The Horrendous Allegations Against Sound of Freedom ’s Hero

Tim Ballard, the real-life protagonist of the surprise hit film Sound of Freedom, seemed on the verge of breaking into another stratum of fame and power when the movie was released. Ballard, who had already been anointed something of a Latter-day Saints hero for his work rescuing child trafficking victims, suddenly became a national hero, appearing on the conservative news circuit to discuss the insidious threat of sex trafficking (and the need to “secure” the U.S.-Mexico border). Prominent Republicans urged their constituents to see the movie. Donald Trump hosted a screening of the movie at his private club in New Jersey. It wasn’t long before some began to speculate that Ballard would run for the U.S. Senate.

There had been hints of trouble for Ballard, though. The many critiques of Ballard’s organization, Operation Underground Railroad—that its unconventional methods were ineffective; that it seemed to exaggerate its accomplishments; that it prioritized giving wealthy donors an adventure over actual results; that it did a poor job of caring for the children after they were “rescued”; that it retraumatized the victims; that it even created demand for more trafficking victims—were dismissed by Ballard’s fans as petty attacks from the secular left. But it wasn’t just criticism; there were more serious signs of scandal. Since 2020, a prosecutor from Davis County, Utah, had been investigating possible communications fraud and witness tampering; Vice News reported that the investigation had looked into whether OUR had misled donors and that the investigation had involved multiple federal agencies. (That investigation was dropped in March 2023.) And in 2021, Vice reported that the previous year, an anonymous letter had circulated that accused Ballard and the organization’s leadership of misusing donor funds and of misconduct toward women. (The OUR board of directors said it investigated the allegations and found no evidence.) Finally, on July 13, Vice reported that Ballard had left OUR, which he had founded in 2013. (OUR and Ballard did not explain the separation initially, but OUR implied in a statement at the time that it was connected to the film’s release.)

The answers arrived a few days later, when the outlet learned that Ballard left after an internal investigation into claims several employees made against him. The seriousness of the situation was clarified when, on Sept. 15, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publicly rebuked Ballard for “morally unacceptable” activities.

It seemed, from the decisive actions of his one-time defenders, that something damning was coming. Now, we have the details. And the portrait it paints of the Sound of Freedom hero is a dark one.

Five anonymous women filed a lawsuit against Ballard on Monday, accusing him of sexual assault, telling very similar stories of manipulation and abuse. The lawsuit also targets OUR and a number of its leading figures, asserting that they knew of Ballard’s misconduct and enabled it. And on Wednesday, a sixth woman filed a similar lawsuit. Her lawyer speculated that more suits were coming soon.

The details of the alleged assaults are stomach-churning, but the lawsuit also portrays Tim Ballard as akin to a cult leader: paranoid, narcissistic, and prone to delusions of grandeur.

It had already been reported that Ballard went to a psychic named Janet Russon for guidance in his operations. But according to the lawsuit, Ballard also went to Russon for “reassurance and justification” of everything he did. Russon spoke to Nephi, an ancient prophet in the Book of Mormon, for direction, and the psychic was not alone. Per the lawsuit:

One of the women recalled his paranoia as well. “At Glenn Beck’s home, Ballard spoke about how he had to remove the cancer from OUR, and that many were out to get him,” according to her testimony.

But what primarily comes through in the testimony of the five women is Ballard’s outward conviction of his own special mission. Another woman, a hairdresser, recalled that Ballard was “shocked” and “disappointed” when she told him she didn’t know anything about him. “I’m actually a big deal,” he told her.

He went on to tell her, as he told others, that he had been praying on the issue of intel-gathering and that God answered by giving him the idea for something he called “the couples ruse.”

