Welcome and Episode Introduction

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am your host for today, John Dehlin. It is July 13, 2023, and we are here to discuss a really, really important story. I believe one that in some sense is literally sweeping the nation and kind of the political landscape and discourse and certainly the socio political landscape. And at its core, it's a truly Mormon story. We, we are here today to talk about the new film that has been released called Sound of Freedom featuring or at least loosely based on the life of allegedly on the life of Tim Ballard, founder of the nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad. It's a super important story and right off the bat, I want to just mention breaking news that Anna is it Merlin, is how you pronounce it? Anna.

Anna Merlan [00:00:53] Yeah. Tim and I broke this together this morning, though.

John Dehlin [00:00:56] Yeah. And I'll just go ahead and share the actual article. They broke the story today that Tim Ballard has stepped away from Operation Underground Railroad, which is really, really important news. And that follows a really important story that they shared earlier in the week, which is called Anti Trafficking Group with Long History of False Claims gets its Hollywood moment. And if I had to give just a really brief intro, Tim Ballard in Operation Underground Railroad. He is Mormon and he has been claiming for many, many years that he and his organization are on the front lines rescuing children and young women primarily from being sex trafficked, both foreign and domestic. And he's raised tens of millions of dollars in the process. And he's also been under federal investigation. There have been many board members and employees that have come out to me and to others saying that there are problems with the organization. But at the same time, there are others who say there's no one in the world who's done more to promote sex trafficking or at least concern around sex trafficking. And then this movie, apparently Sound of Freedom did better than the Indiana Jones movie in the box office this week, which was independently, I guess, distributed by is it Angel Angel Studios. So that's just kind of an introduction to what we're going to be talking about today. We're very honored to have Anna and Tim on, both of them from Vice News. Later, we're going to have reporter Lynn Packer on. We've had him on Mormon stories in the past. Lynn has done really important investigative work into Tim Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad. And then we're going to have finally a former employee of our join us to talk about her experiences with the organization and with Tim Ballard. So without any further ado, let me welcome Anna and Tim on and ask Each of them, if they wouldn't mind just giving us a brief introduction of their background.

Introducing Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman of Vice News

Anna Merlan [00:03:02] Yeah. Hi, I'm Anna Merlin. I'm a senior reporter at Vice News. Tim and I specifically both work at Motherboard, which is Vice's tech desk, and we have been writing stories together about Ou are since 2020. The first story came out in December of 2020 and are continuing right up until the present day, a couple hours ago.

John Dehlin [00:03:24] Yeah. And I think I've been able to find at least six or seven articles, plus at least one podcast episode. So you've been doing really. Anna, you and Tim have been doing really important reporting, and as someone who comes from a Mormon background, we're really grateful for that.

Anna Merlan [00:03:40] Yeah. Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:03:41] Tim, do you want to introduce yourself?

Tim Marchman [00:03:45] I think Anna covered the bases. I'm an investigative reporter and editor at Motherboard Advice, and I've been a journalist for about 20 years, about half of that doing the kind of work I'm doing now.

John Dehlin [00:03:59] Okay.

Anna Merlan [00:04:00] Tim is my boss. He hates when I mention that.

John Dehlin [00:04:04] Well. Well, it's an honor to have you both on. Really quickly, I'm just gonna state that Gerardo and I put together a short summary of the. Of the video that we did with Tim with Lynn Packer a few years ago. And immediately I found comments saying that anyone who speaks in any way critically of Tim Ballard or Operation Underground Railroad clearly, by definition, are pedophiles and. And are protecting abusers at the expense of victims. And I was surprised to see that type of reaction. So we all agreed that at the beginning of this episode, the first thing we wanted to do was to make a very important public statement as to where we stand. We are squarely against trafficking, sexual trafficking, human trafficking of any kind. We're against abuse. We're against pedophilia. And I believe it's safe to say that we are reporting on this episode because we care so much about things like trafficking and pedophilia. And if it were to be true that someone were to be fraudulently fundraising tens of millions of dollars telling false stories, using human trafficking as a way to emotionally appeal for those donations, but telling false stories, we believe that would be a very significant disservice to those who are being trafficked and to those who operate on the front lines as NGOs and as nonprofits actually trying to help the victims of human trafficking. And so we're doing this episode not because we support human trafficking, but be. But because we are vehemently against human trafficking and against anyone who would profit from deceiving people. Anna, let me give you a chance to also give your disclaimer.

