reporter. I get that. But what is the purpose of it? I mean, you take something that has genuinely, I think, created awareness and a dialogue

that didn't exist before. Obviously, there's a dark element of entertainment. There's a dark element of humor, and I lean into that. But at the end of the day, we're collaborating with law enforcement all over the country and have been for 22 years. We started not with law enforcement, but it grew there, taking bad guys off the street.

And so when you look at the movie, as I did with my wife, we watched it in a theater in Times Square, New York City, walked out, interviewed moviegoers. You know, we looked at each other and it was so over-the-top, so hyper-sensationalized, so dark, so twisted,

a fever dream as even the director has said it is. Yeah. It was hard. be angry about it. So you go to see it. You hadn't seen it before it hit theaters. No. You didn't collaborate on it. You didn't help write it. It was not contacted. The first official word from 824 came on May 27th when they sent me a partial trailer and said, we hope you like it. We'd like you to support the film. We'd like to talk about advertising, buying ad time on your network, True Blue, our streaming network,

where the Take Down Predator series goes, and your podcast platforms. And I said, well, it's a little strange you didn't reach out before. Well, we didn't have to because it's a fictional story only loosely based on your real experience. And earlier on in January of this year, a colleague of mine in the podcast world who knew the director Lance Oppenheim well enough to reach out did so.

Lance Oppenheim texts back and says, the studio is going to reach out, but it's basically a love letter to Chris Hansen. I'm a big fan of Chris Hansen. I said, after seeing the movie, if that's this director's love letter, I hate to see a poisoned pen letter from this guy at Spopenheim.

So your friend contacts them. They don't reach out to you initially. They try to sweet talk you, then they try to sweet talk you a little bit more. And when you ask a basic question, which is you make a movie about me, why didn't you talk to me before this? They seem, well, we didn't have to

because it's a fictional account. Right. At what point, you know, one of the key takeaways from your interviews with the Predators is that these guys are really, really stupid. And I have to wonder if the same thing applies to the movie makers. Are they, they really thought, did they think you were really, really stupid? Or? I think it speaks to the mindset of some in Hollywood. They think that you're going to be so blown away that an actor of the quality of Robert Pattinson, who's insanely popular right now, would play Chris Hansen. And of course that's flattering. And I have no issue with Robert Patton's. And he's an actor. He got paid to do a job. I don't think what he did is remotely reflective of who I am or what I do. It's so over the top and dark and vampire makeup.

It's just crazy. But you have to wonder what the motive is. I mean, these guys sitting around in a room engaging in mental masturbation about how genius they are. And I know guys, guys, guys, guys. Let's take the Predator series and let's turn it around and make people feel sorry for the Predators. That's awesome. Yeah, let's do it.

Isn't that basically every Hollywood movie for the last 20 years is, hey, what if the bad guy were really the good guy? So there's that. Also, the idea that Hollywood would defend degenerate sexual behavior. That's not a man bites dog story. That's the sort of thing we've come to expect.

When you were watching it, you see this over-the-top, Vampiric, Robert Pattinson performance. A great performance of whatever that character was, Right. Albeit not Chris Hanson. It has no connection to the real Chris Hanson. So what are the, the moviegoer is watching the movie.

What are the differences between that movie in real life? Well, everything. I mean, this movie is about as connected to reality as a Scooby-Doo animated cartoon movie. I mean, literally. There's nothing in that movie that happened the way it's portrayed, except for the use of my name and a couple key phrases. They have me in the movie with a dressing room in the Predator Stinghouse, and I'm sitting there shirtless with a mirror that has light bulbs like a dressing room, rehearsing my lines for the Predator.

I mean, it's so disconnected, so crazy, fictional. And so I think that it's an insult to the thousands of men and women who go out and try to protect children for, predators every day. There's no, they make fun of the police. They glorify and try to create weaponized empathy for two of the predators who are profiled. Two guys who were trying to sexually exploit children, one of whom was an assistant district attorney who knew better, who had child pornography on his computer, and now we're supposed to feel sorry for the guy? Well, that wasn't in the movie. That part was not in the movie. No, of course not. This is the

climax. And in all of the, even the pre-prime-time criticism of To Catch Predator, End of You, that's always the episode that is top of people's minds. There was this assistant DA and he was talking to the decoy and trying to approach a kid for sex. He doesn't show up to the Stinghouse. So the cops roll in, your crew rolls in, and the guy kills himself. Correct. And this is portrayed as the climax of the movie. Nowhere is it mentioned in the movie, or really even in the reporting, that the guy had child pornography on his computer. That in itself is an act of violence against children. Well, the movie is based on an article that appeared in Esquire

written by a freelance writer who interviewed myself, my producer at the time. And it was clear in that interview that he had an agenda, that he was out to show TV bad, you know, police bad in this situation, Predator should be alive today, somehow that we pressured police to go to his house and arrest this guy. The truth of the matter is this. And we lay this out in the stories at the time,

in both the episode about this guy, Bill Conrad, and even the next day after the suicide, I was on the Today Show, completely transparent. This is what led to it. This is what happened. This is what's under investigation. We've been completely transparent about our methodology from day one and continue to be so

with the current take-down episodes on True Blue. But this man, who was an assistant DA, was online chatting with decoys posing as two different 13-year-old boys. The chats were sexual. In Texas, as in many states, that constitutes a felony. Now, at the time, this is November of 2006,

it's an election season in Texas. And they're running campaign commercials with law enforcement figures going in and busting predators and dragging them out of their darkened computer rooms because everybody's trying to save kids from predators, this has become a big issue in people's minds. A phenomenon.

So he doesn't show up. So now the police have a decision to make, a decision that I don't have a role in. They have to decide, do we wait and arrest him at the DA's office the next day? Yeah. Which, you know, would have been great TV. But they were concerned, apparently,

about evidence being destroyed. So they went to his house. They sent a sergeant. They got a warrant, right? An actual warrant. So they decided there was probable cause that crime was committed and they were going to arrest somebody, worried that evidence was going to be destroyed.

One of the sergeants in that department knew the assistant district attorney. Knocked on the door. I said, hey, you got to come out, we got to talk. It doesn't come out. They breached the door. They go in. He's got a laptop nearby.

There's evidence that he was trying to get the hard drive out. And he said, I'm not going to hurt you guys and shoots himself in the head. Horrible, tragic. Nobody wants to see this. But he made the decision to escape the consequences of his acts. Right. Weeks and weeks later, after an independent investigation by the Texas Rangers, they find that there were images of child pornography on that hard drive.

Right. for which he knew, as a prosecutor, he could spend 10 years potentially in prison on each charge, Texas law. So we'll never know what really went on in his head, but you have to look at the totality of the circumstances. There's also a big criticism of that episode was, well, you shouldn't have gone to his house.

And first of all, you... I wasn't running the show. Right, yeah, you is referring to the cops. If you're looking for the perfect television scenario, you watch them being marched out of the DA's office on Monday morning. Right. But they made this, you know, that they were in a big rush, and the cops are these, you know, heavy gun-carrying militiamen.

They're going to go in and get them. The decoy is singing show tunes. I mean, it's just, it's insane. Yes. So, one, none of the reporting and the movie doesn't make the point that the cops had good reason to go to the house. They have to get probable cause to get a warrant. Yes.

Go get him. And also, it would have been harder to nab him if he deleted the child pornography if you were destroying evidence. Potentially. They had copies of the chats, but, you know, they wanted the computer. Yes. On top of that, you bring up the show tunes thing. What was the deal with the B story of the... It was all made up.

That was made up. That's not real. No. You didn't have a decoy singing show tunes in the To Catch a Predator dressing room. No. I mean, it's... Like I said, everything in that movie... is fictional, except the use of my name and a couple catchphrases that I have used over the years.

So then he asks a question, well, if it's fictional, and that was their intent to create a dark, fictional fever dream of a movie, the director's interpretation of the Internet's interpretation of the public image of the meme of me. So we're now five generations removed from reality. Boudrejords hyper-reality to a great extent. Exactly. So if that's the intent, why do you have to use my name, image, and likeness? Because ordinarily, in this kind of a story, they would say, okay, any resemblance. Yeah, yeah, Charles Kanson, any resemblance to real figures is purely coincidental.

And they put a graphic up on the movie saying this is fiction, I think in the beginning and the end. But, you know, the reason they used my name, image, and likeness is because it's got commercial value. I spent 45 years in this business creating a brand. that has value. So they want to do a dark fictional piece, but they also want to exploit my brand for commercial gain. So they want it both ways is what's happened. So one, are you going to sue them? Could you sue them? I don't know. Lawyers are looking at. What I didn't want to do, Michael, is turn this into the movie that Chris Hansen doesn't want you to see. Yeah, yeah. And so you've got to play the long game on something like this. And I've been in this business a long time.

you know, and doing high-profile stories. And so I didn't get upset. I'm not furious, as the New York Post headlines. I've never been. But we did decide myself and Sean Wreck at True Blue and others involved, lawyers included, to make the best of it. And that is why we bought commercial ad time

before every showing of this movie in America. So before people in, in 95% of the theaters in the country that show this film, before they see the film, the last thing they see is me walking into a kitchen, telling everybody in the theater to have a seat because there's something they need to know, and that is this very important work continues.

Every day on my streaming network, TrueBlue. Go to watchtrueblood.com, and you can see all the episodes. A new episode drops every Thursday. So we got ahead of it. And obviously, there's some benefit to, that for our platforms, our businesses, for the network, for my visibility, for the podcast, predators I've caught, and have a seat with Chris Hansen. So, you know, we've definitely worked it

to our advantage, but it still raises questions as to, you know, is that fair? And what is the motive behind it? You know, what's the value of it? Is it just entertainment? Is it a larger indictment of what Hollywood is? Because there are two reads. There's one which is, the sophomoric, you know, the first time a creative art student decides he's going to write a poem, and he says, I know what I'm going to do, I'm going to subvert expectations. Okay, so there's that. It could just be kind of weak sauce, which is an impulse in Hollywood the last 20 years. Right. Or they actually are more on the side of the predators. I shouldn't laugh about it. Look at the industry. I mean, this is an industry, and I'm not engaging in the hyperbole here. This is just a fact that this is,

This is an industry that was ruled for decades by one of the most prolific predators to walk the planet in Harvey Weinstein. That's just a fact. There is a monument to the casting couch in Hollywood right below the Hollywood sign at a shopping mall. People kind of forget this. Yes, Weinstein is a particular example, and he's so hideous that he reveals the rot of what it is in an evocative way.

But this has been true from the beginning of Hollywood. Everybody would make jokes about that. So it is, it's Gomorra by the Sea. It's an industry run by sexual predators. That does color my view of what exactly is going on in the movie. However, can I make an argument that it doesn't present you in a bad light? Sure. So the argument is, the movie to me as a biopic.

So you're going to say it is a love letter? In a weird way. It reminds me of that movie Vice about Dick Cheney. I don't know if you ever caught that. You know, I never saw it, and I should take a look at it. So, Vice is about Dick Cheney. It's this fever dream crazy thing. Dick Cheney breaks into Shakespearean soliloquies, breaking the fourth wall.

Like, really crazy stuff. And the whole point of the movie is to make him out to be an Uber villain. And yet, you leave the movie thinking, man, this guy's cool. It's kind of like American psycho, Christian Bale. He's this villain, but he is the protagonist of the movie. I saw people tweeting about this online. You leave the movie, which is supposed to paint you as, basically the devil himself. You leave the movie thinking, Chris Hansen's got a lot of aura.

You know, Chris Hansen's pretty cool guy. And I understand that. And that, you know, it goes back to your initial question about, are you suing? Well, lawyers are looking at it and I won't rule it out. I mean, that's why I wouldn't sign the NDA, the non-disclosure agreement that they wanted me to sign before seeing an early screening of the film. That's it. Now, people are saying, well, the NDA, that's standard for anyone to say. Now, I've been to a lot of screenings. I usually don't have to sign an NDA. And was this a standard NDA? Not for Chris Hansen. No. Because it specifically prohibits in paragraph five, any legal remedy being sought against A24, any employee of A24. So they want you to sign away. So I knew that they were going to want me to

sign the NDA. They sent it to me in advance. So they were setting you up, though? Well, maybe, you know, I think they were protecting themselves. I mean, if it's, why do you worry about it? You know, why would you make somebody whose name, image, and likeness you stole, essentially, have to sign an NDA unless you're anxious about potential legal problems? Now, what 824 has said is this is standard everybody has to sign it, but I know that people saw the movie without signing it.

Yeah. I know that David Osset, the director of a documentary called Predators, in which I cooperated. Had some issues with it, but I did cooperate with an interview. That was a doc last year. That was a doc last year. He saw the movie without signing an NDA.

Now, when I go to the 824 offices in New York, I know I'm not going to sign the NDA, right? They're hoping I will, but I'm not going to. My lawyers have said, under no circumstances, do you sign anything? And I wasn't going to do it anyway. There's a lot more to say first. They go to Tachovus.com slash Knowles.

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front door in the house here. And they say, oh, yeah, we need that NDA. I said, well, I can't sign it. I said, I'm not going to sign an NDA, and I'm sure you can understand why. I'm thinking I can appeal to their, you know, common decency to let me see the movie anyway. Classic Hollywood common decency. Yeah, exactly.

So I said, well, you can't see the movie. I said, you know, fine. I'll watch it when it comes out to the theater. I'm not mad. There's no threat. There's no hidden camera nonsense. None of that. It's just, you invited me here.

Yeah. Kind enough to give me coffee. We had a nice chat, people taking pictures of me and, you know, folks are walking by. And, um, fine. You know, tell your lawyers that I'm not going to sign it for the obvious reasons. You wouldn't sign it. I know that other people have seen it without signing an NDA, and I tell them I know I have

this from David Austin himself, and they're flummoxed. And they said, well, what if we can work this out for later today? I said, fine. I said, I'll promise you that I'm not going to give away the plot line. Yes. You know, I'm not going to ruin it. I get that. No, your issue with the NDA was not about potential spoilers.

It was about the, you can't. You can't sue us for stealing your identity. Right. So we go down the street to have coffee, Joe and I, and get another email. Here's the same NDA. Have your lawyers just, you know, adjust it to make it acceptable to you. I said, you don't get it. This isn't my lawyer's job, right?

This is your problem. Yeah. So I'm not signing an NDA unless it's just to say I won't talk about the film until the film comes out. So they're back and forth. And the lawyers get involved from A24, and the lawyer says, well, that wasn't an official A24 screening, the one that David Osset saw. That was just, you know, in a editing room with the director and David Osset. So, well, give me that screening. Yeah, I'll send me editing.

Call it whatever you want. I'll be happy to, I'll do, let me do that. And then the publicity person calls back, says, I just talked to Robert and Lance, and they're very concerned and they want you to be happy with the movie. I said, well, then they should have started the discussion in January when I first reached. I don't mean to flatter you, but there are a lot of people, and we'll get to them in a second. There are a lot of people who try to copy what you did and they do it on YouTube and everything, but they're just like guys, you have won 10 Emmy Awards, is that right? You've won a lot of journalism, like many journalism awards. Your whole job in the Predator series and all the

successive series has been to poke through bogus, ridiculous excuses by people who think that they can get won over on you. That's like your whole job. That's the best observation. Most articulately put, yes. And they think, well, we're going to get one up. So you got the guy who's been an investigative reporter and an enterprise reporter for 45 years, and you're going to get them to just sign it because you're Hollywood.

Unbelievable. So from the beginning, you know it's a hit job. They know it's a hit job. They think you don't know it's a hit job. Then they know that you know it's a hit job. The movie comes out, okay. The theme that I keep returning to here in all of the, the story about the movie, about going to see the movie, about your entire career is,

how are these people this stupid? How does Hollywood behave this way? How does an assistant district attorney do something so painfully stupid? There are other people. You, you've... Well, they're not stupid people. I mean, they do stupid things. You're absolutely right. I mean, you can't call them smart things. They're not good things. They're bad things. And they're stupid things. You're absolutely right. But they're not intellectually impaired people. Now, some of them are, you know, we get some shady-looking characters, you know, who might as well have the word predator tattooed across their forehead. We see that.

But we also have situations like we had in San Francisco several weeks back where a Ivy League educated lawyer shows up in the sting in the middle of the day. This guy manages a multi-hundred million dollar fund. He's married to the dean of a law school in San Francisco. he's got a seventh grader, and here he is in the middle of the day, after chatting with somebody who's posing as the father of a 13 and 6-year-old, he shows up after a very graphic conversation to sexually exploit those two boys. Now, this is a guy with a big education, a big job,

and yet he's twisted in a way that he's going to take part in this. And I truly believe, and based upon the chats that I saw, and the criminal charges that followed that he was going to take part in this activity if it was provided for him. So St. Thomas Aquinas, when describing the motivations for sin and how sin relates to the intellect and the will,

Thomas Aquinas makes this point that sin makes you stupid. This is part of the Catholic tradition. Right. That sin darkens the intellect, that people who graduate from Ivy League schools and run big hedge funds and they probably have 140, 150 IQ.

that they can do the stupidest things imagine. Right. And he did the same thing that a checkout clerk at Best Buy did. Yes. Right? Because that's who came in next. Yes.

