Chris Hansen
Christopher Edward Hansen (born September 13, 1959 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American television journalist and anti-pedophilia activist, best known for his illustrious 32-year career with NBC from 1981-2013.
Career with NBC and To Catch a Predator
Hansen spent the first 12 years of his career with NBC reporting on local news in Michigan, where he spent much of his life growing up and earned his degree in telecommunications, and briefly in Florida. In 1989, he married his first wife Mary Joan, with whom he had two sons, Chase and Connor. In 1993, he joined NBC's Dateline programming block. Before To Catch a Predator, he built up his reputation covering a number of historically significant events, including the Columbine High School massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Unabomber, the TWA Flight 800 disaster, and the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Hansen rose to prominence later in his NBC career as the host of To Catch a Predator (2004-2008), a series of reports serving as part of the Crime Watch Daily segment of Dateline. Hansen he worked with the agency Perverted-Justice (who received consulting fees from NBC) to create decoy online chatroom profiles impersonating underage teens (typically aged 12-15 years) and engaging in sexually charged conversations with adults. These men made dates for sex with the decoys, only to arrive at sting houses and be confronted by Hansen before being sent out for their arrests. The series ran for a total of 20 episodes spanning two seasons and covered 12 sting operations across the United States. While the earliest stings caught dozens of predators, the number declined due to the show's growing popularity and would-be predators becoming better at identifying the fake profiles. Consequently, the last sting only caught seven predators.
Despite the fact that almost all of the men who appeared on the show pled or were found guilty of using the internet to solicit a minor for sex, NBC and Perverted-Justice were accused of entrapment, despite the fact that only law enforcement officers can entrap, and for NBC's paying Perverted-Justice a consulting fee. ABC's 20/20 criticized this alleged misconduct. Some of the suspects had charges against them dropped because the Perverted-Justice agents impersonating minors were first to bring up sex in conversation.
To Catch a Predator lost much of its reputation when suspected predator Bill Conradt went on the run when he found out he had been tricked and committed suicide by gunshot, leading Conradt's surviving sister Patricia to file a wrongful death lawsuit against NBC that was settled outside of court after almost a year for an undisclosed amount. Though Hansen commented that the show had "run its course" when it was cancelled, he has since tried to revive the concept on multiple occasions after his contract with NBC ended. Hansen's image, particularly as he looked circa 2004, endures as a popular symbol of anti-pedophilia humor among young social media users.
Post-NBC Career
In 2015, Hansen hosted the short-lived Killer Instinct, in which he investigated homicides. He then planned a new series entitled Hansen vs. Predator but could only raise $89,000 of the planned $400,000 he had planned to raise through crowdfunding via Kickstarter. He was arrested and charged with larceny in 2019, namely paying for $13,000 worth of promotional items related to the Kickstarter campaign, which customers never received, with a bad check. In 2016, after Hansen became the second-season host of Crime Watch Daily, now existing independently of NBC, Hansen vs. Predator premiered and ran for a short time.
Later in 2019, Hansen started a YouTube-exclusive one-on-one interview series entitled Have a Seat with Chris Hansen, jokingly referencing his catchphrase "Why don't you have a seat?", which he became famous for saying whenever he encountered suspected predators.
In 2020, Hansen co-founded the true crime streaming service TruBlu, where he became the host of Takedown with Chris Hansen (2022-present), which once again finds him investigating and interviewing online predators by luring them into sting houses, this time one or two per episode. Working independently has given him greater creative control, allowing him to work more directly with local law enforcement and use uncensored profanity. The series has so far run for eight seasons totaling 80 episodes in a span of two years, a few of which have been removed due to legal complications.
Later in 2020, Hansen and Mary Joan divorced; he married his girlfriend Gabrielle Gagnon the following year.
In recent years, Hansen has enjoyed friendly relations with Fox News, occasionally appearing to discuss with regular news hosts incidents of online sexual solicitation to minors as they relate to illegal immigrants who perpetrate the crimes.
