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All the Predators:
Chloe Lizotte on David Osit’s Predators and the Progeny of To Catch a Predator

“Help me understand”: Chris Hansen asked this of each man he interrogated on the infamous Dateline NBC spinoff To Catch a Predator (2004–07). After luring men who have preyed on minors in online chatrooms to a sting house, Hansen makes a show of delving into their minds—of getting to the root of such abhorrent behavior. But there’s no skeleton key in anything that these men have to say, no sinister articulation of the philosophy of a pedophile, straight from the source. Instead, we see a spectrum of weak, ruined people who cannot describe what brought them to this moment. Some repeat pathetically that they’ve just come to “talk,” some cry, some invoke their Fifth Amendment rights, some admit their desperation for a therapist. We’re left to gawk at the circus animals, the freakshow, while Hansen plays ringmaster. “You’re free to go,” Hansen says after the cameras have banked enough footage of them babbling—but as soon as they leave the house, they are arrested by police, often tasered or tackled to the ground.

To Catch a Predator married the framework of a hidden-camera comedy show to the titillation of a moral panic, couched within the authority of a newsmagazine; this made it a cultural sensation, appointment viewing. Close to the start of David Osit’s new documentary, Predators, there’s a montage of Hansen appearing on talk shows like Oprah, The Daily Show, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! “Why do these men sit down and talk to you?!” Oprah exclaims to Hansen, hitting on the uniquely lurid magnetism of this form of exchange. As Osit’s film delves into the history, format, and influence of the show, it orbits tighter and tighter around this initial plea: “Help me understand.” Could this three-word appeal ever get to the bottom of such an indefensible crime? Since we know, deep down, that there’s no answer, we might wonder what it is that keeps us watching.

A show like TCaP may purport to foster awareness, but any exploration of this particular demand, which suggests building a bridge to the reprehensible other, is undermined by its formula. It started as a Dateline segment, in which the show’s producers hired members of the online watchdog group Perverted-Justice as “researchers” (according to the New Yorker, the group received more than a hundred thousand dollars per “instance” in which they were contracted). The PJ team would set up underage profiles on social networking sites like Teen Spot and MySpace and strike up chats with users. When a user’s messages turned suggestive, pointedly hinting about age gaps, a PJ volunteer would try to keep the predator on the line, promising absent parents to lure them to a “sting house,” which the Dateline crew would secure and set-decorate, planting hidden cameras inside. The men were greeted at the door by a young-looking actor—a “decoy”—but they quickly disappeared, replaced by Hansen with a catchphrase: “Have a seat.”

Watch an episode of TCaP and you’ll be struck by the editing: the show shuttles through a disquieting number of predators like a revolving door, blending them into a collective mass villain. Lewd snippets of chat logs are read aloud, then redacted when they’re deemed too explicit for broadcast, though it’s hard to tell where exactly the producers are drawing that line—it can be more salacious when viewers are asked to fill in the suggestive blanks. Most overbearing of all is Hansen’s voiceover, which will often drown out the predators when they begin to speak at length—the more we hear from them, it seems, the riskier it becomes that we’ll start to see any shred of humanity in them, or that Dateline might be seen as allowing us to see that. (“I only wanted to talk—this is the first time I’ve ever done this,” they’ll say; “They always say that,” Hansen cuts in.)

Osit, on the other hand, anchors his film in raw footage from the stings, which he—and editors Robert Greene, Charlie Shackleton, Erin Casper, and Nicolás Staffolani—present as a multi-channel stream. Having stripped back these layers of interference, Osit delivers something far more unsettling than the edited show: the men seem even more predatory, as we catch them on the precipice of getting away with a truly despicable act, sometimes waiting giddily for the decoy to return to the room. They also seem much more pathetic and damaged when they are confronted by Hansen. We come face-to-face with broken home lives and psychological issues, sometimes the men ask to speak frankly off-camera about the possibility of getting help; “I can tell you’re a therapist,” one man says hopefully to Hansen. The raw footage leaves the viewer more space to consider whether one-size-fits-all public-shaming will meaningfully address this crime, but that thought process is incompatible with “good TV.”

Before TCaP, Perverted-Justice’s activities centered on humiliation and doxxing, posting chat logs to disclose the identities of potential predators to their communities. TCaP takes that core purpose and cloaks it in a PSA, venturing that if these men are afraid of being exposed on television, then they are unlikely to offend. Osit inquires with Greg Stumbo, the former attorney general of Kentucky who collaborated with TCaP, about this logic: “My job is not to rehabilitate them,” he says, “my job is to make them be responsible for the act that they’ve committed [...] It’s going to have a chilling effect, the more light we shed upon these crimes.” But that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, either. Most victims are abused by people they already know, and there’s little evidence that sex-offender registries are actually effective at preventing predation of minors. In fact, many of the men on later episodes of the show mention they’ve watched TCaP, yet here they are, responding to Hansen that they know not to trust that final “you’re free to go.”