And by the way, there are checkout clerks at Best Buy who maybe they don't have the 150 super hedge funder high queue. Maybe they've got an average IQ. And that guy would never do any such thing. That guy would never, it wouldn't even cross his mind.

So then I'm curious from your 45 years of journalism and 22 years doing this kind of journalism. How does a guy go from graduating from Harvard or whatever? Forget about Harvard. They're all predators and degenerates. But, you know, from some other like reputable school, how do you go from that to being in a kitchen over a pizza talking to Chris Hanson? I wish I could give you a precise articulate answer. I can narrow it down to some areas for you, Michael. I think some of these guys are hard. hardwired as predators. They're the guy who would be, you know, at the mall, at the movie theater,

the unmarried little league coach, the bad teacher. You know, we have 50 million kids a year who have inappropriate sexuallyized contacts from school employees in this country. I mean, it's a big problem. But what about these other guys, right? I don't know why they're wired this way, but there's a group who are wired this way. And then there are the younger guys

who are socially inept and they get caught up in the fantasy. Yeah. Right? And then there's this middle ground of guys like the lawyer in San Francisco, the doctor in Michigan, the police officer in Maryland,

the Little League coach, the Catholic school teacher, you know, all of these cases we've seen in the last month, in current investigations. What makes them do it? And I think part of the answer to that is the proliferation

of child's sexual abusive material on the internet. And I think there's a curiosity in the minds of some of these guys. I can't tell you why, but I know that psychiatrists who study this, who go into the federal prison system

and talk to guys who have nothing to lose, they're not getting out, will tell you that there is very definitely, a connection between viewing CSAM child porn and offending it this way. And that's why I get so upset when I see cases that, you know, recently a judge ruled that AI generated child porn was okay if somebody was viewing it in their home and didn't take it out of the home. Well, what's the difference between, you know, there's no child there, but it's still the image of a child. Yes. Right. And it's still going to feed their fantasy for only so long until they get to the point where they need

to knock on the door of one of our sting houses or to meet a child who's available in real life. This highlights a couple major errors, I think, that people make in liberal, modern society. One of which is that the only thing that matters is consent, as long as consenting people. We see that, you know, I come face to face with these guys. Every month we're out doing a sting. Every single month, there's at least one and sometimes two or three. I mean, sadly, our production schedule is so far ahead at True Blue. I mean, we've got episodes for the next year already.

Yes. And we're still producing, right? So it's out there. I think in the beginning, you know, we would go to one of two chat rooms and one platform. We had chat rooms in AOL and Yahoo and MySpace, and all the activity was there. Well, today, it's so diffuse and so spread out that. it's harder than ever to detect these guys, but there's more activity than ever before. Right.

And that's why we've conducted investigations in places like Roblox, the wildly popular gaming planet. It's like a kid's game. It's a kid game. And the characters look like little Lego characters. But think about the argument they're making, not just the predators, but even the kind of liberal politician types who say, oh, it's okay. If the kiddie porn is AI, it's no big deal.

what they're viewing morality through is just basically a kind of basic liberal premise, which is that, well, if you don't hurt another person, it's no big deal. But one of the problems with child pornography or any kind of vice is not just what it does to the victim, it's what it does to you. And then this is this other error that they make, which is that they think, like Freud, they think, well, if you blow off a little steam, if you're one of these predators and you go look at child sexual abuse material, You're going to blow off a little steam. You're going to be less likely.

Maybe once or twice, but ultimately that high that these guys get from this, wherever it comes from, is not going to be met by viewing child porn. Yes. And, you know, going off in a corner and masturbating someplace. You know, not to be overly graphic about it, but that's what these guys are. I mean, they're not going to go bake some cookies, you know. That's what they do when they look at it, yeah. And so, you know, these guys are so twisted that they get to the point where, you know, it doesn't. work for them anymore. Yes. And so then what do they do? Well, they find a child. Where do they go?

They go where the children are. Where are the children? Various chat rooms, gaming platforms like Roblox. I mean, in the course of the Roblox investigation, and there are thousands and thousands of cases across the country, across the world, where men go on there, opposes children and try to meet kids for sex. I mean, it happens on a daily basis, and the company has said that it has put in security measures, and it has. Many of them have workarounds, and it continues to be an issue. But during the course of this investigation, which we turned into a documentary called Dangerous Games,

which people can see on True Blue, a woman reaches out to me from Texas. She reaches out on TikTok. Now, I've got to be the only 67-year-old guy in America who's got $1.2 million TikTok dollars, but it's a place where I harvest intelligence and story ideas. And she reaches out with a video saying,

I need to find Chris Hansen and his team. I've got a situation in my house. My husband, I caught my husband, grooming a child on Roblox. Now, she's already got kids. And so I immediately reach out, contact her. We go down there, we interview.

Now she's estranged at this point from the husband. She shares with me the texting, the messaging on the Roblox platform, her husband conducted with a child in California. A real child. Real child. Not a decoy. Real child.

I take those texts and I confront the husband as he leaves his workplace in a dark parking lot one night in Holland, in Texas. And he gives me his excuses and I read the text and he drives off. Then the estranged wife does her own investigation. She reports this to police. There's an investigation. She gets the, she finds the, she finds the, mom of the child who's targeted and the child hooks them up with the Hollingen PD, they get the statement and they prosecute the guy.

I can't get to Texas for the arrest. She gets it on her cell phone and sends me the video. So within the larger documentary, we have this very organic story that's told that I got because she heard that I was working with a young man named Schlep, who is an activist, who himself was victimized on Roblox. and now does his own stings. Well, okay, this is a very important... So this is, you know, this is how sometimes the new world of journalism works.

And I'm so blessed to have, you know, the ability to get in there and mind this stuff and to work with young people who understand it and can teach me about it, so I can understand it as well. This is a very important point in defending the whole endeavor, because the arguments against it are, well, okay, it's just fantasy, right? And you say, well, no, no, no, it's bad for the person who's doing it. You say, okay, well, no, they're blowing off a little steam. You say, no, no, no, look, we've known since Aristotle. People develop these habits and eventually that high, it's not going to be enough.

They're going to have to go further. Okay, I get all that. But then one of the chief criticisms of to catch a predator all the way up to True Blue is, well, you know what, these guys wouldn't do it. Right, unless you're not getting them to do it. Yes. But you were not on Roblox getting that husband. No.

No, and look, in the stings, which are carefully done, this isn't entrapment. These guys have multiple outs. You know, you want to talk about feeling sorry and we can talk about that and whether I have empathy or sympathy for some of the predators. That's fair game. It's a fair conversation. But you know what? It's really easy not to get caught in one of these things. Very simple. And you want to know how? Don't try to sexually exploit children. Don't do it. Right. Don't do it and you'll never get caught. Don't drink and drive and you never get a D-D-U-I. Yeah.

But I wonder, when you say, okay, there's a connection between child sex abuse material and trying to molest a kid. There is. Obviously, there is. There's no question. But then my question is, well, how do you start looking for child sexual abuse material? Well, there are organizations like the Child Rescue Coalition and others, law enforcement, who go out every day to do this work. And it's hard work.

Yeah. I mean, somebody's got to look at this. I've never seen it, and I never want to see it. And I think it would damage me. I mean, I've seen a lot of dark stuff and I've survived relatively undamaged. But I don't think I could survive seeing it. I mean, it's been described to me

and it's very disturbing, dark, the darkest, most disturbing material I can potentially think of. Yeah. Right? Worse than a homicide scene. Worse than a mass murder. Worse than a car wreck. worse than anything you can possibly imagine would be what people do to children in these

photographs and these videos. But so how does a person either, you know, they're born that way? Some people are born gay, some are born lesbian, some are born pedophile. That is an actual argument that some sociologists have made. Well, I think some predators are born that way. I mean, I think that's a third of these cases are people who are just for whatever reason wired that way. That's the first most dangerous group.

What about the other two-thirds who, like my question is, how does a guy say for the first time? You know what? I think I'm going to go look up some child pornography. You know, I wish I knew, my poem. I mean, I wish I knew. I think that there's a curiosity. I think for whatever reason they go look at it, they like it, they pursue it. There's a whole world out there that didn't exist 25, 30 years.

ago that is available to people who want to go see it, and it's not just the dark web. It's on the, because the dark web is that you have to get a special browser and things. But you're saying it's on the open safari. Yeah, you can find it. And there's technology that tracks it. I mentioned earlier, the Child Rescue Coalition, they work with law enforcement all around the country. They have technology, and they can put up a map, and they'll put up dots where child porn is being traded in real time. And we work with them on some of these projects. And we've got something coming up that I think is going to be quite stunning to see. And they go bust the people as it's happening.