On OUR missions, men posed as sex tourists or those supplying customers with underage victims to entrap the traffickers. But the men were not supposed to actually touch the victims themselves. (This was the principle, at least: The criminal investigation into OUR found that one operative, who was also an executive producer of Sound of Freedom, touched the naked breasts of an apparently underage trafficking victim during a 2016 undercover operation.) The “couples ruse” was OUR’s tactic of having a “jealous girlfriend” present with the man posing as a sex tourist to object to his inquiries in order to deflect suspicion from the undercover men.

But, according to the lawsuit, Ballard demanded that his female partners in this ruse show full commitment. He seemed to believe—or at least said he believed—that to be convincing, the two would have to act as a very “kinky” and highly sexual couple, unable to keep their hands off one another. And so to prove they would be right for the roles, the women would have to convince him that they would have “chemistry.”

To do so, they would “act out” that chemistry, privately. Ballard had two rules for the ruse: no kissing on the lips, and no touching or exposing genitals. But everything else was fair game. Ballard would grope the women. He would order them to strip and give him lap dances and prove they could “turn him on.” One woman recalled that in his first test of whether she would be a fit for the ruse, he pushed her up against the office door, grinding on her. The incident ended as someone walked in while he was trying to undo her jeans.

Worse, to many of these women, were the “practices.” At least a couple of the women were actresses who assured Ballard they could play a role when needed. But Ballard would insist on practicing the ruse anyway, often in strip clubs, where he would make the women act out their sexual personas. And separately, to really prepare for their “sexual chemistry,” he would arrange for the two of them to have tantric yoga sessions and couple’s massages with escorts.

And to get in the right mindset, he would discuss their sexual interests and histories. These women were almost all members of the Church of Latter-day Saints, and one of the women recalled that she had never before uttered the word that Ballard once demanded she say to him. (One of the oddest details of the lawsuit relates to the Latter-day Saints’ prohibition on alcohol. Per the filing, he told the women that if they were offered a drink, they should take it, “open-mouth kiss him and spit the alcohol into his mouth, and then he would spit it out when the traffickers were not looking.” In reality, Ballard, the lawsuit reported, drank tequila to excess.)

But at times, Ballard seemed to slip and forget that OUR’s missions were the professed reason for all of it. He consumed alcohol and drugs at the “practices.” He told the women he found them attractive and demanded that the women tell him the same. He would acknowledge his own arousal. He expressed frustration and rejection when the women did not respond to his touch. He told the women that the role would improve their marriages, that it “helped keep your relationships more exciting,” as one recalled. “Tim spent very little time explaining the missions and the targets and the victims and an excess amount of time discussing sexual things,” one woman recalled.

One woman testified that she was told, in a text message, that in order to be prepared for a mission, she would have to accept certain possibilities: That he would have to touch her, under a swimsuit, in a hot tub, or that they would have to shower together. After one practice in which he admitted to his own arousal, she left, realizing that he was not actually planning on taking her on a mission. “I had been used and played,” she said in her testimony.

During the actual missions, Ballard insisted that they stay completely in character. Some of these women recalled Ballard groping them even when they were alone or in a car with tinted windows; Ballard would assure them that the traffickers could still be watching them. He would have the women share beds with him. He would insist on nudity. And he acted out sex acts with them, often over the women’s protests. (“Ballard developed a sexual position where it appeared he was having full-on sexual intercourse with his couples ruse victims, while not actually penetrating,” the lawsuit said.)

Ballard would sometimes offer the women a “safe word” to use to get out of a situation; two women recalled using that safe word as a female escort groped them, only to have Ballard ignore them. One woman said she had a panic attack after one of these incidents.

Another woman said that Ballard once came over to her home for a haircut. He started to have what appeared to be a panic attack, and when she went to comfort him, he forcefully removed her shirt and bra, pinned her to the ground, pulled down her pants, and grinded on her until she was able to convince him to stop.

It may seem obvious to outsiders reading the lawsuit that Ballard had no legitimate need to take the sexual behavior to such extremes, but the women targeted by his plan had real reason to feel confused. Ballard, as depicted in the lawsuit, hit these women with a number of manipulation tactics.