Anna Merlan [00:06:07] Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't feel the need. Tim and I have written for years and years and years about sexual violence. This is one of the main things that I have covered in my career. Besides conspiracy theories. Those are the two things I work on. And so for me, this hits home. And the people that we've interviewed for these stories are former operators with oui, people who work in the anti trafficking space, people who work in government, people who are concerned about the representations that our has made about their work and what it could do to the issue of human trafficking and the ways that it could potentially siphon support from organizations doing important work. The idea here that we keep hearing over and over from experts is that misrepresenting what human trafficking looks like and misrepresenting what organizations are doing to fight it can only do harm to victims. And so that's something that concerns us and something that we've kept front of mind when we report on these stories.

John Dehlin [00:07:12] Thank you. And Tim, anything else you want to add?

Tim Marchman [00:07:16] I think the pro trafficking, pro pedophilia constituency is pretty much zero. That's, you know, it's not what's on the table here is anybody being in favor of these horrible things. It's a discussion about what the most effective way to, you know, to prevent them and to address them is. And that's, you know, a conversation we've had with a lot of people who work in the this area. And that's what they're concerned about is what's effective, what's true, what's the best use of time, what's the best use of resources. I think everybody is, is pretty much in agreement on that. And you know, the differences are in the details, some of, some of which are really important to talk about and some of which people have legitimate disagreements about. But the tactics you're talking about just are, you know, there's nothing really to say about anybody who would throw around those kind of accusations.

John Dehlin [00:08:13] Okay, thank you. Yeah. The example I had is if somebody were to criticize Bernie Madoff for engaging in financial fraud, that wouldn't mean that they also hate capitalism and hate the free market and hate the stock market. It could be they're just against fraud and they actually love the free market and capitalism in the stock market. And so they want to make sure fraud things are on the up and up. That's the best analogy that that came to my mind. So before we jump in, I think I wanted to read an excerpt from your amazing article again entitled Anti Trafficking Group with Long History of False Claims gets its Hollywood Moment. Although I believe this may be from your article today entitled Tim Ballard has Stepped Away from Operation Underground Railroad. And let me just go ahead and read says a variety of lurid stories he's told about his and ours. And this is Tim Ballard. Improbably cinematic exploits have turned on closer inspection to not be accurate. And the organization was the subject of a protracted criminal investigation examining among other things whether our our whether our operators engaged in sexual acts with human trafficking victims, whether our operations had created demand for trafficking victims and whether our has committed human trafficking itself by enticing people who were not previously traffickers with large sums of money. Those seem to be the main, some of the main accusations. In summary. And then it goes on to say that investigation ultimately closed without charges being brought, but did real damage to the organization's image with donors. According to multiple sources, our nonetheless raised tens of millions of dollars each year based largely on Ballard's image and reputation and that of the supposed jump team which our claimed went abroad to enact daring raids and rescues of trafficked women and children. So why don't we just begin Anna and Tim with just a brief history of Tim Ballard and our for those who just are totally unaware of their background.

Tim Ballard's Background and Operation Underground Railroad

Anna Merlan [00:10:36] Right. So Mr. Ballard has claimed to have been a CIA agent and then spent the majority of his career in government working for HSI which is a division of ice. He claims to have worked on anti trafficking cases while he worked at HSI and has said that he quit because he was frustrated that he couldn't do more to help trafficking victims directly when there was not a connection to the US or the US government. So from there, beginning in I want to say about 2013 and Tim can correct me on that. Supposed o ur operators who the organization claimed were, you know, ex Military, ex Seal Team 6, things of that nature were enacting what they said were these very daring raids and rescues overseas to rescue trafficked women and children. And you know, we began looking into the organization in 2020, sort of in light of the investigation that at that time was taking place and sort of due to a number of other factors. Tim, what am I missing in the sort of takeaway bio?

Tim Marchman [00:11:49] I think that's, that's the broad parameters of it. So Ballard left government. In some tellings, he says he was called by God to find the children and established our in 2013. Throughout its, throughout its run, it's been backed by celebrities like Glenn Beck, Tony Robbins, very, you know, very popular in Utah, very popular with Mormons. They've partnered with MLMs like the do or DoTERRA foundation that sell essential oils. They're not partnered anymore. And the kind of core appeal over that time has been this very media friendly approach to anti trafficking involving not only getting involved with these paramilitary raids in foreign countries, but filming them, putting them on YouTube, making everything look like an action movie, which is pretty much the opposite of what effective anti trafficking work is generally held by experts to look like.