In 2007, former Dateline producer Marsha Bartel filed a lawsuit, which NBC settled, alleging that she was let go from the company for voicing complaints about PJ’s methodology, which verged on entrapment: they had a financial incentive to trick targets and push chats in a more explicit direction. They also had a practice of withholding complete chat logs, which could make it impossible to verify the identities of potential predators. Although TCaP made a show of bringing in law enforcement in the final moments of each episode—Bartel alleged that they were paid to participate “for dramatic effect”—fewer than half of the men brought to light on TCaP were ultimately convicted, owing to these procedural mishaps.

Osit backs up some of Bartel’s claims in his interviews with decoys. They remember the show as a gumshoe, kid’s-clubhouse kind of environment—and describe their deep-seated desire not to disappoint the producers by letting any of the men get away. We see archival footage of one former decoy, Dani Jayden, on the phone with a target, chirpy as she tries to keep them on the line: she remembers thinking of it as an acting job, albeit “one that really heavily [relied] on me doing my job correctly,” with the aim of “getting Chris Hansen his best interview.” “My job was: be a face,” adds another decoy, Casey Mauro. She recalls luring in an undergraduate student close to her real age who, when they met and started talking, seemed more lost than lecherous—she wanted to tell him to run away before his face ended up permanently in a registry. The decoys were tasked with amplifying an element of out-of-body escapism inherent to online correspondence, and although this doesn’t excuse the messages the predators sent, it did encourage them to see these chats as a dream space. “I gave them that full permission to disobey any thought that maybe this isn’t okay,” Mauro explains.

Finally, Dan Schrack revisits his feelings of complicity in the most controversial episode of TCaP. He exchanged explicit messages with a target who turned out to be Bill Conradt, the assistant district attorney of Kaufman County, Texas, who got cold feet when he was invited to the house. So the TCaP team and the police decided to ambush Conradt at his place instead, and Conradt shot himself when they entered the house. Osit shows us footage of police officers delivering this news to Hansen and the Dateline crew, who process it in awkward, flat silence; Hansen soon pivots into trying to suss out the show’s responsibility. Conradt’s sister, Patricia, later filed a $100 million lawsuit, and a federal judge accused NBC of facilitating “a substantial risk of suicide,” all leading to the show’s cancellation.

Two elements are in play here: one is the moral question of whether we can allow ourselves to see any humanity or individual difference in these men, which may reframe the problem and open up a path toward rehabilitating select individuals. The second is the blurring of entertainment, news journalism, and justice—a now-familiar paradigm that TCaP had a hand in creating. Hansen is positioned as a chimera of a service journalist, entertainer, law enforcement officer, and vigilante folk hero; the stings were structured as popcorn cinema to unwind to, a mediated way of engaging with the issue. For some viewers, this airtight formula could be cathartic and therapeutic; it was comforting to know that Hansen and his crew were reliably there to save the day and deliver the punishment (and ridicule). As Osit put it in an interview with Kathleen Lingo, however, the show was, in effect, “a film set to end people’s lives.”

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The show’s Candid Camera–style, “gotcha” approach has appealed to a new wave of online predator hunters: streamers who transpose the TCaP framework to YouTube, Facebook, Rumble, and Locals. Many of these shows are hosted by survivors, or people one step removed from them, and viewers are invited to vicariously purge their demons when they tune in. “It is fucking funny when a bad person gets what’s coming to them,” a decoy for one of these shows, named “T Coy,” tells Osit; she’sa survivor of CSA herself, and hunting gives her a path to confronting her trauma head-on.

T Coy works with the most popular of these YouTubers: a Chris Hansen impersonator named Skeeter Jean, whose stage name is “Skeet Hansen.” He’s been hunting predators since 2021, and his channel brings in six figures annually. Like Hansen, he wears a blazer and has a quippy manner of riffing on chat logs; unlike Hansen, he is not a journalist, but a comedian and an entertainer. He sells T-shirts emblazoned with his catchphrase, “You’ve been Skeeted in 4K,” written in the Coca-Cola font; he aims for clickbaity video titles that will yield strong view counts. (An example: “Evil Grandpa Drives 4 Hours to Meet the Young Love of His Life.”) In an episode of Jamali Maddix’s Vice series “Follow the Leader,” Skeet mentions trying to brainstorm more “advertiser-friendly,” non-sting video formats. One idea, “Pred My Ride,” would involve plastering a predator’s chat logs on the exterior of their car.

