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Television network NBC Universal has settled a lawsuit brought by the family of a man who was swept up in the To Catch a Predator program and killed himself, The New York Times reported.
NBC spokesman Jenny Tartikoff said in a statement that the issue has been “amicably resolved”, but wouldn’t give any details about the amount of money paid by the General Electric Co unit.
Louis W. Conradt Jr., an assistant district attorney in Rockwall County, Texas, shot himself in the head after investigators of the above mentioned NBC program entered his home with a camera crew as part of an online sex sting.
Conradt’s family, his sister to be more precise, filed a $105 million lawsuit against NBC. Patricia Conradt brought to justice NBC, which ran the Predator episode as part of its Dateline NBC newsmagazine. She filed suit in 2007 accusing the network of being “concerned more with its own profits than with pedophilia,” The Los Angeles Times reported.
It all started with some sexually explicit messages sent by Conradt to a person that he believed was under-age. He did not know that he was in fact sending messages to a volunteer for Perverted Justice, an organization which sets up stings to catch child sexual predators. The man had been hired as a consultant for the Predator series.
The basic idea of the show "To Catch a Predator" is that a person poses as an under aged girl in an Internet chat room to lure men who want to meet her to a house, but when the child predators arrive at the house, they are confronted by the TV show's host and a camera crew.
However, Conradt didn’t fell for it. He didn’t show up, but police arrested him at his home. The camera crews accompanied the police at the man’s home to his embarrassment.
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