John Dehlin [00:13:01] So I think if we want to have best faith interpretations of people, what can we understand about Tim Ballard's origins in terms of their authenticity? Can we assume that he at one point did encounter legitimate human trafficking and that he did care about it and that he did do some things to help fight it? Like, you know, there's, you know, several people have said, you know, what good has Tim Ballard? And oh, you are done. Are you just going to attack and tear down the good? Or are you going to spend any time, you know, even if you saved one child or 10 children or 100 children, that's more than most of the people listening have ever done. And one children's life is worth, worth everything. So what can we say about potentially genuine motives and, or potential good that Tim Ballard and our have done?

Tim Marchman [00:14:03] The answer I'd put to that is it's not our job as journalists to argue that someone is bad or good or their actions are bad or good. It's to present facts and put those in context and give people the information they need to draw their own conclusions. One challenge we've had in our reporting is that in trying to verify a lot of details about Ballard's career, we don't have access to relevant information. So for instance, when we say that he claims to have done things in government, it's not because we doubt them as much as because we don't have the records that we would need to verify his claims. He said he worked for the CIA. The only way for an outside party to get knowledge of what someone did at the CIA, even in a general sense, like what their job titles were or things like that is for that person to give the CIA permission to release that. Same at hsi and in our attempts to get Ballard to do that, he hasn't done so. So we know he did work at CIA for a year. It was probably in something akin to an internship position with hsi. We do know he worked in, we do know he worked in anti trafficking. There's you know, there's, there's not any doubt about that. The kind of work he was doing, the extent of it, the duration, those are all more open to question because there's not a huge paper trail there. That's again, something he could clear up but hasn't. So, you know, while I kind of reject the framing there, even to come up with a lot of details would be necessary for a full accounting of all the good and the bad of Ballard's career is something that's very difficult to do because he doesn't, you know, he doesn't answer questions, he doesn't use his own ability to get materials released. And so to the extent that you're left in the incomplete picture, that's through his own choices. We, whenever we're working on a story or a line of inquiry, you know, we always make sure we're reaching out to Ballard through representatives and in addition to asking specific questions, making clear that we'd love, you know, a more open ended conversation on whatever terms are good to him. And if we, you know, if we learn relevant information that paints him in a great light, we're happy to publish that and we always welcome, you know, people who have good things to say about anyone recovering and of course, for the subjects themselves to participate in the reporting process so that we're reflecting every, you know, every fact and bit of perspective that they might have to offer.

Anna Merlan [00:16:49] Yeah, it might seem crazy that after all this time we are not sure if he actually worked at the CIA or not. But as Tim says, that's something that he could clear up if he wanted to by releasing those records and we would love to see them. We've reached out to Mr. Ballard and his representatives and Glenn Beck and everyone else involved in the organization many, many, many, many times. And, you know, we'll continue to do so. And we have had really productive conversations with some of their PR representatives who have tried really hard to be really helpful and get us the information that we're seeking that can only come from Mr. Ballard, you know, to the best of their abilities. So there are a lot of people who really want to help clarify the record and are trying to do so.

John Dehlin [00:17:35] Okay, that makes sense. Thank you so much for sharing. Let me just. And maybe it's okay if your answer is just, this isn't your purview, but let me just read a couple comments. One person wrote, I have this is Summer. On the, on the Facebook page, she wrote, I have a hard time being super critical of an organization that is helping children short of Them being sexual predators themselves, I will forgive any monetary flaws they do. Another person wrote. His name's Brian Hutchings. He writes, our company has a direct partnership with our. They speak at our events, and we know multiple people that have done sting operations with them. Couldn't be more impressed with an organization. If you want to find fault in, you will find it. I guess the question might be you. Vice News could report on a gazillion different topics if there's a chance that they're doing 25% or 50% of the harm of the good that they claim. What would make you want to even take interest in a story like this, especially if it could potentially do damage to the good things that they do do and you don't have to answer it. I'm just curious.