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So you say about a third of these guys there's just something real deep in them. Right. That it would be very hard to get wired. But so then you say, okay, the majority of the people, two-thirds, are not like that. Right. So then my suspicion is having a Catholic view of sin and human nature, which is not like totally depraved, but it's pretty wounded, you know, and it's, my view of it is when I look at those guys, I say, well, there but for the grace of God go I. Whether I'm talking about the worst criminals or whether I'm talking about a guy

cheats and stats. Yeah, but I don't know how you, I just don't know. how you abuse a child in that way. Yeah. And I can't understand, and I've talked to, as I mentioned, hundreds of these guys, and I have this question over and over again. What makes you think this is okay? And I very rarely get the truth out of these guys.

It's, well, I just came here to help the child. That one, that's the best. I wasn't going to do anything. And to which I said, well, couldn't you call 911? Couldn't you call child family services? We had a guy in Alabama once who actually. actually had the sheriff's cell phone number in his phone. I said, you couldn't call the sheriff?

Well, I didn't think of that. Well, I know you didn't think about that because you were thinking about exploiting a child. Of all the Chris Hanson episodes I've ever seen, which are many, on all the, you know, NBC to True Blue, the excuse, the most ridiculous one is, well, I came here to help the child. I knew what this was.

I knew it was a sting, and I was here to tell that child, stop talking about sex on the internet. We have chats where people will say, Potential predators will say, this sounds like a Chris Hansen sting. I don't want to meet Chris Hansen. I don't want to meet Sheriff Grady Judd. I don't want to meet Sheriff Chris Watson. I don't want to meet this or that.

And they show up anyway. You know, the decoer plays it off, says, I don't know who that is, who's that. Or, you know. But there's the time to say, okay, this is a bad thing for me to be doing. But that's what I mean. Stop it. Don't continue the chat. They know at a certain level, intellectually, they know this is a sting.

This is not how children behave. This is not normal. This is totally, this is deeply immoral. This is all these things. And yet they do it anyway. And so I guess my point on the sort of, just about any human being, of that two-thirds group, just about any human being could commit any number of the gravest sins imaginable under the right circumstances.

It makes me wonder, okay, if what they had to do, they show up to the kid with the pizza in the kitchen with Chris Hansen, before that, had they not looked at child pornography, they probably wouldn't have gotten here. Had they... I think in a number of cases, you're exactly right. Well, so then you ask yourself, okay, how'd they start looking at child pornography? I bet a lot of them were looking at normal pornography. If they hadn't looked... And that didn't do it anymore for them.

Yeah. No, I think there's... That's a real track for some of these guys. So that's what I wonder. I just think, okay, if... And there's, you know, look at porn hub, look at all these different sites. I mean, it's not hard to go find porn if that's what you're looking. Yeah, one would say it is the entire internet.

Yeah. Statistically, the entire internet. And so I just think that when we, you've been doing this a very, very long time. You've talked to probably more of these people than just about anybody has. If you see these patterns emerge all the time, shouldn't we try to, if you want to protect kids, shouldn't you try to cut the problem off a few steps before they're showing up? I think so. I think that's valid.

So how do you go about doing that? You know, and I spend time thinking about this too, airplane rides and, you know, you know, What's the bigger picture here? What is my duty to give some thought to this or to work with organizations who address this? But I can tell you that I occasionally get an email, sometimes anonymously, sometimes with the name attached to the podcast email.

And occasionally somebody will say, I have this propensity. I have an attraction. towards inappropriately younger males or females. I go to a therapist, I keep it in check, I don't act out on it. You need to know that. Don't report me to the police

because I haven't done anything. But you need to work that into your equation. What do you say to that guy? Well, I try to get them on the podcast, you know, because I think it would be a very interesting, important, maybe frightening in some ways, discovery discussion. So I know that people understand they have the problems. Some subsection of this group understands they have a problem and deals with it. Yeah. And I can't tell you,

I mean, I don't know if you can ever quantify how many people that is or who's out there, who slips up. I mean, it's just such an individually specific crime, I think. It's hard to, you know, put everybody in their proper category. Yes. I mean, I When I would watch the show as a teenager in my early 20s, I'd think, okay, yeah, get him, you know. I had the reaction that most people had. Then I had kids. And it really does shift your perspective, not in kind, but in degree. I mean, you want to rip these guys' heads off.

Yeah. I've never had a guy email me and say, hey, I'm a pedophile, but I keep it in check. But I got a related email once years ago. The guy said he has pedophile obsessive-compulsive disorder. that his intrusive thought was not an attraction to children. It was the fear that he would be attracted to children. I don't know if you've ever come across this strange cycle. But to your point where you say, this is such a bizarre kind of crime,

it's hard to put these people exactly in one box or another. I got that one. I didn't know how to respond. I said, you know, I don't talk to a psychologist or a priest or something. Like, I don't really know what to do with that. But there's a reason that to catch a predator became a national and global phenomenon. There's something about the age in which we live that this kind of crime seems particularly relevant. Well, I think it's because it's happening.

And I think that, you know, going back to the very beginning, you know, it was an area that interested me, right? But how do we do that story in a way that takes the viewer inside the commission of the crime. I mean, look, these crime stories are, whether it's a murder mystery on one of the, you know, mainstream networks or whether it's something that we do into the streaming world, you know, these stories are as old as the Bible. It's good versus evil. People like to see that. My theory on all this is that I like to take my viewer on a journey of discovery, where they see things they wouldn't normally see, hear things they wouldn't normally hear. And what the Predator series has done from the beginning is take people inside the commission of a felony in real

time from the chat to the showing up to sometimes in interaction with an onside decoy. I mean, you see these guys cuddle up and going for a hug. They're ready to go. And then they see them being confronted by me. And then you see them being arrested by law enforcement. And we follow up in the Predators I've Caught podcast with what happens to them once they go to trial. Did you ever have the fear that, speaking of getting a little too close, that one of these guys would just pull out a gun and shoot you? Well, we have a lot of security, you know, in place, and I think we've made it absolutely as safe as it can possibly be.

And look, one of the reasons why this franchise has been so popular is because of the edgy nature of it. It's not without risk. We adjust our security based upon, you know, each individual in the environment where, you know, in. We have a lot of built-in stuff that people don't see. But yeah, we've had guys bring guns in. We've had, we've never seen somebody try to use the gun. We've seen it in his waistband and had him take it away. We've had situations like recently with the lieutenant from the Washington, D.C. Metro Police Department, who was in charge of dignitary protection, motorcades, including the presidents, shows up to meet a 15-year-old boy after 30 days of change.

and sending photos of himself from his police office and in his police vehicle, you know, there was fear that he might be carrying a gun and not only harm us, but also harm himself. Yeah. And so we have a different protocol for that. In those cases, law enforcement takes control of the situation in a controlled environment, and it's secured before I even get a chance to talk to him.

He showed up to meet a 15-year-old boy in his cop car? Not in his cop car, but he sent pictures of himself in his cop car, in uniform to this 15-year-old boy. I talked about taking him to Europe and Italy and all the things are going to do together and describing his job in dignitary protection, which is exactly what he did.

He was a lieutenant. And, you know, when somebody comes in from another country, you know, he knew the details of that motorcade movement. He knows the daily motorcade movement of the president. And so this adds another element to it, which is if you have somebody like that and say he doesn't get caught in our sting, he gets caught in a foreign honeypot deal where now he's compromised by a foreign government, what does he give up to keep this from being exposed?

And what if Russian, you know, FSB agents find out about this? They would never do that. Our foreign adversaries would never try to sexually entrap. You know what I'm saying? You go to China, that's the first thing they do to you. Yeah, of course. They send a woman to your room. If you don't like the woman, then they send a man to your room.

I mean, China's notorious for this stuff. Right. The stupidity of it all brings me back to that point you alluded to earlier, which is, yeah, look, you know, you can ask me if I have any empathy for them or pity for them or anything. So do you have any empathy for them? Well, you know, sometimes, Michael, when a guy shows up who's, 21, 22. You know, you think maybe the guy's made a mistake.

Maybe he thought, okay, she's 15, and it's only six years apart, and redemption and second chances and, you know, maybe. But then you go back over the video, and you see how this legally aged man tried to exploit and physically make contact with somebody who's 14 or 15. and then you go through the chats again and realize what he was talking about was making a porn film with this girl, you know, making a porn video.

And then he's taken away, but they search his backpack, and then in the bottom of the backpack, they find a loaded 38 pistol. And you start to think, well, okay, well, if we're not here, and this happens in a real scenario, which we know it does, and ultimately he would likely have found that

if he hadn't gotten caught at our stick, what does he do with that gun? when the girl doesn't want to do what he wants to do, is halfway through what he wants to do and has second thoughts, or goes through with it and then wants to call the police because she realizes she's been exploited. What happens then? What does he do with that gun?

