‘To Catch a Predator’ star Chris Hansen buys ads for his true-crime network to run before ‘Primetime’ - Entertainment Weekly

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In a characteristic episode of To Catch a Predator, a gray-haired man in his 40s walks into a suburban house in Florida. He's there to meet a 15-year-old named Jolanda who he's been chatting with online under the username "genericwhitemale," but he's intercepted by an unruffled Chris Hansen, who uses his authoritative newscaster voice to instruct the visitor to have a seat. Genericwhitemale begins eating cookies. One of his eyebrows flies to the top of his forehead as he denies knowing Jolanda's age. Jolanda is not really a teenager. She's not even real. She was constructed by the members of Perverted Justice, an online watchdog group, who masqueraded as children in chatrooms to invite potential sexual predators to a home under the guise of meeting the kid they'd been talking to. Instead, they're met by an adult decoy portraying Jolanda, law enforcement and a TV crew, all in on the scheme together. The whole thing was broadcast on NBC's To Catch a Predator series, a sensation in the mid-2000s. Hansen snarkily asks the subject of the sting if he'd like to finish his cookie. The man says no — he just wants to go to the beach — and turns to leave.