Concerns About OUR's Fundraising and Operations

Anna Merlan [00:18:49] I actually think that a good way to answer that is to tell you about one specific story that we looked into that our has fundraised off of quite directly and made much of their involvement in that some folks might be familiar with, which is a little girl that ou are calls Liliana. Ou are and Mr. Ballard have repeatedly represented themselves as having helped to rescue Liliana when she was trafficked. Mr. Ballard has argued that Liliana's story is an argument for the need for, you know, a border wall between the US And Mexico. He's talked about it with former President Trump, with Ivanka Trump. They made the Liliana story as they represented it really central to oyor's public image. So when we started investigating some of your claims, we found the person that Liliana is based on immediately, because, of course, her traffickers were arrested and brought to trial. And, and what we found in the trial transcripts is very different than what OOR has represented. Liliana was 14 when she was trafficked by a man that she believed to be her romantic partner and brought to the United States. And when she was 17, after years of being sexually trafficked, after years of, you know, the worst abuse that anyone can think of, she rescued herself. She escaped herself, which is incredible. The strength that it takes to do that as a. As a teenager is unthinkable. Right? And what we discovered is that if our has ever worked with Ileana, it is not until years after she was rescued, rescued herself, not until years after she escaped. O ur misrepresented their involvement in her case. And they seem to have done so to fundraise and to make a case in Mr. Ballard's case for the existence of a border wall that is not. That is just simply not in line with the truth as we understand it from court records, from her own testimony. And you could argue that it does a disservice to people like Liliana to misrepresent them, to argue that someone else is responsible for their safety and their well being when in fact they rescued themselves. And that it helps contribute to a false understanding of how trafficking works and of how anti trafficking work is conducted. The other thing that's important to understand about Liliana is that her case was ultimately brought to trial through a partnership between, you know, many different branches of government, many, many, many people who work together to arrest her traffickers and bring them to justice. And so when our and Mr. Ballard represent themselves as being, you know, her sole saviors, you know, not only is that not honest, it also oversimplifies the important work that other people do. And it creates again, a false sort of binary understanding of how folks can work together to end human trafficking. It makes it sound like it's the work of one man or one organization. And when people think that, it does not empower them to take the action that they could take themselves to help end human trafficking.

John Dehlin [00:22:02] Thank you. Anything else you want to add to that, Tim?

Tim Marchman [00:22:07] I think those responses that you shared with us are perfectly fair. Our job isn't really to convince people of anything. It's to make sure that there's as much information as possible so they can make their own decisions. So one thing I can say on the basis of our reporting as fact, is that the consensus among people who work in the anti trafficking space, and I'm talking direct support providers who work with survivors of various forms of trafficking, law enforcement, prosecutors, social services people, just a wide range of people with very different opinions and very different approaches to problem, both domestically and internationally, including advocates for sex workers. Lots of people. Is that the type of anti trafficking work that our made its name on, Westerners going into foreign countries, raiding or, you know, raiding places, liberating, liberating women, is, is ineffective and doesn't, doesn't address the core reasons why people are trafficked, why people are sex workers or other elements of these related problems. It doesn't address labor trafficking, which is by far the most significant form of trafficking just in terms of how much it happens and how many people it affects. And at the same time, organizations like those direct resource providers who are providing job training, health care, help navigating the immigration system, which can be very challenging. Even if you, you know, even if you're here on one of the rare visas that are open to survivors of trafficking, those are really under resourced. Those are places that are working on a shoestring. So the kind of relevant information to me that it's necessary to provide is that truth. And then it's for every person to decide how important the efficiency of their giving is to them. I have my own criterion rubric when I'm looking at an organization I might be donating to. Everyone has to make their determinations for themselves. And if someone looks at our reporting and is aware of the full context of the situation and they decide that oh, you are is where they want to give to, that's, you know, that's fine. That's their choice. I just hope that they're making it in full awareness of everything involved there.

John Dehlin [00:24:37] Thanks, Tim. I just included a link in the comments to a podcast episode that you all released on Vice News Reports podcast, which I think may be paused for now. But the episode is inside a mysterious anti sex trafficking group. And you talk about the Liliana story there. And I just, I want to refer people to that because it was excellent. And you also interview people that, you know, someone that went on jumps and someone that was recruited for jumps. And it's just an amazing story and we won't be able to do justice to what we're trying to describe. Like, people will be able to benefit from actually listening to that episode. So listeners and viewers, if you really want to hear it from people involved directly, please check out that podcast episode. It was particularly good. Okay, so we've talked about it a little bit. I guess we won't know enough to say if, if Tim Ballard and our have saved some kids, have had some successful jumps, we certainly know that they have raised awareness about human trafficking because they've helped clearly bring that issue to the forefront. Maybe we should jump to some of the main concerns that have been raised with what they've done. We've already touched on some of them, but I guess one of the ones I want to talk about that's very prominent is faking or staging fake rescues or trumped up rescues. Anna, do you want to. Do you want to start talking about that one?

