You don’t need to be a true crime junkie to be familiar with Chris Hansen’s work. The investigative journalist has spent decades chasing down child predators first on his NBC hit To Catch a Predator and now on his own independent network Tru Blue.
On Friday’s show, Hansen joined Megyn to discuss how he still manages to get perps to “take a seat” following one of his infamous sting operations and what parents can do to keep their kids safe online.
To Catch a Predator
Hansen spent 21 years at NBC News, which he joined in 1993 after cutting his teeth at the local affiliate in Detroit. He began on a show called Now with Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw that was folded into the Dateline brand a year later.
He spent years as a Dateline contributor before To Catch a Predator launched under the news magazine’s umbrella in 2004. It ran for about four years, but the investigations and stings were subsequently repurposed in numerous ways that continued to run on NBC and MSNBC long after.
If you happened to be living under a rock for those years, the show involved luring adult male ‘predators’ to a sting house to meet a minor they thought they had been corresponding with in online chats. Most of the operations ended in an arrest, but not before Hansen would appear and ask the suspect to “take a seat.”
Hansen’s work continues to this day on his show Takedown, which has filmed 250 episodes in the last four years, and he is as surprised as anyone that the bad guys are still showing up.
“In the beginning, I thought, alright, this is very compelling. We’ve obviously hit on something here. We did the first investigation in Bethpage, Long Island. We did a second one in Herndon, Virginia, outside of D.C. Then, we did the big one where we finally worked with law enforcement in Riverside County, California. And I thought, okay, well, at some point, guys are not going to show up, right? They’re going to know that it’s us… and here we are, 22 years after the very first investigation,” he said.
Still Catching Predators
In fact, Hansen has found that the work continues to be as necessary as ever. “The cases are more dramatic, and more compelling, and more disturbing than ever before,” he noted. “Last month we did a sting in Marion County, Florida, near Ocala. 58 guys showed up in six days, including a second-grade school teacher who is here on a work permit from Jamaica, who was also a children’s author. You can buy his books on Amazon, or you could.”
Another terrifying case from that operation involved a married electrician who thought he was talking to the father of a seven- and 14-year-old boy. “He drove on a Saturday afternoon to the parking lot of a Target store, thinking that he was going to meet the dad, and they were going to go in and ogle these two little children up and down the aisles and live out his fantasy, the initial phase of this sex party he wanted. Then, they were going to go back to the dad’s house and both of them were going to engage in sex acts for the seven- and 14-year-old boy,” Hansen recalled.
“He is arrested, they take him down, and this all rolls back to the sheriff’s office,” he noted. “I get a chance to interview this guy, and he basically gives it up. Here’s a guy who was married, a workaday guy, installed lighting outdoors at people’s homes and businesses, and this guy could have been in your front yard thinking God knows what.”
Staying Safe Online
In addition to putting away perverts and predators, part of Hansen’s work is educating parents and children on how to stay safe online. One of his latest projects is a documentary called Dangerous Games: Investigating Roblox, which looked into the reports of predatory grooming on the kids gaming platform Roblox.
Megyn said the documentary hit close to home. “This happened to a friend of mine. [Her son was] on Roblox… like a lot of kids are. Someone started inappropriately messaging him, and she had no idea,” she shared.
Hansen called it a “playground for predators,” though many parents don’t realize the danger. “It creates the potential for predators to be able to approach your kids… While we were investigating this, we worked with a law firm in Chicago… At the time we started our investigation, they had 500 cases, and now it is approaching 5,000 because people are coming out,” he said.
Roblox, for its part, says on its website that the platform is designed “with safety in mind” and it takes “the safety of their youngest users seriously.”
Regardless of the gaming or social media platform, Hansen said it is crucial for parents to talk to their kids about how to stay safe. “From the very moment they have access to the internet, you’ve got to tell them, ‘Look, there are grown-ups on the internet who try to trick kids.’ Kids don’t like to be tricked, and then you have to ratchet up that conversation as they get older,” he suggested.
That includes explaining the types of scams and traps that exist, like extortion plots that threaten to expose provocative photos or information. Hansen said his team has a documentary in the works on that very topic.
“I sat across from four sets of parents whose children committed suicide… And you talk about just gut-wrenching conversations, all because the kid sent a picture of his private parts, and he was worried that Grandma was going to see it or his friends were going to see it,” Hansen recalled. “You know how kids are with their social media presence; it’s their whole world… These parents are among the best parents you could ever find, but the kid gets caught up in this shame.”
“But again, the message is: Look, I get you’re going to make a mistake, but the mistakes today are way different than the mistakes when I was 15 or 16 years old. There were there were very little consequences then, and there was no internet… Today these kids are so tied into this that it crushes them if they think it is going to be destroyed, and they worry about getting into college, and they worry about their buddies on the football team. You just got to tell them, we can go to the National Center for Missing Exploited Children, and they have a program that’ll wash this stuff off the internet, and we’ll take care of it,” Hansen explained.
Ultimately, it is about reminding children that they are the victims in these situations. “[They’re] the victim. We’ve talked with all three of our kids about this because you like to think that your kid will never make that mistake, but kids do make this mistake. Good, sweet kids make this mistake,” Megyn noted. “You have to be upfront with them, like, ‘This could happen. Don’t worry, we’ll help you fix it. This is a scam. Even if you fall for it, we’ve got you.’ It’s worth having that conversation now before it happens.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Hansen by tuning in to episode 1,367 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.