Chris Hansen Condemns Primetime Film as 'Identity Theft' — SkimNews
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- Lance Oppenheim's film "Primetime" opened in US theaters this week (UK release October 30), with Robert Pattinson playing Chris Hansen in a dramatization of Dateline NBC's To Catch a Predator and a line arguing "there used to be a pillory in every village. Now there's a television in every living room."
- Chris Hansen, 67, told USA Today the film is an "insult" and "identity theft" that exploits "the brand I've built over the last 45 years"—despite not having seen it—and bought advertising for his TruBlu true-crime streaming network to run before screenings.
- Dateline NBC's To Catch a Predator averaged roughly 7 million viewers per episode by the 2006-07 season before its 2008 cancellation, using Perverted Justice volunteers posing as underage children to lure men from online chat rooms into sting houses.
- The 2006 suicide of Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt during a To Catch a Predator police raid prompted lawsuits and became the subject of Luke Dittrich's 2007 Esquire article "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die," which served as a key source for the Primetime screenplay by Ajon Singh.
- Perverted Justice founder Xavier Von Erck claims his organization produced more than 600 convictions with a 99.1% conviction rate and statutory changes in all 50 states, while calling the film a "purposely malicious portrayal" built on invented scenes, opinions and locations involving him.
- Kentucky Attorney General Greg Stumbo oversaw state-led stings in Bowling Green that resulted in more than 20 arrests, with state prosecutors refusing to hand criminal evidence tapes over to NBC producers while trials were pending.
- Predators director David Osit argues the show's commodification of vigilante justice established a precedent now accelerated by social media, noting that modern networks and streamers no longer blur suspects' faces or apply traditional journalistic safeguards.
Why it matters: Three principals from the actual To Catch a Predator operation—Hansen, Von Erck, and the Stumbo-era Kentucky team—have publicly clashed with the filmmakers over what one calls "identity theft," while the 2006 suicide of a Texas prosecutor anchors renewed scrutiny of a format that drew 7 million weekly viewers before streaming-era imitators dropped its journalistic guardrails.
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