Allegations of Staged Rescues and Harmful Tactics

Anna Merlan [00:26:25] Actually, I think, Tim, maybe you should do that. But yeah, this is something that came up in the first story we did about them, I believe.

John Dehlin [00:26:35] Yeah. So I, I wouldn't.

Tim Marchman [00:26:37] We haven't reported on. We haven't reported on any faked or staged rescues. What I can say is that, trying to think how to put this.

Anna Merlan [00:26:49] Again, if we're hesitating here, it's because everything that we have put out has been vetted by our attorneys. We reported it very carefully, we worded it very carefully, and we have our lawyers read it. And we do all that because we don't want to make any misrepresentations at all. We do not want to accuse anybody of anything they haven't done or you know, vice versa. It's just really important to us. So, yeah, we want to be stumbling a little bit sometimes. It's because we're just making absolutely sure that we are phrasing things exactly right.

Tim Marchman [00:27:20] Yeah, we want to be scrupulously fair. What I would say is definitely fair to say is that the image that. The image that our has consciously projected of highly trained military operators going into foreign countries and doing with the US Government or local governments in those countries, cancer won't do is just not what has been described to us by people who have participated in these. There are basically two types of missions. One is the kind of just described. We've talked to people who have gone on those. People with, you know, people who were Special Forces operators, people who, you know, do have backgrounds in the intelligence community. And they have described them as very chaotic, slapdash, disorganized. No cultivation of assets, no preparation of escape routes, no intelligence on what the surrounding area is like how you would evacuate to a hospital if somebody were injured, for instance. Just, just very basic things like that. One of those missions was actually carried out based on information Ballard got from a psychic medium from Utah, for instance, which is not something that someone from Delta would do. The important thing there is to get your intelligence and your situational awareness and then create a battle plan. None of that's going on in these missions as described. But the more, the more common one is where these, these so called sting operations. A lot of groups do these. It's not just Operation Underground Railroad, it's not just groups that are in America, but basically what you'll have is a group of Westerners posing as tourists and they'll go to hot spots that are known as places you can, you can find sex workers. They'll flash money around. In cases we've heard of, when young girls have been brought to them, they've asked for younger and younger girls, which is a really serious problem. And that you're potentially creating demand for traffic girls where there hadn't been any. And then basically in many cases, the police and camera crews will swoop in, arrest some people, you know, at this bar they've been at, they all go on their way. That's a very different sort of thing than what Our has, has projected about tight paramilitary operations with discipline and intelligence and logistics and you know, highly trained spies going undercover. You know, that's just, it's, it's a, it's a very theatrical enterprise and it's a thing a lot of people do. And it's counterproductive in the opinions of many, many people who work in anti trafficking that we've spoken to. And it is, I think another point to raise here is that inherently in doing that kind of mission, by going to places that are known tourist hotspots for sex workers, you're going into a context where it's easy to misrepresent what you're seeing. A concern that's been brought up to us a lot of times by a lot of people is that it's very easy to go into a country where it's legal to be a 16 year old sex worker supporting her family and saying that this person is someone who's been trafficked against their will. A 16 year old sex worker may have a lot of issues that they need support with. They might need, you know, they might need something as simple as cash to start a business or job training or you know, medical care to help them take care of somebody that they're, they have to provide for. Going into a situation like that, creating something where that girl is, you know, getting arrested, depriving her family and herself of support, and then treating that as having saved someone who had been trafficked is probably fundamentally misleading. Whether or not it's staged in the way we would understand that. Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [00:31:43] It does. Can you just take us through a second allegation that I have here that you just referenced is creating demand for trafficking victims. Would you mind just taking us through how Tim Ballard and our efforts might step by step create the problem that they claim to be fighting just so that people really understand how that would work.

