Hot Docs 2025: Shamed

Matt Gallagher’s Shamed is something of a cross between a true crime expose and a freakshow. Its subject is Jason Nassr, an online zealot who spent five years exposing alleged pedophiles through his online persona, the Creeper Hunter. Nassr would post online, posing as a minor on social media sites and chat apps, catfishing adult men into asking him to meet up. When he did meet in person, Nassr would film the encounter and then post it online, exposing the men’s identities and their communications with minors. Essentially, he ran a YouTube version of To Catch a Predator, but without even the modicum of oversight that primetime show had. As a result of his work, several of the men Nassr accused online eventually killed themselves.

Shamed catches up with Nassr in the midst of his court trial in London, Ontario. The crown accuses Nassr of harassment, extortion, and the distribution of written child pornography in the pursuit of his vigilante justice. Nassr contends that it’s because he made the justice system look bad, carrying out the sort of justice that the actual system seems woefully inadequate to deliver. Nassr has a point: law enforcement expends scant resources to stop child predators. But as we learn in the film, Nassr is something of a predator himself, a person seemingly fueled more by the joy of destroying others’ lives than the so-called justice of exposing crime and criminal predilections. The film splits its focus between an interview with Nassr, footage from his Creeper Hunter web series, and interviews with the families of some of the men who killed themselves in the aftermath Nassr’s actions. The totalizing effect is truly discomfiting.

For one, Nassr is himself a grotesque individual, a narcissist of the highest calibre who seems to think he’s a champion of justice, but who is something of a scumbag in his personal life. For instance, we quickly learn that former girlfriends have accused him of distributing revenge porn. Furthermore, his own encounters with the men he accuses paint a portrait of a truly vindictive individual who takes pleasure in making others suffer. The fact of exposing a potential pedophile is one thing; the glee with which he exposes these men is something completely different.

The film’s boldest choice is to make us feel genuinely bad for some of the accused. It’s hard to feel bad for pedophiles, but the manner in which Nassr entraps them, and the ashamed and grief-stricken testimonies of some of their family members, makes us remember that these are still human beings in the end. Human beings with perverse appetites, yes, but human beings nevertheless, and not necessarily men who committed any crimes. The justice system uses doubt as a check and balance. A man like Nassr has no room for doubt. It doesn’t matter to him whether some of the men he exposed might never have gone so far as to have committed a crime. The mere fact that they engaged with his catfishing attempt is enough for him to find them guilty and ruin their lives.

The irony of Nassr himself being on trial in the film and not the men he accused is not lost on the director, Gallagher; he lets Nassr say his piece about the inadequacy of action in the justice system. Does he go far enough in exposing the other fractures that men like Nassr attempt to fill? That’s on the viewer to say. Shamed is a compelling work. Well-shot, confrontational yet measured in its approach, provocative in its questions. It leaves you feeling uncomfortable and reflective, which is more than you can say for the typical true crime doc.

7 out of 10

Shamed (2025, Canada)

Directed by Matt Gallagher.

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