What does he do with the video? What does he do with the video? And then suddenly you have a whole lot less sympathy or empathy for that person. Of all the people you've ever interviewed, you've done Stings on, is there one or two? Do any come to mind where you say, you know, I really do feel bad for that guy? Or no?

Not really. I mean, really, I'm just being honest with you. I mean, not really. I've heard from some who have led exemplary lives since being caught. I've heard from some who just led quiet lives. I've heard from some or about some who've been dusted up over and over again. Wasn't there one guy who showed up to you, like two days in a row? Yeah, a couple times.

And then we have that, but we also have guys who are chatting in a sting, but don't show up. And even though sometimes law enforcement will go arrest them, they'll do a roundup after the sting and get all the guys who broke the law online but didn't show up. But sometimes, you know, they can't find them or, you know, they move on to other investigations. But we've had guys show up in one, two stings chatting, but not physically at the stinghouse. And then the third time they finally worked up the nerve to go fulfill their fantasy. And I know it. And I have the ability to get the chance from those earlier investigations. So we can really go through it.

And that's where you see the progression of these guys sometimes. What do you think of the guys who try to copy what you do? There are a lot of these guys. I've interviewed at least one of them. But there are a bunch of these guys on YouTube. on TikTok, who say they're going to go hunt petos, and they bring a camera and they live stream it, and they're just, they're the younger Chris Hansen, or so they say. Well, I think that, you know, access to YouTube and digital media has been, in some ways,

the great democratization of journalism or content creation, right? And I think that people who have done podcasts with content like this have sometimes crowd-solved, the solution to crimes. So I think that's beneficial. I think when you get to the predator-catching thing, I think any time a bad guy is identified and taken off the street before they can harm a child,

I think that's a good thing. Having said all that, and this is the part that always gets me in trouble and will get me hate on eggs, is that some of these content creators come from the prankster world. Right? That's their mindset.

They were YouTube pranksters who decided ah, look what Chris Hanson is doing. Look what the police and sheriffs are doing around the country. Look what the FBI is doing. I can do that. Well, the reality is not everybody does it well. And not all of those cases get prosecuted.

And sometimes some of these individuals, not all, create dangerous situations for law enforcement. Sometimes they bring cases to law enforcement that are prosecuted. Sometimes that happens. I can predict without fear of contradiction that most law enforcement agencies, most DA's offices around the country, aren't big fans of this sort of thing because they become difficult to prosecute. And again, I don't want to make a blanket statement. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there trying to do good things, parents who care, all that stuff. But generally speaking, a lot of these guys, and I see some of the content, I don't dwell upon it, I don't follow it, I'm not going to collaborate. and that makes them mad that I won't join in this, you know, world of superhero predator countries.

I mean, I'm very comfortable with what I do. I know how we do it. I trust the people with whom we were. And so we're going to keep doing it. But, you know, I don't need the collaboration with some of these folks. Yeah, it's also, you're kind of the OG. I mean, it's kind of like Elvis, you know, playing around with the garage band. It's not going to happen as much.

Well, there's no need for it. I mean, we're, we have more world. than we can handle now. I mean, I don't need to... So then how... Because another distinction, these guys were pranksters, a lot of them on YouTube. Some. Some. And you are this journalist. So you covered all these stories. You won all of these accolades. You, you know, you were front and center during 9-11. Just to name one of the big stories that you were front and center during. What got you into this line of work, which has now dominated your career for over 20 years.

You know, well, we've always done other stuff. I mean, you know, even at the height of the initial Predator series, you know, we're working on, it was just one of the things I did at the network. It's one of the things I do now. Obviously, it gets the most attention for all the reasons we know. But it started with an interest in exposing this kind of activity. We had heard anecdotal stories about kids getting harmed by predators, by adults online. And so how do you get in it?

How do you do the story we did in Cambodia where we infiltrated a brothel where five and six years old, six year olds are being sold to Western Europeans and Americans were saying, how did we posed as tourists? We got into it. We infiltrated. Oh, how do we do it in this world? And about the time that I was thinking about all that, a friend of mine who was a reporter in Detroit said, have you heard of this group perverted justice? which was an online watchdog group, they would put decoys out in these various platforms, chat rooms, and poses children.

And if an adult made the first contact and made the initial conversation about sex, they would post these guys on their website, proverturejustice.com. Sometimes law enforcement would get involved. Sometimes they wouldn't. And I thought, well, if we could use these guys as decoys, perverted justice,

and wire a house with hidden camera, and microphones, it could be compelling. So we did it. They agreed. We agreed. We found a house in Bethpage Long Island. We rented it for two and a half days, wired it, had our hidden camera guys come in. And they went to work chatting. And I'm driving out there and I'm thinking, you know, what if nobody shows up? What if I've just blown, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in that which money? Well, my producer calls and said, look, there's two guys in 45 minutes, you know, get here. Traffic clears I get there. And in two and a half days, 17 guys surfaced, including New York City firefighter.

Now, no law enforcement those days. One of the guys was prosecuted after the fact, but the rest of the guys were in the wind, which made it unfulfilling to the viewer. And, you know, you got to start asking questions about social responsibility.

We did it again outside Washington, D.C., and that's where the rabbi showed up, a military intelligence officer, a teacher, a doctor, all these guys. Those were the second sting. Right. I thought the, I mean, the rabbi one is really famous and infamous interaction. I thought that one came much later.

That was that early. He was prosecuted after the fact by the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office. And the Fairfax Virginia Police Department made a bunch of those cases. The military prosecuted one of the guys. But by the third investigation, which we did with the Riverside County Sheriff's Office, you know, it became very clear that we needed to figure out a way to collaborate with law. enforcement. You, so okay, those were the early days of the career. You've kept it up, obviously. You recently, somewhat recently, sat down with this big YouTuber weirdo that I had never even

heard of. It was my associate producer, Jacob, who's a complete freak, and he consumes everything on the internet, and he is so easy. Jacob is not alone, by the way. Yeah. This guy's very popular. He's very popular. What's his name? EDP 445. And EDP is a sexual Eat that blank. Got it. Okay. And 4.45 is his weight. So during COVID, when I was first experimenting with YouTube and things,

and one of my co-collaborators had me do a piece on EDP, and we interviewed some people involved in the case. So this guy was a wildly popular YouTuber who was a Philadelphia Eagles fan, and he would just run his mouth. Big guy, talked about food, talked about all kinds of. kinds of crazy things and sports. And so people latched onto this, and he became very popular. Well, then there were rumors about him having inappropriate conversations with underage followers, 13, 14-0 girls.

And somebody caught him in a chat, either on Discord or someplace similar, having one of these chats. And apparently the girl came forward, and this came to the attention of one of the, you know, prankster YouTuber guys, and they confronted him. And it was a big uproar. The case couldn't be prosecuted, but he was shamed. So I got a call from a film producer, director named Mike Klum, and he was doing a big documentary on EDP 445. And he wanted me to actually do the interview with him.

And as part of the documentary, and then I would take that interview and put it on. my platform after the documentary came out. So they put this all together. He agrees to sit down. And in Vegas, a few years ago, we walk into this very theatric, beautifully lighted set, and I go at him for an hour, a full hour. And he admits to everything. So now this documentary comes out. My interview with him comes out on my Have a Seat with Chris Hansen podcast and YouTube channel the same name. And now law enforcement

is reopening the case because he's admitted, he's confessed essentially, to these crimes in the interview with me. So I think there's at least the potential of him now being prosecuted because he agreed to sit down

with me as part of this larger documentary and the piece that aired on my podcast. Why did he talk to you? And this is actually a big bigger question than just EDP. Right.

Why do any of these people, the smart legal thing for them to do is to, the minute they see the scenes, there should be that guy shaped pole in the wall, just run out the door, right? They don't have to speak to you. And yet they do, even when they know what's going on. Well, EDP 445 agreed to participate in the documentary, knowing that I was going to do this interview with him. So he bought into it. He fell on his sword.

Even crazier. That's even crazier. Right. Get it off his chest. facing health problems. Maybe he wants to go to prison and wrap up his life there where he gets medical attention, gets three squares a day,

and, you know, lives his life out. Maybe that's it. The other predators, that's a good question. I would like to think I have wit and guile as a reporter to get people to talk to me that other people maybe don't have that skill. But I think sometimes they're anxious and they want to explain themselves.

Sometimes they come up with an excuse going into this, thinking that they can talk their way out of it, some people honestly get fanboyish. I mean, I've had situations where they told the detectives to pound sand, and I walk in and they say, oh, it's Chris Hansen, and they tell me the whole story. This has happened. I mean, there are people who are at least for a minute excited to see me. Imagine the psychology of the pedophile to catch a predator fan, Chris Hansen, True Blue. We had a guy in Livingston, Paris, Louisiana, who drove two hours to the Stinghouse, and while he was driving, was watching takedown episodes on his tablet to pass the time of the drive.

