To Catch A Predator And How Suicide Makes For “Good TV”
BUDDING Donal Macintyres and Roger Cooks beware. If the subject of your undercover expose decides to top himself, you could be hauled into court.
Patricia Conradt is suing NBC Universal for $105 million after her brother shot himself as a TV crew surrounded his Texas home to expose him as an alleged sexual predator.
Louis William Conradt Jr., 57, was caught in a sting operation by “Dateline NBC: To Catch a Predator.” The show employs people posing as underage children in online chat rooms to lure suspected “predators” to a house that is fitted with cameras and where the show’s host, Chris Hansen, lies in wait along with police.
The lawsuit alleges that Conradt didn’t take the bait after a sexually explicit online chat with someone posing as a 13-year-old boy. So the Dateline crew swarmed the yard of his house where Conradt, an assistant prosecutor for Rockwall County, took his life.
His sister maintains that the TV company should have known such an outcome was possible. Her suit states that: “The suicide was reasonably foreseeable…Having trespassed and invaded upon Bill’s property to broadcast a spectacle to millions, the defendant took no more steps toward protecting him than are received by a gladiator or bull.”
According to the New York Sun, the lawsuit also claims that after the shooting a police officer at the scene told a “Dateline” producer: “That’ll make good TV.”
A spokeswoman for NBC Universal told the Associated Press: “We have not yet received the lawsuit, but we plan to defend ourselves vigorously as we believe the claims in the suit to be completely without merit.”
Posted: 25th, July 2007 | In: Anorak In New York Comments (5) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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July 25th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Won’t it bring the exhibitionist types out of the woodwork and urge them to greater crimes?
July 25th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Its another boogeyman to keep you looking at your neighbor instead of the real criminals …the Goverment officials. I was in Miami and the local weatherman was arrested for the same thing trying to meet a young boy where was the press during that arrest….Im sure they knew about it.
July 25th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
The thing that gets me is that the thin veil of innocent till proven guilty has been so abused by the law and Gov’t that now the press feels it has a right to “expose” a suspected criminal to the world on tv ….not a convicted criminal..
Don’t get me wrong most of these guys on the show are clearly guilty. But to have some bullshit TV host come in the room before you get arrested is only adding a level of insult that will eventually get the host shot or taken hostage.
Now that will be some good TV
July 25th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Does such a show curtail urges? What good does it do?
July 25th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
In a world where paedophiles are the new Jews, this was always going to happen. It has already, if you know your recent history (just look up ‘Operation Ore suicides’ in any search engine).
In a world where you can insult, beat-up, incite to commit crime and even murder a suspected paedophile what else is to be expected?
‘Right-thinking’ people - and the gutter press - imagine they have a license to now to behave in as base a manner as imaginable towards those suspected or accused of having a sexual attraction to children. There is no discussion of the issues, no pause for cool common sense or reasoned debate - there is just hatred, bile and the ignorant, primal instincts of The Mob.
In America alone there are over 600,000 ’sex offenders’ as a result of unimaginably bad, reactionary new law designed to ‘protect children’.
Many of the 600,000 are themselves mere teenagers.
Knee-jerk new laws are still in the pipeline for the UK along very similar lines as the US model. But are prisons are already full of so-called ’sex offenders’. Uh-ho.
It’s a joke. And not a very funny one.