Anna Merlan [00:32:11] Right. And again, this is not a matter of our opinion. This is a concern raised to us primarily by former our operators who worked in, in the military and intelligence spaces. So people who really know what they're doing when it comes to this kind of investigation, the concern that they had was that when an organization like OU are other organizations that follow what's called the raid and rescue model go into situations without adequate intelligence and they are not breaking up existing trafficking rings. So for instance, if you go into a bar or a sex club and you say, you know, we're, you know, we're looking for young girls. No, we want them younger. No, we want them younger, you're not necessarily finding a trafficking ring that way. What you're doing is creating a perception that there is money to be made if someone brings you those children. Right. So the concern, again, from the, you know, former military and former intelligence people that we talked to who had been involved with our, was that they were not finding trafficking rings, that they were instead sort of creating potentially demand. That was, that was their concern. That was something that they brought up to us. Again, because when you're doing this kind of work, you want to make really sure that what you're doing is finding actual trafficking rings and bringing those to local authorities. Because again, even if our was able to find, you know, what they believed to be an actual trafficking ring, they have to involve local authorities. You know, these are countries that have their own rules and laws. This is not the wild West. Tim Ballard can't, you know, as depicted in the movie, kill a trafficker with his bare hands. Like that wouldn't. That wouldn't be okay. Right. So again, when we don't, when they don't follow, you know, allegedly like, patterns of careful sort of investigation, intelligence gathering, the concern is that they're not actually finding trafficking rings. So that's something that's been brought up to us again and again and again.

John Dehlin [00:34:16] Does that, does that imply that they're bringing money to pay people to come up with victims? Is that part of what's implied then, or alleged?

Tim Marchman [00:34:27] There's at least one account by somebody who went on one of these operations of paying a trafficker, negotiating with a trafficker, a price for a child. I think it ended up being $30,000. And it's even, it's even central to the plot of the movie, which for a variety of reasons, you know, you don't want to take too seriously. It's fictional. But the, the engine of the movie is, is the character Jim Caviezel is playing as Tim Ballard going to traffickers. And, and they say, I can't come up with that many children. And him saying, I want at least 50 children. I want as many children as you can get. So we know that, you know, there have been, there have been cases of them just paying for children. At least this, this one case that a real estate agent who had gone on one of the missions talked about himself. And we know that to the extent that Ballard and OU are at control over the representation of them in the movie, that sort of activity is something that they're comfortable portraying as part of their method. So, yeah, it's, you know, I think it's fair to Say.

John Dehlin [00:35:35] Okay. And just. Just because you mentioned it. So the movie is alleging that the Ballard killed a perpetrator with his own hands. Is that what you're saying?

Guest [00:35:45] Yeah.

Anna Merlan [00:35:46] Oh, you are. Has been very clear that that did not actually happen. But yes, the. The. I'm sorry for spoiling it for anybody who hasn't seen it yet, but the final scene in the film is the character playing Mr. Ballard killing a trafficker.

John Dehlin [00:36:01] But he didn't.

Anna Merlan [00:36:03] No, no.

John Dehlin [00:36:04] Okay.

Anna Merlan [00:36:04] No.

John Dehlin [00:36:05] Okay. That's important. Okay.

Anna Merlan [00:36:06] I think that's something that everyone agrees on our. All of our sources and us generally, everyone can agree that Mr. Ballard did not kill a trafficker with his bare hands.

John Dehlin [00:36:15] Well, we're going to be talking later with Limb Packer about differences between the truth and. And the movie, and I hope that comes out because that's. That's a pretty problematic. As I understand it, the filmmakers have gone around the world saying this is 80% a true story, which gives the impression that. That things like that really did happen.

Anna Merlan [00:36:34] So, yeah, I think our. In recent days has been communicating pretty fulsomely on social media that that specific incident did not happen. We've both seen the movie at this point point, and our perception is that it is based on sort of blending two different operations that o. Your claims happened, one in Colombia and one on the Haiti Dominican Republic border. So that's our understanding. Again, neither of those operations, as far as we know, really went how they were depicted in the film.

Tim Marchman [00:37:09] Yeah. And I think Lynne Packer is a great person to talk to about that. His work is really great and has been really crucial to our reporting and.

Anna Merlan [00:37:17] Absolutely.

Tim Marchman [00:37:18] He's the guy to go to on that one, I think.

John Dehlin [00:37:19] Yeah. Yeah. And we'll be talking to him in a bit. Okay. The next one of the next allegations is that I referenced earlier that our participants have allegedly potentially engaged in sexual acts with victims. What. What can you say about that? What we know about that?