I mean, you help me to understand that. You're the investigative journalist. I'm but a humble cigar salesman and podcaster. The psychology, that seems significant to me. It seems that there is something meaningful going on in their minds that, is that part of the thrill? Is that, is the breaking of the taboo and the risk of getting caught?

Are those parts of the... Well, I think they're able to compartmentalize that what they're doing isn't that bad, right? I'm not the guy in the sting. This is something different. Because I'm just going over there to check it out. I'm not really going to have sex with her. Well, maybe I will, maybe I won't.

Let's see how this plays out. if she wants to, if she's mature for age. I mean, they think about all this as they're driving over sometimes. And sometimes they just don't see the criminality of it. They're just going over there to, as one guy said, bust a knot. You know, I mean, it's like that can be a crime. It ain't going to happen tonight, son. Yeah.

It's like the complementalization bit is so astute because this seems to be feature of our whole political order is that we compartmentalize. Look, I'm one guy at home and you better stay out of my bedroom and I'm one guy at work and I'm another person in my family life and I'm another person in my political life and whatever. We compartmentalize in a way that earlier generations simply did not. And we've lost the sense of the near occasion of sin, you know, to bring it back to that Catholic view of sin. We have this, Catholics think about sin a lot. And we think about sin so much that actually opening yourself up, to a situation in which you might sin,

is itself a sin. Right. The near occasion of sin. And so I wonder with these guys if it's just, if they really do believe, when they go, first of all, they say, well, what I'm doing is different from what those guys are doing. Right.

And two, I'm just going to, I'm just going to go look at the kid. Yeah. I'm just, but they might actually believe. Well, I'm not necessarily. Well, it may start out as, you know, I came over here to have a discussion with her, but I just don't buy that. I mean, who does that?

Right? I mean, in what real-world scenario does somebody conduct their own sting operation? And we had a guy who was an activist in Florida show up and give me that whole story about, you know, he was just there to say, well, what about this chat when you told the mother you wanted to do this with the daughter? And you wanted to, after he did it with the daughter, you wanted the mother to join in. Was that all part of your sting? Right.

And if you're such an activist with connections to law enforcement, couldn't you have called somebody? Yeah. Tell them this is going on at this hotel. We had a guy, this is an interesting story who was just sentenced a month ago. He was a TSA security guy, worked at one of the airports in North Carolina. And he was driving down to Florida and was chatting with different people on different sites, looking to sexually hookup. was married, newly married, and he was going to a family birthday party, and he hits us up, and the scenario was a father or a stepfather guardian selling the girl for sex.

The girl was 14, 15 years old, in a hotel. So he pulls up, he goes in, he gives the father money, the undercover detective gives him the hotel room key, He goes in, sees the onset decoy, they take him down. Screaming, crying, high pitch. You know, this is a setup. This is a traffic. This is a, you know. It went on forever.

So now it's my turn to try to talk to him. Get this camera's out of my face. I'm not going to talk. Well, you know, like I'm going to have sympathy for that, right? So I'm right in there. And the whole thing plays out and goes through the system. He goes through three different lawyers. And in Florida, because of the way this went down, he got charged with human trafficking.

And if you're convicted in Florida of human trafficking, it's a mandatory life sentence. Wow. So in the process of this, his family apparently had some money for defense. In the process of this, they offer him a plea deal. 15 years. 37 years old, you get out, clean up your life, move on. Well, he doesn't take it. he goes to trial.

And his third attorney, who comes up from Miami, decides he's going to, you know, call me to the stand, which rarely happens because there's no need for it. They have the chats, they have the, I provide the video. They have the footage. Yeah, we give them. We don't hide around with it. We give it to the prosecutor,

and the prosecutor gives it to the defense in discovery. It's all out there, very transparent, as is every part of this is. But he's going to call me to the stand, remotely, because I'm off, actually on another sting. And he's going to be fancy with me. Isn't it true that you make money for every predator that comes in? No, we don't.

I said, they find us, we don't find them. Aren't you friends with the sheriff? I've known the sheriff for a long time. 42 years, to be exact. But we don't go to each other's house for Christmas or Easter. But I said, yeah, just like I'm friends with a lot of criminal defense lawyers around the country. I've been doing this a long time. He goes, well, but you must make more money.

the more predators you catch. I said, I would love to have a sting, sir, where nobody shows up. I'd love to do a cooking show. And I'd like to go hang out with the fine folks at Blackburn's barbecue right there at Eagle Lake and Polk County, Florida. Oh, you wouldn't know where that is because you're from Miami. No further questions. Case goes to the jury. The jury's out 20 minutes convicted on all charges. Now, this guy has to do mandatory life in prison in Florida. could have taken the 15-year deal. Is that not part of the mania? This is the theme that I just,

I can't help but return to. It's just, okay, wow, man, you got, you won the jackpot, 15 years. You won the jack. This is the best you could possibly hope for. And we've seen it in Florida. Just put it on red 23. I'm just going to keep taking risk after risk after risk.

You're being accused of something where there's a lot of proof, a lot of evidence. You showed up, all of which is on camera, on my cameras and on law enforcement cameras. You know, they don't depend just on us for the camera work. They have, in some cases, their own cameras. Is there any sting or any program or any episode or any guy where you had a second thought,

where you regretted it, where you felt something was improper, because this is the thesis of the movie. Is you, you know... And that's why it's such a... an offensive piece of fiction, to me. And you don't hear anywhere anybody affiliated with this film

who wants to give a portion of the proceeds to the National Center for Missing Exploited. children, Child USA, Child Rescue Coalition, the National Center for Victims of Crime, none of that. It's just a purely selfish, money-making Hollywood endeavor. Yeah.

And if they cared it all about victims and survivors, they would at least make an attempt to make it look like they were doing something, something positive would come out of it. Yeah. But you don't even see that. You don't see the actors talking about that. You don't see the directors talking about that. You don't see the director talking about that.

You don't see the A-24 talking about that. You don't see the writer of the original Esquare hit piece talking about that or the screenwriter with whom he worked. There's none of that. And maybe that's not their responsibility. But I think it says something about who they are, what they do, and how they do it. But if the thesis of the film is that you compromised your journalistic responsibility, which is a major theme of the movie, then surely they, the filmmakers, would have to consider their own ethical responsibility

and the subject. Right. Do you find, on the journalistic side, forget about the perps and all that kind of stuff, do you take any of that criticism to heart? Do you... No, I understand the criticism, and I understand, you know,

when the Pointer Institute and they sit in their tower of Scarlet J. journalism, and they think that we work too closely with law enforcement, and I would answer that, criticism with it's the only socially responsible way to proceed. Yeah, would they prefer to do it? I said, well, don't do it. I said, well, that's not an

option for me. You know, the thing is, they act like I didn't come up through traditional journalism. I mean, I've been a reporter on air and before that radio and a minute in print for many years, 45 years now, and I wore a button-down white shirts with, you know, rep ties to go cover the state capital in Michigan. I mean, I, you know, I came up that way, old school, you know, well before we could even conceive of how a computer would help us to be journalists. I mean, they weren't even in newsrooms, and we had typewriters when I started. And so I get it, but we have to evolve.

Yeah. Yeah, I would. We have to be enterprising. And, you know, people talk about investigative reporting. I mean, it is that, but it's also enterprise reporting. It's like, how do you take the viewer inside the crime? And if you're not going to innovate, then you're going to end up like some of the newspapers that have gone out of business.

And I'm not saying that we, you know, give up our ethics, certainly not. I think a lot of ethics questions and we evaluate all the time how we do things in both the Take Down Predator episodes on True Blue and the documentaries we work on. We have these open discussions. all the time to make sure that we're doing the right thing. But, you know, we do have freedom to do it the way we think is the right way to do it. And that's what the streaming world has allowed us to do.

I mean, imagine after having worked for the man, you know, for so many years, and I'm grateful for that opportunity because I wouldn't have had the brand to do what I'm doing today. But we own the content. We own the distribution of the content. We have relationships with folks like Fox News, come here, have a chat. So we're very blessed because we have the best of all world.

Right, right. And it does seem to me that the ethical complaints all kind of break down a little bit. To your point, they say, well, you work too closely with law enforcement. Would you prefer that we didn't work with law enforcement? Right. So we're never going to evolve in order to come to story? So you have us not do this? And we had that discussion internally.

