The voice of a 37-year-old man salivates on the phone. “I’m thinking… I’m wishing I was there with you. If I was, I’d be naked,” he says, towards whom he assumes is a 13-year-old girl he’s groomed online and has arranged to meet. “I’ve thought about you all day,” he grimly continues, before concluding, “I’m a very lucky guy.” “You think so?” replies the voice of the ‘child’, knowingly.

It’s a set-up for a ghoulish punchline – one familiar to viewers of Dateline NBC’s paedophile-baiting phenomenon To Catch a Predator.

Arriving at a camera-rigged house, the unsuspecting man is welcomed by the 13-year-old girl (in fact a young-looking actor over 18), before being unexpectedly confronted by journalist Chris Hansen. As Hansen reads out the most sordid extracts of the online chats with the girl (actually an adult from the anti-predator citizen group Perverted-Justice), the man’s face crumples and he dissolves into tears. This is the money shot – the precise moment his world crumbles. But Hansen has one final trick up his sleeve. Telling the shell-shocked man he’s “free to walk out of the house right now”, the predator leaves and – boom! – is swarmed by police and arrested.

Airing between 2004 and 2007, To Catch a Predator’s formula was dubbed “Punk’d for paedophiles” by late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel and “Paedle’s About” by writer Charlie Brooker. Over 256 men were arrested as a result of the show, NBC has claimed, yet slightly fewer than half of those were convicted of a crime.

Like 10 million other viewers at its height, Emmy award-winning documentary maker David Osit religiously tuned into the show, and his new film, Predators, in UK cinemas from November 14, is a nuanced yet gut-wrenching unpacking of what happens when righteous anger meets entertainment, and the troubling vigilante imitators it spawned online.

One day, when Osit was down an internet rabbit hole of To Catch a Predator fan communities, he began by feeling overwhelming disgust. Yet, watching unaired footage where remorseful predators beg for help and counselling, Osit “couldn’t help myself feeling sympathy, pity and sadness, despite knowing what they had done – or were about to do,” he tells me via Zoom. “And the show was never designed to let you feel that way. It was darkly humorous reportage of man after man, coming in, being humiliated and arrested.”

Predators asks if the show actually deterred criminals and helped us understand one of society’s most reviled crimes. Despite Hansen’s catchphrase, “help me to understand”, which he would put to the predators, the show was never about that, argues ethnographer Mark de Rond, who contributes heavily to the documentary. Having spent four years inside COBRA (Children Online Battling Real Abuse) from 2018 to 2022, he wrote a fascinating gonzo book Dark Justice: Inside the World of Paedophile Hunters. “As a TV maker, the last thing you want to do is humanise the monsters, because then the show falls apart,” he explains. “It’s powerful because it presents a flat narrative of good versus evil. The predators aren’t human beings; they’re caricatures.”

Blurring the lines between TV and law enforcement, some felt the investigations in To Catch a Predator were less about justice and more about sensationalism. While former Kentucky attorney general Greg Stumbo partnered with the show on three stings as a solution to law enforcement’s lack of resources, issues with jurisdiction, claims of entrapment and the use of non-professionals sometimes tainted the cases, hindering prosecution. “The role I played in it is a stain on my soul,” laments one police officer.

To Catch a Predator’s black humour is also retrospectively disturbing. Despite its sickening content, Kimmel hailed it as “the funniest comedy on television”, while his audience once howled with laughter at a predator who had been persuaded by a decoy to get naked. Jon Stewart proclaimed that Hansen should have his own channel. “The irony is, back then, if you had a problem with the show, you had to be quiet about it,” says Osit. “But now if you like the show, you have to be quiet about it.”

Others took it more seriously. The show was championed by Oprah Winfrey as a valuable public service, but Osit isn’t so sure. “It might have created a little more awareness, but a larger percentage of child predation is from people who are known to their victims rather than online strangers, and the fact that so many child predators are themselves victims of childhood abuse makes me wonder whether this programme was ever interested in addressing this criminality? Did it create more of a stigma around this to the point where people won’t be able to get help to stop the problem for themselves?”

Also disturbing was the show’s cultural context. “You had Britney Spears in a school uniform and ‘countdown clocks’ on the internet of celebrities reaching the legal age,” says Osit. “Our media helped create a society where young children are looked at as sexual objects for older men – then we have a show which catches them.”

To Catch a Predator ended in 2007, shortly after a notorious incident. Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt, a suspected paedophile, failed to turn up to the rigged house. When, instead, law enforcement decided to raid where he lived as part of the show, he shot himself in front of the police and died. Nearly two decades on, the male actor, in his early twenties when he portrayed the 13-year-old Conradt was preying on, remains visibly shaken: “You could offer me £10 million to film that episode again in Texas and I wouldn’t take it,” he tells Osit in the film. Watching the footage, it feels like only a matter of time before someone took their own life. “I can’t speak for the inner-workings of the minds of the producers, but my conjecture is there was an idea that some day, it would happen,” says Osit. “But I don’t think it was an idea anyone lost sleep over.”

The show’s complicated legacy didn’t end there, however. To Catch a Predator “set the template” for the online paedophile-hunters we see today, notes Osit. “The dehumanisation formula worked so well, now amateurs can do it in their own homes without police involvement.”

De Rond has no sympathy towards paedophiles. He would ritually shower each night after wading through the depravity of online decoy chats. Nonetheless, he questions the means of “publicly exposing them in spectacles of humiliation.”

“If the objective of these hunters is, as they say, to keep kids safe, there are less harmful ways of doing so. You could film the predator but only release the footage after a conviction has been secured in court,” he says. Hunting groups argue they livestream in order to demonstrate they’re not physically or verbally abusing a perpetrator. “You could film the body and not show the face, or collect the evidence and hand it over to the police and let them deal with it.”

While hunting packs operate by different rules – COBRA, for instance, won’t film if a paedophile clearly has learning difficulties or a mental illness – in an outrage economy where clicks mean cash, videos are becoming increasingly extreme. A New York Times investigation earlier this year revealed more than 170 violent attacks in the US by paedophile hunters since 2023. Now 66, Hansen is still continuing his controversial stings for streaming service TruBlu, and remains convinced that he’s serving a greater purpose. “I understand people saying, ‘You push it too far’”, Hansen tells Osit. “‘You take a man at his worst and you put him on television. You shame him’. I’m OK with that. I’ll take that criticism.”

Asking viewers to feel any empathy with predators is testing, and you might be tempted to dismiss Osit as a naïve idealist, yet towards the end of the documentary, he discloses that he was abused aged seven. He would watch To Catch a Predator later in life hoping it would provide answers.

“The filmmaker in me is not asking why this happened,” he reflects. “We’ve done research about why child predation happens. The question I find myself asking in this film is, ‘what do we do as a society when we don’t have answers, and how does my pain become your entertainment?’”

Although he doesn’t want it to colour how people view the film, it does add a voice that was conspicuously missing in the pageantry of To Catch a Predator: that of the victims themselves. When he met T-Coy, a decoy in a hunting group who is herself a survivor of childhood abuse (a disproportionate number in the hunting community are), he knew that the film was working. Re-watching the footage of one of her ambushes where the predator says he intends to take his own life, she begins to feel sorry for him – despite herself.

As the documentary progresses, Osit starts to question whether his filmmaking itself – and the audience’s voyeurism in watching it – is predatory. “One of the contributors in the film makes an astute point that the appeal of true crime is that it’s a way to feel better [about] your life,” says Osit. “Your life may be awful – but at least you’re not on To Catch a Predator.”

Predators is in cinemas from November 14

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