Anna Merlan [00:37:40] So, again, I believe that that is an accusation that came from an anonymous letter from people who had previously worked at our Tim. Is that correct? That's my memory of where that would have come from. That's not something that we have directly substantiated ourselves. And so I would not want to make a representation that we believe that to be true. We simply don't know.

Tim Marchman [00:38:00] Yeah. What we can say is that there was a letter. There was a whistleblower letter that was circulating in investigative circles in Utah as well as donor circles that made a variety of allegations. That was one of them. And the Relevance to our reporting, since we haven't independently verified that, what we can say is that sources close to the criminal investigation of the group were aware of and interested in that allegation, which is itself, you know, pretty relevant.

John Dehlin [00:38:36] What, what to me lends a little bit of credence to that again, is the podcast episode called Inside a Mysterious Anti Sex Trafficking Group, where I believe you, y' all interview someone from Idaho who was recruited into one of these jump teams. And in his training, what shocked him. Do you want to. Do you want to tell that story, Anna?

Anna Merlan [00:38:59] Yeah. We spoke to a young man who was recruited by our and went through training. He didn't ultimately end up going on a mission with them because he simply did not feel prepared. But he talked about one of the things that was mentioned during training is frankly, what to do if you are an operator and you feel sexually tempted by a victim, which is a pretty shocking thing to have to discuss in a setting like that. But he was very surprised and concerned to hear that being brought up in

Tim Marchman [00:39:32] a context where it was presented as a very normal thing, something that everyone who goes on these missions experiences and that you shouldn't be embarrassed to bring up. He was deeply shocked by this.

John Dehlin [00:39:45] To be fair, I was thinking, well, I'm glad they're training for the possibility of inappropriate behavior in a way that sounds positive, to be proactively trying to prevent any sort of abuse. But the other part of my brain said, well, I wonder what had happened to make them incorporate that into the training. Right.

Anna Merlan [00:40:06] It's a good question.

John Dehlin [00:40:07] Yeah. Okay. The next allegation that I have listed was how, and I think for many, this is the most important question. It's the way that victims are cared for and. Or not cared for. And whether this is just these interventions amount to just either a revolving door at best and potentially actually doing harm to many victims, but certainly not doing the good that we would think that they would do to the victims. And if you're able, can you incorporate anything you understand about the Elizabeth Smart organization being potentially brought in to help care for victims and what we know about why they apparently withdrew from any involvement with Tim Ballard. And our. I know that's a mouthful.

How OUR Discusses Victims and Expert Criticism

Anna Merlan [00:41:02] So what we know, again from experts in the anti trafficking space, is that many of them have raised concerns about how OOR talks about victims. You would not say, for instance, that you are caring for a victim, that a victim is, you know, under your care because it deprives survivors of their agency. And one thing that people really care about in anti trafficking work and in, you know, the work of helping survivors to recover is giving them their agency back, making it clear that they are, that they are their own person, that they are responsible for their own self determination and that they are not being patronized or infantilized if they are, you know, adults who are sexually exploited. So sometimes the way that OOR speaks about victims and talks about caring for them is not in line with the sort of best standards and practices that anti trafficking organizations try to follow. Tim, what else?

