Tim Ballard, the anti-trafficking activist whose wildly exaggerated missions abroad were the basis of the hit 2023 film Sound of Freedom, is facing a new legal action from six women who last year sued him for sexual exploitation — leading Ballard to sue them for defamation earlier this month.
The latest complaint is the first federal suit targeting Ballard; it comes from accusers Celeste Borys, Mary Hall, Sasha Hightower, Krista Kacey, Kira Lynch, and Bree Righter. The filing names Ballard associates Matthew Cooper and Michael Porenta, as well as Ballard’s former organization, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), as defendants. OUR forced out the founder and CEO shortly before Sound of Freedom amplified his celebrity, due to internal complaints of sexual misconduct. A lawyer for Ballard denies the allegations. An OUR spokesperson tells Rolling Stone the suit contains “recycled claims” and that the organization is “confident” they will be dismissed. Porenta did not immediately respond to a request for comment, while Cooper could not be reached for comment.
This time, the plaintiffs have taken the fight to the U.S. District of Utah in order to seek relief under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2003, a federal statute that allows victims of trafficking offenses to bring civil litigation seeking “actual damages, punitive damages, reasonable attorneys’ fees, and other litigation costs reasonably incurred.” While at least one of the women, Borys, has described Ballard as a “trafficker” in public statements, the new suit marks an escalation of that allegation. “THE ANTI-TRAFFICKERS ARE THE TRAFFICKERS,” reads the heading on the document‘s “cause of action” section.
The women once again lay out a narrative of being recruited by Ballard and OUR to take part in rescue missions of trafficked individuals, only to then be “groomed” to become physically intimate with the married Ballard as part of what he called a “couples ruse,” intended to fool traffickers into believing they were romantically involved. They claim they were coerced into “performing sex, labor, and services for [Ballard’s] personal benefit and the benefit of OUR,” and sometimes endured violent sexual assault, or had sex with Ballard while Cooper was present, always with the assurance that it was “necessary to rescue children.” The plaintiffs further claim that Ballard and his associates laundered money in order to hire sex workers while on missions abroad, and that “OUR actively participated in the solicitation, recruitment, and exploitation” of female operatives.
Ballard also justified extramarital sex, the suit alleges, by saying that a psychic medium he regularly consulted told him he was a “prophet” and did not have to follow rules. (Though he was once a prominent member, the Church of Latter-Day Saints formally denounced Ballard last year, and his accusers believe he has been excommunicated in part due to sexual messages to female OUR operatives that became public. Ballard’s lawyer, Mark Eisenhut, recently declined to clarify his status within the church.)
Ballard has continued to deny allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment, and other inappropriate behavior in the decade he spent leading OUR. Two suits against him have been dismissed this year, including one from Righter, who had alleged that she suffered a serious injury during a training exercise due to the negligence of Ballard and OUR.
Reached for comment on the federal suit, Eisenhut tells Rolling Stone that Ballard’s accusers “are engaging in desperate forum-shopping with the same allegations — which one judge after another has called inconsistent and unsupported by facts. Two suits against Tim Ballard have already been dismissed and a third is headlined by a woman convicted of pimping minor children. This new suit is unlikely to be any more successful.” The third suit Eisenhut references is one brought by Kely Johana Suárez Moya, a Colombian woman who claims she was wrongly arrested and imprisoned for sex trafficking when Ballard ran a sting of operations in her country in 2014, then portrayed her as one of the villains in Sound of Freedom. Suárez maintains she had attended a fake sex party set up by Ballard with the expectation of earning money for sex work and brought no one else with her, but was arrested along with the 18-year-old male who had suggested she come.
The SPEAR Fund, an anti-trafficking organization Ballard worked with after leaving OUR, has in the past issued statements calling the allegations against him “false.” But they have since removed information on their website that described him as a senior adviser to the group. They did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the federal suit or whether Ballard remains part of the team.
Ballard himself does not list the SPEAR Fund on a social media page of links to his various projects but encourages followers to donate to an anti-trafficking initiative called Aerial Recovery. Supporters have also donated to his legal defense fund through a campaign on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. Despite his legal woes and somewhat diminished standing in the LDS community, he still makes public appearances with major ideologues — last month he posed at an event with Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, using the hashtag for the tagline from Sound of Freedom: #GodsChildrenAreNotForSale.
