Jeffrey Epstein was once considered for a To Catch a Predator-style sting operation, former host Chris Hansen has claimed.
TCAP was a special report segment that ran on news show Dateline NBC from 2004 to 2007, and used sting operations to trick potential online predators believed to be targeting children.
In a recent interview with the Hollywood Raw with Dax Holt and Adam Glyn podcast, Hansen – who presented the segment – claimed that he’d looked into using the same methods to try and catch Epstein around 2014 or 2015.
At that time, Epstein had already served his first prison sentence for sex offences, with Hansen alleging that he met with lawyers representing some of Epstein’s victims, who claimed that the financier was still preying on underage girls.
“I knew Epstein was coming and it’s one of my great career regrets that I wasn’t more aggressive about covering the story,” he said.
“I met with a group of guys, some of whom worked for lawyers representing the victims in that case. Epstein had done his time... and the allegations were that he was still doing what he was doing [with] young girls, all the stuff we know about today.
Describing how the people he’d met with had a “big file” on Epstein, Hansen continued: “I was trying to fashion a Predator-like sting operation in which we could catch him.”
However, Hansen claimed that the levels of security at Epstein’s homes in New York and Florida made it to make progress despite working “diligently” on the plan.
In July 2019, Epstein was arrested again on charges of sex trafficking minors in New York and Florida.
He died by suicide in his New York prison cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial.