I mean, there were producers at NBC with whom I worked on, other stories who said you should cool it on the predator stuff. I think enough is enough. I said, why is it enough is enough? Why? Because you don't like it? Because it's not, you're not involved in it? Well, I wouldn't want to be involved in that. Well, why? It's different. It's new. It scares you. You got to go talk to these guys. Like, this was a taboo subject. Yeah. That nobody wanted to talk about or a few people wanted to talk about it. Did they give an answer as to why they wanted you to cool it? Just because it was, it was different. They saw it as unseemly. Yeah.

Because it was popular? I mean, I wonder, too many people wanted to watch it. I know. I'm not saying I agreed with it. I'm just saying that those conversations would be had from time to time. And in fact, there was a period of time where we didn't do it. I mean, NBC,

you know, we did it for about four years on Dateline for to catch a predator. They continued for years after that to recut them and expand them. Yeah. And update them for MSNBC. before it was MSDNC. Yeah. MSLSD.

Yeah, MSLST. And then, you know, I picked it up independently for a little bit in the middle, and then four years ago we started up again at True Bloom. Yeah, there's also the social context. For some of the people who raise objections to it, there is a social context of for many decades now, we have seen a consistent trend of liberalizing weird sex stuff and trying to normalize aberrant sexual behaviors,

up to and including the sexualization of children. At the highest levels of government, you know, when it comes to the trans kids issue, for instance, in the popular culture, all sorts of... Isn't that movie Moon, was it, Moonlight or whatever, about, like, having sex with a teenager? And it won the Oscar a few years ago. I mean, there's really...

It's consistent. And so I do wonder if some of the objection was that, because this was showing the dark side of the sexual revolution and some of the technological developments. And then, I guess I have to ask you about your opinion of the underage sex stuff in the news for the last five, ten years, the Epstein stuff, the various theories

about pedophile rings and all. Does that, I actually haven't seen you talk that much about it. Well, we've had a number of the Epstein survivors on my Have a Seat with Chris Hansen podcast, and I've done some reporting on it. I mean, the reality of the Epstein case is it took, you know, Julie K. Brown and folks of the Miami Herald to stay on it as a local news story,

which speaks to the importance of local news. And these people were threatened by Epstein and his people. They were followed. They were, in some cases, there was legal action, and they stayed with it. And the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, when he was indicted in 2019, said as much that, you know, without the Miami Herald reporting, this case doesn't happen.

I mean, I remember looking at the Epstein case in about 2015-2016 and thinking, okay, if all this is going on, and obviously he had had that sweetheart deal where he pleaded in Florida and his lawyers, and he tried to frame this as, yeah, it's bad, it's illegal, but it wasn't child sexual abuse. It was, you know, hiring. girls who were 16, 17, 17. It was unseemly, but it wasn't illegal.

It was prostitution, but it wasn't always prostitution. They came up with this thinly veiled distinction to protect themselves, engineered by high-power lawyers and bought off on by prosecutors inappropriately, in my opinion. But the police chief down there pushed and pushed and pushed. The survivors finally were emboldened enough to push and push and push, and the truth came out, which was, Epstein rang a pedophile ring.

and was grooming women, exploiting women from a very young age until they were adults. And there were hundreds of them. And he was a bad guy. And he involved a lot of other powerful people, some of whom we have not identified yet or don't know about yet.

But you talk about power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This guy is not only guilty as homemade sin, but he's the devil incarnate. Yeah. And I remember in 15, 16, trying to figure out, okay, well, how to, if we could do a sting with him, you know, if we could get into that world or into the mansion on the Upper East Side or, you know, how do we do this? And it was so well protected by layers of security that, you know, I kind of just got busy with other stories. Yeah. That doesn't mean it's not a big story. It's a huge story. And again, I've given a voice to a lot of the, a lot of the survivors and will always in that case. And I don't think we've gotten all the information and evidence that we need to get. But it was the Miami Herald and local news who stayed with that stayed on that and made that case. Right. Yeah. My take on it, to your point on the security, it was always, for a long time, all these audiences, all these podcasts would say,

we're on the brink of the dirty, the biggest secret with Epstein and we're going to break up in the whole story. And I said, I don't buy that for a second. This, this story really took place in the mid-2000s and before, if you think that there is some evidence that has survived for 20 years, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. If there was evidence, it ain't there now. And so my take on it was either Epstein is who they say he is, which is this corrupt finance. Which I believe. Yeah. I mean, look at the money he's thrown around. I mean, the campaigns and the contributions. I mean, you know, interlock and music camp in northern Michigan, you think that your child would be safe there, but apparently he was giving money and trying to corrupt kids and

teachers and have inappropriate influence there. But either he's that guy or he's something else, you know, that he's some James Bond super spy, triple agent, whatever. In either of those cases, I suspect we know everything we're ever going to know about Jeffrey Epstein. Either way, I don't think there's any new evidence that's going to emerge. And look, that's a big story. It's a big sensational story.

It grabs a lot of headlines. But then I think, well, hold on. It was cracked by local journalists. And I think if the story is the sexual exploitation of children, there are a lot of guys who aren't Jeffrey Epstein, who aren't powerful, who aren't rich or whatever. And those guys are showing up to your setup houses. And some are rich and powerful who show up.

Right, right, right. So what comes next? Obviously, this movie is coming out. There was the documentary last year. You've got True Blue. You've got, you know, this development, this evolution of the Predator Project. What now? You know, you've already gotten Robert Pattinson to play.

Yeah, well, we, I cooperated in a documentary that was in the works before we even knew about the movie called I'm Chris Hansen. So that's coming out very soon, which is more of a personal profile of me. We just signed a book deal with Simon & Schuster for a Chris Hansen thriller series. with a fictional character. See, I find it somewhat ironic that when I write a thrill and series, I have a fictional character, but when Hollywood does it, they exploit my name for a fictional movie. It's just, you know, life-imitating art, I suppose.

But so I'm excited about that. So that's underway. And, you know, we've got a bunch of new documentaries underway at True Blue. We just finished one on extortion. And, you know, I sat across four sets of parents who lost kids to... suicide. Good kids, good students, good athletes, good parents, and they got caught up in these extortion plots, you know, victims of criminals, sometimes a half a world away in Nigeria, who poses

young girls, attractive girls, they get the boys to send, you know, explicit photos or racie photos, they use it against them. And these kids, at 15 and 16 years old, sometimes 17, can't see their way out of it and think that they're going to be embarrassed and their online presence is going to be corrupted and they sadly commit suicide. And this has become somewhat of an epidemic in our country. And so my message to parents is that, you know, they should obviously watch the documentary, but you need to create an off-ramp. Yeah. For children. You almost have to approach this as if kids will be the target of exploitation. Yeah. And so when it happens, not if it happens, But when it happens, you've got to come talk to me as your parent.

And together we'll stop it, prevent it, and figure out a healthy path forward. Because if these kids had just stayed alive for 20 more minutes, 30 more minutes, a half a day, they'd be, they wouldn't have committed suicide. Right, right. I mean, there's a state lawmaker, Brendan Guffie in South Carolina, happened to his son. And he literally is going to bed and the son passes him, unbeknownst to him. got his dad's pistol and goes in the bathroom and kills himself because of this non-event. Because what? Grandma's going to see your junk. Grandma saw you being born and changed your diaper.

Yeah. Right? But in the moment, it's the biggest crisis. You've let your parents down. You've let your coaches down. You've let your girlfriend down. You've let your grandma down. They're going to put it on Facebook. And these con artists are expert at doing this. But now, you know, and you just see in the the sex extortion documentary, you know, the FBI actually went over and made arrests in Nigeria, brought culprits back and there's serving time in federal prison here in the United States in the Michigan cases. This is one of the most horrifying crimes, and it doesn't get a lot of play. This one, especially father of four kids. Yeah. It's one of the most horrifying crimes I can imagine, which is, you know, you're kidding. And you don't see it coming. Again, no bad kids profiled in this

documentary. Yeah. Track stars, athletes, great students. They're not. They're not. They're not. They're I should all be, you know, getting ready to graduate from college about now. And we spent a couple of years putting this together, and people let us into their lives. And, you know, obviously True Blue is a streamer to which you can subscribe. We have a YouTube channel where we put free content up. But we made this extortion documentary free on the platform to everybody at watchtruebleu.com to get it because it's that important for people to see. This, especially when you think about these kids, but even for the per person,

and the predator takedowns. Is the answer just take away everybody's phone? Is it that simple? Unplug, well, we know we have a wife. I always get anxious when parents say that because the kid's gonna find a way to get on it, right? It's like if you've got boys and they're interested in shooting a pellet gun

or a BB gun or a toy gun, they're gonna chew their cheese sandwich in the shape of a gun to play with it. Right. Right. So again, I'm not promoting guns. I'm not promoting violence or knives. I mean, we walked around our neighborhood in Michigan with BB guns and bows and arrows. I'm not saying that was particularly good. We also played jarts, which was dangerous, lawn darts. But we all survived. But the point is that kids will find a way to do what they want to do. They're going to get on the internet. At Starbucks, on a friend's phone, they're going to do it. So given that, would, do you do you got to give him the off ramp i mean i preach this over and over again and when my kids are coming up it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today yeah you know um so you got to have the discussion you got to you got to you got to tell them look you know it's going to happen i hope it doesn't but it could yeah and it probably will so let's talk about it no you i mean you

think especially with these young people there was this story in the news what just a couple weeks ago the Cornell 7. Yeah. And here, you know, this is a, we don't go blue on this show too often,

but to describe this story, I had to invent new euphemisms. Right. Because you had this girl show up to a frat house. She is going to hook up with this guy. The guy asks if he can bring another guy in, which is,

