The new biopic dramatises an alleged affair during the To Catch a Predator years, but the timeline reported by tabloids at the time doesn't match what's on screen.
Primetime, the new movie built around Chris Hansen's To Catch a Predator years, doesn't just recreate stings on hidden camera. It goes home with him, into a marriage that was reportedly falling apart while the cameras rolled.
In the film, Chris is shown spending long stretches away from his wife Mary Joan Hansen, and getting caught in an alleged affair that Mary learns about in the movie's final scene, timed to his last sting for the show in 2008.
The real story took longer to unravel, and it didn't happen quite that fast.
Chris and Mary Joan married in 1989. They had two sons, Chase in 1992 and Connor in 1994. Mary Joan filed for divorce in June 2018, nearly a decade after the show wrapped its original run. People reported months later that Chris had been evicted from his New York City apartment and arrested on charges tied to bad checks. In her divorce filing, Mary Joan said the marriage had broken down irretrievably.
The affair itself is where the movie and the record start to pull apart.
The National Enquirer did report an affair between Chris and TV reporter Kristyn Caddell, but placed it around 2011, three years after the sting that Primetime uses as its emotional climax. Kristyn told the Enquirer at the time that Chris had said a divorce was inevitable and that the marriage was, in her words, effectively over already. "Over the next several months, our friendship evolved into a whirlwind romance," she said, adding that none of it was concealed from the public. People close to Chris denied the affair when the story broke.
Chris himself pushed back on the framing years later, telling Mel Magazine, "To equate having dinner with a friend to somebody committing a felony is neither fair nor a conversation worth having. In reality, it was a whole lot of nothing."
Whatever actually happened between 2008 and 2011, Chris has moved on since. He married Gabrielle Gagnon in November 2021, and she's been open about the relationship, running an Instagram account under the handle @officialmrshansen where she regularly posts about their life together.
What Primetime chooses to compress into a single scene took years to actually play out, according to the reporting from that period, and the film's version of events sits closer to drama than to record. Whether the movie addresses that gap directly, or leaves audiences assuming the tighter timeline is the true one, isn't clear yet. Its wider release should settle that question soon enough.
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