Tim Ballard and the Story That Was Too Good to Be True (Allegedly)

I've had a few interesting brushes with fame and newsworthy items over the years. There was the LeBron thing, obviously. And I once told Katie Couric to stop asking questions of my high school classmates during a time one of my friends' fathers was held hostage and later murdered in Lebanon. There's a new entry to this category of my biography, and it's way weird.

Several years ago, i was a speaker at the Conference of Western Attorneys General (CWAG). The event itself seemed to be a bit of a boondoggle for the generals - held at the Biltmore in Scottsdale, which is a really nice resort, copious amounts of food and drink, and a handful of mildly interesting sessions. 

As a part of my company's sponsorship of the event and the organization, I got to interview a couple of attorneys general to get content for our marketing team to use in various communications. I met with Arizona AG Mark Brnovich, who I found very smart and dedicated, even though his politics are way different than mine. In that meeting I was accompanied by a colleague and several of General Brnovich's staff.

Tim Ballard

I also met with Utah AG Sean Reyes. The two of us were the only people in the room. It was a fascinating conversation that lasted more than two hours. That dude can tell stories, and he seems to like to do so. In particular, he told me a story of an operation he participated in where he posed as a customer interested in procuring underaged girls for sex as part of a sting organized by a former Department of Homeland Security agent. I remember telling him someone should make a movie of that sequence of events.

Seems I have an eye for that sort of thing, because they did. It's called Sound of Freedom, and it was released earlier this year to great fanfare from the political right. Reyes has a producer credit on the film, which purports to tell the true story of a guy named Tim Ballard, who founded an organization called Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) dedicated to freeing victims of sexual exploitation around the globe.

Ballard has been something of a darling of the right for quite a while. From its founding in 2013, OUR has been a useful tool for the QAnon crowd, with its ready-made mix of sex trafficking and border insecurity. And nearly from its founding, the organization and Ballard have been accused of overstating its impact and potentially traumatizing trafficked youth.

Now, Ballard faces multiple lawsuits from women alleging that he sexually abused them under the auspices of training them to participate in OUR operations. Here's an excerpt from a Slate article about the allegations:

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.

Ballard denies the allegations against him, but it's worth noting that The Church of Latter Day Saints (of which Ballard is a member) denounced his behavior as "morally unacceptable", and that he left OUR in July of this year under a cloud of suspicion related to the sexual improprieties as well as financial misdealings.

Tim Ballard is certainly innocent until proven guilty. It is undeniable, though, that multiple accusers have independently come forward with very similar stories. Ballard's alleged behavior and public persona are of a piece with the kind of macho MAGA preening all too common in modern America. If he's proven to be guilty, I hope he pays a stiff penalty. 

And Sean Reyes, well, better call your office.