Five Massachusetts college students are accused of luring a man to the Assumption University campus in a plot police said was inspired by the television show “To Catch a Predator” and a fad on TikTok. The students were part of a larger group that chased the man from a campus building after he was invited there by a student on the dating app Tinder, expecting to meet an adult, according to a criminal complaint, the New York Times reports. The campus police at Assumption University, a small Catholic school in Worcester, said that the group accused the man of being a sexual predator, stopped him from leaving a student lounge and recorded the episode as part of a “deliberately staged event.” Two students assaulted the man, the police said. There was no indication the man was trying to meet underage girls and the woman who invited him to the campus, Kelsy Brainard, said on her Tinder profile that she was 18. Videos of the Oct. 1 episode were shared among students and seen by the police, who said that minutes after the man arrived, he was watching a baseball game on a couch in a student lounge with Brainard and there was “ample personal space between them.”
Suddenly, a large group of students appeared from hidden locations. The students berated the man “as a sexual offender,” grabbed him and blocked him from leaving the room, the police said. He escaped, and as a group of about 25 people chased him, a male punched the man in the back of the head. Once the man reached his car, another student slammed a car door on him. The group of students had their phones out and were apparently recording the episode. “A few minutes later you see the group coming back in, laughing and high-fiving with each other,” the police said. One student, Easton Randall, 19, told the police that the students had been inspired by “To Catch a Predator,” and videos popular on social media. The complaint said the group was trying to replicate a TikTok fad in which people lure a sexual predator to a location and either assault them or call the police. The popular NBC series, “To Catch a Predator,” ran from 2004 to 2008 and featured undercover sting operations where men were lured through online chat rooms to a house where they thought they were meeting a teenager for sex. Some criticized the show because of NBC’s relationship with the police and an advocacy group that helped orchestrate the stings. Questions were also raised about the value and ethics of sensationalizing an undercover sting targeting possible sexual predators.
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