Weeks after the blockbuster release of Sound of Freedom, a controversial film about the anti-child-trafficking activist Tim Ballard (played onscreen by Jim Caviezel), director Alejandro Monteverde told Vanity Fair’s Eve Batey that he was taken aback by the discord the film provoked. “I never intended to make a movie to glorify Tim Ballard. It was a movie to call attention to the problem, the subject matter, the darkness,” Monteverde said. “I always thought this was a movie that was going to bring people together.”
Months later, the film—which has grossed more than $210 million worldwide, partially due to a pay-it-forward model that asks audience members to help combat child trafficking by purchasing additional movie tickets for people who wouldn’t otherwise see the film—has been in the cross fires of two separate sexual misconduct scandals, along with a charge involving one of its backers.
Ballard himself, who is mulling a Senate run for the seat Mitt Romney is vacating, has been accused of sexual misconduct. On Monday, a Vice News report unearthed allegations made against Ballard relating to his departure in late June from the anti-child-trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which he launched in 2013. Ballard, a former Department of Homeland Security official, was accused of misconduct by seven female OUR employees while on undercover overseas missions to expose child trafficking.
Ballard reportedly invited women to pose as his “wife” on these operations, and “would then allegedly coerce those women into sharing a bed or showering together, claiming that it was necessary to fool traffickers,” per Vice. He is also accused of sending at least one woman an explicit photo of himself and of asking another “how far she was willing to go” to save child victims of sex trafficking.
Ballard denied the allegations after the report’s publication. “As with all of the assaults on my character and integrity over many years, the latest tabloid-driven sexual allegations are false,” Ballard said in a statement released through The Spear Fund, an organization combating child sex trafficking for which he is a senior adviser. “They are baseless inventions designed to destroy me and the movement we have built to end the trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable children. During my time at O.U.R., I designed strict guidelines for myself and our operators in the field. Sexual contact was prohibited, and I led by example. Given our meticulous attention to this issue, any suggestion of inappropriate sexual contact is categorically false.”
More reporting by Vice journalists Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman dropped on Tuesday. According to their reporting, one of the film’s executive producers, Paul Hutchinson, touched the naked breasts of a presumably underage trafficking victim during a 2016 undercover operation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Their piece cites footage of the incident captured by those working with OUR on a 2016 documentary and a 2019 TV series featuring Hutchinson and later obtained by the Davis County Attorney’s Office.
The Vice piece quotes from descriptions the Attorney’s Office provided as part of a federal criminal probe into Ballard and OUR. The FBI’s investigation was closed this year without any charges being brought. Documents related to the incidents, which can be found here, show Hutchinson voicing concern over whether he’d be prosecuted by Mexican authorities for touching the apparently underage woman’s breasts.
In another video, Hutchinson can be seen asking a trafficker, who was displaying pictures of sex workers, for younger girls. “There is no suggestion in the files that Hutchinson’s behavior was aimed at anything but identifying and exposing traffickers, but federal agents with extensive experience working undercover overseas told Vice News that Hutchinson’s methods ran contrary to best practice,” the piece states. The article also raised experts’ concerns that Hutchinson could have helped create demand for victims rather than exposing their perpetrators.
“There is a lot to the story, a very dangerous situation and I am happy to let the world know the details when the time is right,” Hutchinson wrote in an email to Vice. “Every operator who was present stands behind me in how I reacted to the situation. I have zero reservations as to how I handled myself undercover. You don’t find trafficked children in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton. We had to go to the most dangerous places on the planet to find the children. All my undercover work was done with integrity and honor.” Hutchinson also said that he had a sworn affidavit from Mexican federal police to prove that the female whose breasts he touched was over 18. Vice noted that, despite multiple requests, Hutchinson never provided a copy of this document.