My introduction to Chris Hansen wasn’t To Catch a Predator, the Dateline NBC series where he famously confronted men who had showed up at a decoy house to meet actors who they had believed to be underage teens for sex.

“Why don’t you have a seat over there?” was Hansen’s iconic line, before he would grill the men about their sexually-explicit chats, which had actually been delivered to adults working for an organization called Perverted Justice. After realizing they were being taped for television, the men would typically stumble out of the decoy house and into the waiting arms of local police officers to be arrested for solicitation of a minor. (Although some of them were never convicted, like in cases where the police failed to perform their own investigations and allowed Hansen to literally call the shots.)

I didn’t watch this show, which aired from 2004 to 2007, when I was a preteen. Instead, I discovered Hansen through YouTube, where he restarted his career in late 2019 after a period of intense financial struggle. He had actually been arrested for writing a bad check earlier that year, as a part of a failed ploy to relaunch his eponymous series through Kickstarter funding.

You see, To Catch a Predator didn’t end well for Hansen, or really for anyone. NBC pulled the plug soon after an incident where a suspect being taped for the show died by suicide as a SWAT team entered his home. NBC declined to renew Hansen’s contract a few years later when he was caught by a different kind of hidden camera operation—the National Enquirer filmed him cheating on his wife with a reporter at an NBC affiliate in Florida who was 20 years younger than him. She later wrote that the publicized affair destroyed her professional career.

These events are the basis of the new A24 film Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson as Hansen descending into egotistical madness. The film is out this weekend, and I got the chance to see it at a press screening earlier this week. Pattinson and the rest of the cast give fantastic performances, and it’s a deeply unsettling, pounding race through Hansen’s house of horrors. The man himself is not so happy with this portrayal, suggesting that he could sue the production over it.

But as someone who has closely followed Hansen’s career thus far in the 2020s, watching the unraveling of his once-beloved persona in Primetime was beyond satisfying. One of my earliest investigations as a reporter involved a child sexual abuse case that Hansen covered on YouTube, where survivors say he exploited them for quick cash and made false promises of helping them get justice that was never delivered. I caught up with some of my first-ever sources this week to talk about what happened in this case, where it ended, and how they feel about Hansen’s newfound virality as a so-called predator hunter on social media.

Around the same time Hansen was getting caught cheating on his wife in Florida, a new kind of predator was on the prowl just a few hours away from him by car. In the Orlando alternative music scene, a young performer named Jesus David Torres was on the rise. His stage name was Dahvie Vanity, and he fronted a band called Blood on the Dance Floor that would join consecutive Warped Tours and appear in merch at Hot Topic. The music itself was terrible, scratchy electro-pop with crude lyrics, but it appealed to a crowd of largely MySpace tweens with colorful hair and numerous piercings.

Like a number of other Warped Tour musicians, Torres used his newfound popularity among young girls and teens as a hunting ground. The volume and severity of allegations against him are staggering. In 2019, HuffPost spoke to 21 women with allegations of sexual violence against Torres, many of whom were underage at the time he preyed on them. Torres had been reported to various law enforcement around the U.S., even being arrested at one point, but he had evaded lasting consequences at every turn.

As Hansen set his sights on YouTube at the turn of the decade, the case against Torres was finally coming under public scrutiny. There were other YouTubers, like James “Onision” Jackson, who had also been accused of grooming and preying on young fans. Hansen began conducting livestreamed interviews with survivors of these figures, videos that would get millions of views and generate thousands of dollars in revenue for Hansen. But they also subjected these survivors, who were predominantly women and nonbinary people, to immense negative online attention. And Hansen lured them in with promises that he could connect them to agents in the FBI, based on his time with To Catch a Predator. He suggested that they would finally get justice.

In July 2020, I reported on the Torres case for Business Insider. I interviewed multiple survivors, including Damien Leonhardt, a trans man who uses “he” and “they” pronouns, who said Torres sexually abused him starting when he was 10 and Torres was 24. In a horrifying twist, Leonhardt became a viral meme in 2010 when he faced an outpouring of 4chan-directed online harassment over the allegations, which Torres mocked in a song called “You Done Goofed.” Mainstream outlets like Good Morning America covered the story, but they framed it as a case of cyberbullying gone wrong instead of the child sexual abuse case it actually was.

A decade later, Leonhardt sat for an interview with Hansen on YouTube and told me he watched as $10,000 worth of tips and donations poured in from commenters. Leonhardt told me he was experiencing homelessness at the time and didn’t receive a cent, let alone any support like therapy. When he asked Hansen about making a donation to the survivors from the proceeds, he said Hansen demurred and then ghosted him. Leonhardt says he didn’t personally want the funds, but he hoped Hansen would donate them to somewhere like a charity supporting survivors—and in the meantime, people were donating under the mistaken impression that Leonhardt and other survivors of Torres were receiving it.

He wasn’t the only one. Back in 2020, I also interviewed Ashlee Lillie, who was the first Torres survivor to appear on Hansen’s channel. Today, she says it was the start of one of the most traumatic periods of her life. And it began with Hansen offering FBI connections that never materialized, similar to how Hansen gathered evidence from Onision survivors that he never actually forwarded to law enforcement. Both Torres and Onision are still free to this day.

“He had all of us believing from day one that he already had these FBI connections, and he told all of us not to worry,” Lillie told me over the phone. After several months, a YouTuber who had also been covering Torres and speaking to the survivors reached out to the FBI herself. They began collecting statements from Lillie and others, without any of Hansen’s help. But Hansen kept up the livestreams.

“He used my willingness to speak out about something as a tool for him to then get me to take other people’s stories and just relay them to him, and he barely had interactions with any of the other girls that he would get me to get on his show,” Lillie says. “It was all me talking to them, me taking the stories, and him doing literally nothing other than pressing ‘go live.’”

In 2020, Lillie also began receiving DMs from a 16-year-old girl who said she was actively talking to Torres almost every day. Lillie began messaging with the teen and asking Hansen for help, but shared screenshots with me that showed Hansen ignoring her when she sought his advice about what appeared to be an ongoing case of Torres grooming a minor. Lillie said Torres abruptly cut contact with the girl one day, in the process of her trying to collect evidence, and that it continues to haunt her six years later.

Lillie ended up making her own YouTube channel at the time to talk about her experiences with Hansen, after which he blocked her on social media. Later, Hansen began regularly joining Fox News and other conservative media outlets as a contributor, where he has recently praised ICE efforts. Seeing that Primetime was coming out was a surreal reminder of everything that had happened. And in April of this year, Lillie received a notice from the FBI, which she shared with me, that said the Torres case was coming to a close.

“The United States Attorney's Office (USAO) has declined to prosecute; therefore, the FBI has closed its investigation. The decision to close this case does not lessen the important contribution you made to the investigation. Your assistance and cooperation were greatly appreciated,” the notice to Lillie reads. It was a stark reminder of how little the system actually does to catch the kind of child predators that Hansen capitalized on to become a household name.

“It’s the biggest disappointment in my life, to be honest with you,” Lillie told me.

I’m glad that Primetime shows the reality behind Hansen’s cult icon status. But my hope is that people don’t lose sight of what his career cost the victims and survivors who gained little from uplifting him.

And if you want a longer version of this piece in YouTube video format, I released an episode detailing it all with my friend and former Business Insider colleague Steven Asarch yesterday: