‘To Catch a Predator’: The New American Witch Hunt
No one is home at this house on the Jersey Shore — no one, that is, except a very cute and horny fourteen-year-old. Her parents went to Atlantic City for the weekend, she is telling guys online, and she wants to get laid. Dozens of men are now making their way to the house, hoping to get lucky with an underage kid. One hopped on a motorcycle for the six-hour drive from Pennsylvania; another grabbed a train from New York in a SpongeBob SquarePants jacket, armed with a bottle of K-Y Jelly. One by one, they pull up to this white shingled, weather-beaten house at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, with no cars in the driveway and the window shades drawn. A mailman stuffs some bills into the shark-shaped mailbox next door, pulling open its door of tiny white teeth.
This, as the men will soon discover, isn’t just a house: It’s the set of the Dateline NBC show To Catch a Predator, the ratings phenomenon that zooms into America’s living rooms to humiliate sexual perverts. The program’s gotcha! moments are like those on any reality show; who can forget the time they made a bespectacled twenty-year-old come over naked for sex play with some Cool Whip? Except Dateline sends people to jail and claims a high-minded purpose: warning the American public about what it calls a “growing national epidemic.”
To transform a house into a giant flytrap for sexual predators, it takes more than forty people, many of whom are hanging out in the living room on this Friday afternoon. There’s the face of the operation: host Chris Hansen, a blond Dateline correspondent, discussing helicopter trips to more glamorous assignments with his producer. There’s the eyes of the operation: Mitchell Wagenberg, a spy for hire wearing a long, skinny braid down to his butt, presiding over seventeen cameras hidden in dried-flower wreaths and the toaster. And there’s the body of the operation: Casey, a sexpot college student and aspiring dancer in tight jeans who is playing jail-bait decoy today because her landlord dad owns this house. (Added bonus: Local prosecutors wrote her college a note so she could get out of a chemistry test.)
Casey gabs to potential predators on the phone. “Come on over, we’re not going to get caught,” she says. “If we got caught, I would get into trouble, and everybody would call me a slut, and I don’t want that, either. I’ll pay for your gas. It’s no big deal, trust me. My dad gave me plenty of money for the weekend.” When the guy fails to take the bait, her voice rises in pitch. “OK, fine, whatever, lame. L-A-M-E. You’re being a baby. I told you I’ve done it a million times!”
None of these people, however, are the brains of the operation. Those, appropriately enough, are located upstairs, in the house’s third-floor attic. For the Dateline sting, the space has been converted into the warren of Perverted Justice, a secretive citizenry of seventy-five predator-fighting zealots determined to save children from the long-term scars of sex abuse. The group is an assortment of Genesis-loving fatsos from Texas, introverted copywriters from Wisconsin, and New York nightclub doorgirls, with a dedicated core of West Coast anarchist tech geeks and gamers in their twenties and thirties. For those downstairs, To Catch a Predator is just a TV show; for those upstairs, hunting predators is both the coolest online game they’ve ever known and a life calling. Many members of Perverted Justice use pseudonyms, keeping their real names secret even from one another. One of the few who know their true identities is their elusive leader, Xavier Von Erck, a twenty-eight-year-old libertarian and atheist who kills on Civilization IV.
It’s getting late, and the four top-ranking members of Perverted Justice here in the flesh — Del Harvey, Frag, Pibb and Don Pedro — are arranged around computers and video monitors balanced on the attic’s chairs and beds, eagerly awaiting their afternoon prey. “Friday night, baby — hookup central!” says Del. At twenty-five, she’s a computer geek’s fantasy female: androgynous, beautiful, pierced, with comprehensive musical knowledge and a house overrun by pet Maine coons and an iguana. One of her favorite shirts features two cars crashing into each other under the symbol CTRL + Z, “Get it?” she asks excitedly. “It’s a car crash, and Control-2 is the command for undo!”
Del pecks madly at her keyboard, coordinating the thirty-five volunteers who are working on this sting remotely. They chat with men on Yahoo!, AOL and MySpace about topics such as “have u ever given a bj b4?” and “do you have thick or thin pussy lips?” In the past few days, PJ members posing as young girls and boys have chatted with nearly 300 men. About thirty will actually show up at the house this weekend. A few guys are scheduled to appear soon — a salesman, a printing-press operator and a college student who has revealed that his uncle is a captain at a nearby police department.
Suddenly Frag leans toward his IM screen, which is scrolling rapidly with news from far-flung PJ members. “We got one — Ikeman!” he exclaims. “Ikeman coming from the south, in a blue Chevy Impala. He’s bringing wine coolers!”
Everyone turns their attention to the camera following the Impala as it disgorges Ikeman, a.k.a. John Donnelly, a handsome twenty-one-year-old who is wearing a striped sweatshirt and a look that’s equal parts sexual anticipation and terror. Casey runs outside to meet him, taking a seat in a chair on the beach. He approaches slowly.
“Where are the wine coolers?” she asks.
“I was going to get them after I met you because I was so paranoid,” Donnelly says, looking around. “Man, I was just worried about this shit because I never met anyone under eighteen.” He scrutinizes a couple passing by. “I guess there are no cops around, so it’s cool.”
“Yeah,” says Casey, smiling. “You can see there’s no one here.”
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