Osit’s film skips fleetly over the wider online landscape of predator hunting, shadowing Skeet to maintain the film’s focus on the legacy of the Hansen persona. But Skeet’s comedic-skewing videos, as he admits himself, are something of a tonal outlier. Post-Covid, there’s been a surge in amateur predator hunting: an NBC report counted 30 online predator-hunting groups in 2019; the Washington Post uncovered upwards of 160 in 2022. These videos are what you might imagine if you’re even vaguely aware of this genre: predators are ambushed in the fluorescent aisles of a Target, or a Kroger’s parking lot at twilight, where they think they’ve arranged a meetup with a minor. The public humiliation that takes place next can vary—the hunters may cry out that there’s a predator in the store or force the men to call their spouses and confess on camera—but often these stings turn violent, toward shaky-cam chases and beatings. The likes, subscribes, and influencer-style donations don’t flood in for videos that don’t end in a catch, as Predator Poachers founder (and, it must be said, notorious racist and anti-vaxxer) Alex Rosen explains in Maddix’s documentary.

These hunters are uniquely enabled and egged on by the livestreaming ecosystem. After YouTube updated their moderation policy in 2022, removing all predator-catching videos unless law enforcement was involved, many predator-hunting groups uprooted themselves to join platforms with less regulatory oversight, like Rumble, which owns a Patreon-esque site called Locals. (A few key investors in Rumble are Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy, and JD Vance, and a healthy cast of MAGA characters—like Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, and Dan Bongino—flocked to Rumble from YouTube or Patreon to avoid “censorship” of their hate speech and misinformation.) When the group Dads Against Predators moved to Locals in 2022, their content moved away from verbal confrontations to near-exclusive attack videos, ratcheting up the violence to draw in paying subscribers. As early as 2021, though, at least three of Dads Against Predators’ targets had committed suicide after their identities had been exposed; Dads Against Predators was far from the only group allegedly linked to such suicides. “We don’t count arrests and catches,” the group posted on Instagram. “We count bodies.”

These videos obviously detonate the procedural workings of a criminal investigation, but this post sheds light on a festering moral outrage, illuminating how dehumanization stems from feelings of individual powerlessness. Doxxing is no longer enough: the trauma is unprocessed, and the crisis is out of control. And these groups don’t need the resources of a channel like NBC to take matters into their own hands. The internet makes it easy to amass a DIY arsenal of amateur “hunting” equipment, from voice changers to video-editing software; youth-ifying face filters for decoy selfies are just an app download away. The result is an ethical minefield, muddling personal catharsis and social justice: a quest for vengeance edited like a red-band Marvel trailer. And maybe above all, building an audience is incentivized by the profit margin. For Skeet, who has higher budgets and a full crew, a bit of movie magic helps him keep his audience engaged. He lets Osit sit in on his editing process, showing him how he’s massaged his footage to make it appear as though a police officer is on the scene: he asked an actor to wear a badge, and is in the process of editing in a hazy, blinking blue-and-red light to the left side of the frame.

***

On these streaming platforms, the spectacle of hunting eclipses the reality of these crimes. To actually engage with the issue, we’ll have to look at Roblox, which is currently embroiled in a tête-à-tête with vigilante predator hunters—and soon, it seems, Hansen himself. Roblox is largely built from user-generated material, allowing users to freely code their own multiplayer games and environments. Because there is no age limit to sign up, Roblox is the de facto social media platform for preteens; of 111.8 million daily active users, 36 percent are under 13. By the same token, if minors are allowed to join, Roblox must comply with privacy policies, which is why the platform doesn’t collect names, emails, or phone numbers at sign-up. This makes user identities extremely difficult to trace. When it comes to content moderation, you can see where this is going. The Wikipedia article for “Child safety on Roblox” is as long as the main “Roblox” page; “Escape to Epstein Island” and “Diddy Party” are just two of the custom worlds named in a lawsuit brought by the state of Louisiana in August. All Roblox chats are scanned by a combination of artificial intelligence tools and human moderators—a Bloomberg report counts 3,000 moderators on Roblox’s staff, compared to TikTok’s 40,000 for three times the number of daily users—but AI isn’t able to screen for subtler signs of grooming, and hundreds of reports related to child safety roll in every day.

Many vigilante predator hunters have set their sights on Roblox: one of them, a 22-year-old Texan who goes by Schlep, claimed on Twitter to have been responsible for six arrests through his videos and livestreams. In August of 2025, he posted a photo of a cease-and-desist letter from Roblox, which stated that his actions on the platform violated their terms of use—particularly impersonating “child endangerment conversations,” according to the missive, and inviting users to connect on other social media platforms. Schlep’s Roblox accounts were terminated; Schlep engaged a legal team for a countersuit, as a populist wave of support mobilized behind him. Roblox quickly shared a lengthy explanation of their policy to remove vigilantes, but the platform continues to evade implementing meaningful safety measures. In April, the Guardian reported Roblox’s framing of the issue as something that “needs to be addressed through collaboration with governments and an industry-wide commitment to strong safety measures across all platforms.” It’s true that content moderation on this level is, in Bloomberg’s words, “Sisyphean,” but Roblox’s slow rollout of weak, AI-powered safety technologies doesn’t inspire much hope.

Though Schlep’s videos earnestly engage with safety concerns on Roblox, his videos are vintage TCaP. With a small team, he lures deeply pathetic men to public places for drawn-out confrontations, indulging in some mockery in the town square before the police turn up. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Hansen has an affinity for Schlep—he praised him for his seriousness as a hunter since he avoids doing the “Borat thing,” both a clear dig at Skeet and an oversimplification of the stunt work in Hansen’s own shows. Besides, Hansen has learned more from Skeet about online branding than he’d like to admit. Nowadays, he’s got his own podcast, “Have a Seat,” and a true-crime streaming channel, TruBlu, where he’s planning to release a documentary about child safety on Roblox with Schlep. This is likely to be the only breaking news–adjacent video on the channel. Its flagship show is Takedown, a deeply unpleasant TCaP rehash starring Hansen, which exchanges Dateline’s flashy editing for the ability to use profanity and distend the interrogation scenes. Hansen leans into a fraudulent DIY aesthetic: his crew posts up in undecorated condos, using surveillance equipment you could probably easily buy at Home Depot. I thought of Skeet’s emphasis on clickbait when I chose to screen the episode “Glory Hole Jerry” for this piece, in which the drawn-out Hansen inquisition evokes a Beckett play. At the sting house, Hansen runs through an endless barrage of questions while Jerry lays face-down on the ground, repeating how “stupid” he was to come there, handcuffed and in severe pain after being tackled to the ground by five men from the county sheriff’s office. “Is there anything else you want people to know about this situation?” asks Hansen. “Yeah, don’t fucking do this!” he replies.

Hansen pushes, but there’s nothing to hear, and without the over-the-top house style of the original show, any sense of spectacle falls away too. The “help me understand” line of inquiry seems limp, perfunctory. Eighteen years on from the salad days of TCaP’s premiere, the concept of understanding this particular crime has corroded into something colder, harder. Delusional conspiracy wormholes like QAnon and Pizzagate have proliferated on poorly moderated platforms like Meta; a post-Covid level of open chaos has led to Republican politicians advancing false allegations of grooming in schools to emotionally activate voters who want to reclaim some control. Meanwhile, incontrovertible evidence of monstrous abuse lies in plain sight—literally in an open book—in the Jeffrey Epstein case. The aspect of this to “understand” has nothing to do with what it was like inside Epstein’s or Ghislaine Maxwell’s heads, but that it was repeatedly enabled by the levers of power and flow of capital.

More broadly, “Help me understand” has mutated into its own meta-spectacle. On the web series Surrounded, a prominent cultural or political figure is encircled by 20 seated “opponents” of the opposite viewpoint, who jump from their chairs to debate the guest one by one—a lo-fi gladiatorial setup with folding chairs, brick walls, and a ticking clock. One episode saw the progressive Majority Report host Sam Seder squaring off with 20 Trump supporters; another had Jordan Peterson lobbing Kermit-voiced barbs at atheists. The media company who produces these videos, Jubilee Media, frames them as an exercise in finding common ground, but that’s not achieved by these videos at all: they’re like throwing on a very predictable horror movie at the end of the day. It doesn’t give a sense of closure or relief to watch Seder correct a young man’s assumption that government agencies receive tax breaks, but it is stressful to watch his opponent stare back, dead-set in the belief that they do. At points, Seder does back off and say that he and his interlocutor will never see eye to eye on some things, no matter how long they interface: he’s really addressing his words to the audience, and maybe one of the people in the room whose mind he can change. The conversation itself—the entertainment—is a dead end; any value or progress has to come from outside of this closed system.

Inevitably, Predators builds to a conversation between Osit and Hansen, blocked and staged like a newsmagazine segment. Hansen politely acknowledges Osit’s raising of ethical concerns with the show, but he stands by everything that played out in the name of a larger mission. His goal was to “heal the wound,” and he shares how often people come up to him in public to tell him that watching the show has been therapeutic. Osit reveals that he is a survivor of abuse himself, which has led him to grapple with the draw of the program—what happens when you “point cameras at something,” he wonders, “and the trauma continues”? “In a way, you are the ideal audience,” Hansen says to Osit. We see a slice of Osit’s face, hidden behind the camera as he eyes Hansen, expectant but suspended in limbo. After a while, there is only one thing left for Osit to say: “You’re free to go.”