Miss America Plays "Innocent" to Catch Sexual Predators

by Matt Webb Mitovich

Lauren Nelson with America's Most Wanted host John Walsh

This Saturday on America's Most Wanted (9 pm/ET on Fox), viewers will see Lauren Nelson use her Miss America powers for good, as a "special investigator" enlisted to snare online predators in a very different Web. Nelson, who has dedicated her reign to promoting Internet safety for kids, posed in chat rooms as a 14-year-old girl, and found herself on the receiving end of overtures at first plain and genteel, but for the most part ultimately graphic and sexually perverse in nature. The end game? To give a would-be predator enough rope with which to hang himself, by arranging for an in-person "meeting" with Nelson's underage alter ego. The perv would instead, however, be greeted by AMW host John Walsh and the Suffolk County (New York) Computer Crimes Unit.

Detailing for TVGuide.com the fine line she had to brave within the instant-messaging arena, Nelson, 21, says her teen persona never made the first move — nor needed to. "[The men] would send the first message, saying, 'ASL,' or 'age/sex/location,' so immediately they know that I am a 14-year-old girl from Long Island," she shares. "From there, they started a conversation and escalated it to a sexual level. And they came, on their own time and very willingly, to this [decoy] house to have sex with a 14-year-old."

But as these cyberchats grew dicey in nature, did Nelson have to pruriently play along to sustain the sting operation? "No, we played innocent," she says. AMW's John Walsh reiterates, "Lauren is a 21-year-old lady, and nobody asked her nor did she try to take [the conversation] to another level, to entrap them by saying anything salacious or off-color to lure them [to the house]. These guys, it's almost like they're talking to and titillating themselves, so our job was not to provoke them or be provocative, but to say, 'Yeah, I'm dumb enough or naive enough or curious enough for you to come here."

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