Hey y'all, welcome to Pink Shade. Aaron, are you excited about today? I am so excited. I barely slept. Okay. I am thrilled about today. I am two and I have three beverages. I have a tea, I have a coffee and have a water. So I will never have to get up. Okay.

Okay. Y'all, I am so excited today because we are going to get to chat with a true legend and a multiple Emmy winner among other accolades. It is Chris Hansen and most of us know Chris from his date line series to catch a predator. But he is also a producer on these Discovery plus series that we have been talking about, the one about Onisi on as well as Unseemly about Peter Nygard, which he and that guy is a total piece of shit. And Chris also has a YouTube show and a podcast and you know how I feel about podcast. So he is a

really busy. Chris, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. This is super exciting for us. Like we are kind of a little bit beside ourselves. Like we told you. Well, now you know how I see. Yeah. Yeah.

But we have so many topics to cover because you're so you're so busy. All right. I wanted to tell you that I was telling my mother, my southern mother about this interview I was going to have and I was reminding her, you know, what it is to catch predator and NBC used to see it all the time. And she said that that show came to Jackson, Mississippi, my hometown.

And I was like, I don't think so, right? Because I would have known and I looked it up looked it up, but it seems like it was perverted justice that came.

Perverted justice didn't investigation in Jackson. We did one in Georgia. Columbus, Georgia years ago. And so, you know, we've done some stuff in the South, Southern California down in Florida. Kentucky, we did one.

And, but that was perverted justice. So as you know, perverted justice was the online watchdog group, which we collaborated with on our investigations and they would do the decoy work online, posing as children.

And then we did all the television part of it. And then I would confront them. But it was originally the reason the series started was I became aware of perverted justice.

And the work they were doing it, they'd set up these these online meetings, not set up, but they would put people posing as children in different chat rooms.

Adults would approach them. They would make a date. There would be a sexually charged conversation and perverted justice would post their identities on their website.

When I became aware of it, gosh, 17 years ago, which is shocking to me. I thought that, you know, if we could combine our ability to put hidden cameras and microphones in a house or a location and collab with them, it could be compelling and sure enough.

And really 17 years ago, this month right around this week, we did our first investigation in Beth Page Long Island.

Oh, okay. Well, my mother was saying that I was like, I don't remember seeing it. And then I did a little research and it seems like it was perverted justice that did it.

But two of the guys that were caught were sons of very prominent doctors, political connections. I remember this. Yeah.

One guy got off because literally like he they had all this like political connections that wrote letters to the governor to kind of put pressure.

So this guy who had done it before completely got off never even had to register as a sex offender. And the other one just sort of admitted it and took, you know, passed along.

How does that make you feel? Well, it's disturbing because obviously people got away with it. They got away with it. I think in the early stages with just perverted justice because, okay, there are these quote, unquote vigilantes.

We never call them vigilantes. We call them a watchdog group. And that's really what they were. But I think it took a minute for law enforcement to decide, hey, wait, these guys are the real deal.

You know, and I think it took us for a minute to figure out that we could, you know, have law enforcement to a parallel investigation.

Remember the first two investigations we did in Beth Page Long Island and in herring Virginia just outside of DC. We just did them and law enforcement was able to make some cases after the fact, but it wasn't until the third investigation in Riverside County, California, where the Sheriff's Department or police department did a parallel investigation.

And once I finished talking to the fellows, they were arrested and prosecuted. And that really set the tone for what we do today, which is a much cleaner way to do it. Now I faced criticism for working too closely with law enforcement.

I faced other criticisms about, you know, should television be doing this. I felt comfortable because of how absolutely transparent we were that we a had a social responsibility to work with law enforcement and to make the cases easier to prosecute and be from just a television correspondent producer standpoint.

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