I don't know a lot of frat guys who, in my day, would have wanted to do that. No. Then there are these other guys. Then the girl seems to be fine with it. Then she gets upset because she wasn't invited

to a party the next week. Then she later alleges she was raped. But then text messages come out where she says it was all consensual. And the whole thing is, there are even more lurid details about different arrangements and configurations. Anyway, the whole thing is so depraved where you start to ask yourself, are the kids just, clearly they just saw this on the internet. I wonder if If kids aren't getting desensitized and becoming over-sexualized, in other words, what passed for exciting in 1980 is now seen as so old-fashioned and boring that they had to ratchet this up. Yeah, you have a fair faucet poster in your bedroom. I mean, and I had one. And that was great.

It was glorious. All the porn I needed. It wasn't even pornographic. But, you know, in the Victorian era, it would have been a little ankle. You know, I've been around, so I was born in 1959, right? Yeah. So, racy pictures to us meant that you had to sneak down the street to Bobby West's garage where his dad kept playboys, which weren't even pornography by today's standard, in a box.

And you had to secretly carry them to the woods to look at them and then somehow get them back to the box. But, you know, today, I just think that kids have gotten, young people have gotten desensitized. now they're looking for excitement at different levels. I mean, storing ketamine off of somebody's private parts? I mean, when did that become a thing? Yeah. And maybe I'm just disconnected from it, but I was in a fraternity. My son was in a fraternity, two of them, and none of that was going on.

No. No, the hardest drug I've ever been attracted to is a cigar, and it did not involve anybody's appendages. But, you know, what if they are smoking weed? all right, you know, you can debate the merits of that. Ketamine, though. Ketamine, when did that become a thing? I mean, I know it is in Hollywood. Yeah.

You know, the poor, you know, Matthew Perry and that whole situation. But, I mean, what is being allowed in this fraternity house? And again, take the legal aspect out of it. Yeah. Which can be debated. But where's the morality in this? I mean, who thought, if the allegations are true, who thought it was okay to have seven guys

come in and out of that room. And why is that exciting? Why does anybody even think that that's acceptable? And why do we even need a monitor at a party to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen? I mean, why is it happening in the first place? It's because they're all bored and secluded

in upstate New York. Remember, Cornell had a big suicide problem. You know, and what does it say about that school? What does it say about school-age kids today? But that's what I mean. The whole thing is disturbing. And then you've got, for instance, and I'm having somebody to come on in my podcast

and talk about it later this week, the lawyer, the plaintiff's lawyer for the survivor victim in this case, files a complaint that names one of the perpetrators but puts the address of another person who has the same. name of the perpetrator, who's actually a sergeant in the Marines, and this guy and his family are getting hate and threats of violence, and the guy is not quick to amend the complaint to put

the right person in there. So what is, you know, if you're going to accuse somebody to this, and I will always take the side of the victim, the survivor, that's what I do, as long as it really is. But you've got to be really careful when you level these complaints, and you've got to be right, check things. So for this guy to go out and have the wrong information in the complaint that triggers hate to a guy who did nothing wrong and is serving our country in the Marines, I mean, there's something wrong with that. It's also, I kind of, I think of the frat guys, forget about the legality or what happened or the girl changing her story, I think about how bizarre it is in much the same way as I think about the perpetrators that you're talking to

time, which is in my single days, in my wayward youth, if a girl came up to me at a party and said, hey, you know, I want to hang out with you at this party, it wouldn't be the first thought on my mind or the second or third or 500th, probably the 10 billionth thought on my mind wouldn't be inviting another fellow here. Yeah, let's get that guy over here, too. So what even makes you think of that? Right. And that's my point about the desensitization that these kids have going on. If one of the knocks on the whole Predator series, which is an undercurrent of the movie, but has been recurrent for decades now, is, well, you know, this is a sensationalist. This isn't hard journalism. This isn't a big story. I think, first of all, it's pretty hard journalism when you got the perps walking in. But two, it seems to me that the desensitization and the debauchery, particularly when it comes to sexual culture, is one of the driving issues in the country for decades. I mean, it was decisive, especially when you look at the trans issue, that was decisive in 2024.

It was one of the top issues because it showed up in the polls in common sense. So it was why the Republican candidates campaigned on it all over the country. We've redefined marriage as a result. We've had major, major, we've, Bill Clinton tried to pass two laws against online porn with bipartisan support. The courts shut him down on it. In other words, the subject matter that you have taken on for a lot of your, time over the last 20 years, seems to be a lot more important than, I don't know, insider trading or something.

Well, I agree. And that's why we continue to do it, you know? I mean, there comes a point in a career where you can say, okay, I already did it, set it aside, we'll do something else. But what's your responsibility? Obviously, you have the infrastructure to do it. You have the relationship with law enforcement agencies across the country and the world to do it. Shouldn't you, me, continue to do this to ensure that the discussion, the dialogue, the awareness continues, to follow the crime as it evolves as it has over the years, to expand the franchise to cover areas where you haven't worked before, which is what we're doing?

Yeah, there's an entertainment portion of this, no question. There's a darkly humorous part of this, which we've talked about. I understand it. There is the collision of right versus wrong, evil versus good. That's a part of it. And maybe traditionally, that has not been an integral part of journalism. But go back several years. Upton Sinclair went into the meatpacking business, exposed what was going on there. Now, he was, very liberal, socialist, but Teddy Roosevelt, who was president, looked past that to see that he had exposed something that was very important and implemented measures into law to make the system safer and better. I remember being 18 years old, 17, 18 years old with my uncle in Chicago

at a saloon were reporters in pressmen from the show. Chicago Sun Times would go. And around 7778, they did a series called the Mirage Tavern. And the newspaper reporters, with permission from the newspaper, opened a tavern. And they had cameras, such as they existed in those days, hidden cameras, recording all the inspectors, all the people coming in to hit them up for bribes. And the Chicago Sun Times did like a 20-part investigative series blowing the lid off, the corruption in the city of Chicago.

And it was the Mirage Tavern. And I was fascinated by this story. And my Uncle Charlie was a character. He operated the cranes that built Sears Tower and the John Hancock building. I mean, it's just a true Chicago character. I love him, did that, loved him, did that. And, you know, he'd take me to the saloon. And I, you know, I listened to these guys talk about this.

And it was just, to go back and read those stories today, it's a great reminder that we didn't invent investigative journalism. and it's really not that radical to use hidden cameras. Well, that's my question. Did you change journalism? Did you innovate? I don't know if I changed journalism. I think there's a lot of good journalism going on out there using hidden cameras. And sometimes it's citizen journalism.

I think about my pal's James O'Keefe, Nick Shirley. They've got a lot of attention for these. They're not doing... Well, weirdly it does sometimes involve sex stuff because James O'Keefe lures these guys in on dates. Yeah, yeah. But they're usually on other issues and political issues. But they, you know, the whole gig is undercover camera.

I think as long as you're painstakingly transparent, as we have been from the very beginning, continuing through the investigations we do today, I think it's fair game. And I think it's our responsibility to take people inside the story, inside the commission of the crime, to hear things they wouldn't normally hear, to experience things they wouldn't experience, to take them along on this journey of discovery. I mean, that's what separates me from a lot of other people in this business. And I'm proud of that at the end of the day.

And, you know, I'll put my body work up against anybody else's predator and everything else. If the movie is waiting for Chris Hansen to make an apology, Big Mea Colpa. Not happening. I sleep very well at night. I sleep very well. If I'm up, you know, and unable to sleep,

it's because I'm working through a script or an idea or a passage in the book, or I had one extra cup of espresso that day, but it's not because of any regret for anything I've done professionally ever in my entire career. Chris Hanson. We didn't even have the pizza. I know.

I regret that. I think we'd let it go cold. That's bad. Put it in the microwave. We'll get it back. We'll look at pizza too. And identical to the pizza in the predator segment we discussed.

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