First, he leveraged his “expertise” and fame, causing almost all of these untrained women to dismiss their doubts as stemming from ignorance. Some of these women encountered Ballard after he had served on a White House advisory council and developed relationships with powerful Latter-day Saints apostles. At least one met Ballard after Sound of Freedom had been filmed. He had credentials. And he knew the women wanted to help. Often, he would ask: “Is there anything you wouldn’t do to save a child?”

He also relied on fear, telling the women that if they failed to convincingly play their parts, people could die. They could die. And even if they got away safely, if they failed, they would have “wasted hard-earned money that honest donors had entrusted” them with. He made the women sign NDAs, claiming it was for the sake of their missions. He told them he was tracking their phones and that if they told anyone about their sexual encounters with Ballard, it would endanger lives. “He … made it seem like it could be a life-or-death situation if I was not willing or able to act out certain sex acts well enough,” one woman recalled.

He also derided other women he’d “worked” with, claiming that they had either gone “crazy” and fallen in love with him or failed the mission by not being committed enough. This caused some of the women to feel they had to prove themselves. Sometimes, the women felt that Ballard’s advances were a test of loyalty, or a challenge to see what they could handle under pressure.

And when the women brought their doubts to Ballard, he turned spiritual. He told them that the third-most senior apostle in the Church of Latter-day Saints had given him a special priesthood blessing for the couples ruse. He cited a Book of Mormon passage to defend “unconventional” tactics for doing good. He told them that Russon, the psychic, had chosen them for the role. And he told at least one woman that Russon had said he and the woman had been married in a previous life, making their conduct morally acceptable. Sometimes, he leaned more heavily on the romantic elements, telling them that if his wife died, he would marry them. He told one of the women that if she left him, he would “put a bullet in his brain.”

But the lawsuit wasn’t just about the abusive behavior of one powerful man. Though he wasn’t a defendant in the suit, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes was mentioned as a friend and supporter of Ballard who was quietly campaigning to have Ballard run for U.S. Senate. It had been previously reported that Reyes had supported OUR and attended one of its missions in Colombia. “Reyes has repeatedly vouched for OUR and Tim Ballard,” the lawsuit noted, “giving Ballard the cover of the top law enforcement officer in the state of Utah to carry out his purposes, including the couples ruse, even while consumer complaints and criminal investigations were pouring into his office regarding the improprieties of OUR and Ballard.”

And the women claimed that a number of OUR employees and board members clearly saw signs of Ballard’s abusive behavior and did nothing. They did not help set the boundaries of the “couples ruse”; instead, they also warned the women that if they did not listen to Ballard, they would risk the mission and lives.

Eventually, when the full details of the abuse emerged, OUR fired Ballard. But OUR’s board, which was composed of Ballard’s friends and family, fought back. The two parties met and developed a plan in which Ballard resigned but was able to blame it on the appearance of a conflict of interest with the Sound of Freedom release, and not because of any shameful behavior. He was allowed to remain the face of OUR. And he was able to launch new anti-trafficking initiatives, including the nonprofit SPEAR Fund, that relied on his reputation.

So now, the question remains if supporters will stick by Ballard. When previous allegations emerged, Ballard acted enraged, telling his supporters to “expect more lies” about him and blaming the “godless leftist media” for attacking him on behalf of traffickers. Through the SPEAR Fund he made similar claims on Wednesday, suggesting that the cartels were behind the accusations. “It’s evident that those who are behind these cartels have clearly woken up to the light that is being shed on their dark activities,” the statement read. “We had no idea how much influence they had with so many powerful people and organizations in the United States.”

Given the power and reach of conspiracy theories related to child sex trafficking, it wouldn’t be surprising if Ballard managed to maintain a position of martyrdom, allowing his supporters to do the same. Ballard spent the summer a major star on the conservative political stage. It remains to be seen if that star will fall, or if his proximity to conspiracies will allow him to push through.