Tim Marchman [00:41:56] I think there's a lot we know about how they, about what they do and don't do. So one thing that jumped out at us very early on in our reporting when we started looking at them was that they didn't have staff trained to train to handle aftercare and the numbers you would expect. And as we looked more into the organization we found that the established service providers for trafficking survivors had never worked with our and a lot of cases had never heard of our and this is not a large community of organizations. There are umbrella organizations like Freedom Network USA and when questions are put to the entire membership, everyone says we don't work with them. That's true in other countries where they operate. They in at least one country where no NGOs were allowed to work with them because they had been operating without a license. And so any registered organization was like legally barred from working with them. So we know that they're not working with the established groups in this area when it comes to stories they've told like that of about a dozen Venezuelan women who they claim to have obtained visas for and brought to the U.S. that was a whole long and complicated saga we can't really get into in this format. But the end result was that rather than getting them in on visas which would permit a defined period when you're allowed to stay in the US and allow you to access public services, they had them brought in on humanitarian parole, which meant that the women were here at the sufferings of the US government could be expelled from the country at any time and that they weren't legally allowed to do something like, you know, enroll in Medicaid, which made them very reliant on our and one organization that we know was working with these women was a small church that had started up basically a halfway house for rescued women between the ages of 18 and 34. It turned out that they themselves said they weren't qualified to provide aftercare. There's an audiologist running the operation. We don't really know what happened to them after that. So There's a lot you can infer from the absence of established contacts between our and the governmental and non governmental agencies that work in this area which are very familiar with groups that are providing aftercare. And there's a lot to infer from what we do know about this one case. And then there's a lot to infer from the fact that as I mentioned, our is not alone globally in doing this kind of work. And a repeated pattern that we've seen with western groups in other countries is that once women and children are quote unquote rescued or actually rescued there, there's a real drop off in the level of concern on the part of the western organizations. A lot of times there'll be a local kind of fixer who is given money to take care of people with very little oversight or accounting of what they're doing with that money, if they're doing anything at all. And those are the kind of situations where it's very hard to get concrete information because our won't give it. And there are very valid reasons not to give it. Not to identify locations where you've resettled trafficking survivors, but also makes it difficult because if you're talking about say Thailand or Haiti, there are a lot of tools that we have available as reporters in the US like freedom of information laws that allow us to suss out contacts between a group and the government that aren't available to us. So it's very opaque. It's just hard to say, you know, whether these survivors are being cared for. Hopefully, you know, hopefully they are there being well, you know, well treated and supported and their needs are being provided for. But there are a lot of reasons to question whether that that happens.

Anna Merlan [00:46:15] One of the most interesting interviews we've ever done in all of our reporting on this was with a self advocacy group in Thailand who are all sex workers and the sex workers that we spoke to who have, you know, been advocating for, you know, better working conditions and better safety in their industry in Thailand for many years were saying that they had never specifically heard of Oor, which again is a little bit striking because you are claims to have worked in Thailand for many years, but they said that there are many, many, many western groups from the us, from Australia and from England who all come to Thailand specifically because there's a large sex trade there, sort of on the same model which is claiming to rescue women and children from brothels often by conducting these armed raids and then in many cases, ironically, sort of, frankly, for lack of a better word, arresting these women and Taking them elsewhere and holding them against their will, which is, by no one's sort of estimation, an actual rescue. Right. So the women talked about this being like a very kind of persistent problem in Thailand. The other thing that they talked about a lot that they personally found offensive was the suggestion that anybody working in a brothel in Thailand as an adult would not notice or not be concerned about seeing a child in those spaces. You know, these women who we interviewed stressed to us that they are themselves mothers and would never sort of tolerate seeing a child being sexually exploited. Which, again, is sort of a detail that a lot of Western organizations tend to gloss over. They tend to imply that there are countries where everyone is okay with the child sex trade and are looking the other way, when in fact, pretty universally among most people on the planet. The idea of children being sexually exploited is disgusting, it is distressing, and it's something that we all want to fight against. So when someone suggests to you, for instance, that no one cares about child sex trafficking except for them and no one cares about the sexual safety of children, you know, just ask yourself if that has the ring of truth.

John Dehlin [00:48:27] That makes a lot of sense. Can either of you speak to. To what extent Elizabeth Smart and her foundation were in cooperation with Tim Ballard and our. And then what led to what appears to have been a falling out? Do either of you know anything about that?

Anna Merlan [00:48:44] We know that our at one point announced that they were going to kind of take over or incorporate the Elizabeth Smart charity, and that didn't happen. I think that Lynne Packer would be probably better situated to talk about why that didn't happen. But yes, we, we. We've heard things about that. But I would, I would be more comfortable letting him speak to that one because that's his home turf.

John Dehlin [00:49:05] Okay, I'm going to just share one quick comment from, from a viewer. Christina writes, omg, where's the proof, you guys? All these accusations are just opinions. I was hoping for more. And I, I think there's two sides to this. Because on the one hand, what I hear Anna, you and Tim saying is victims privacy needs to be protected. Our hasn't been super forthcoming, coming with

Lynn Packer [00:49:34] information,

John Dehlin [00:49:37] you know, and so we only have sources that we can speak to or that you can speak to that we could even talk about. But I would flip that around to Christina and say, look, if. If Tim Ballard and our are raising tens of millions of dollars claiming to support victims, I would throw that back on Christina and say, where's the proof that Tim, you are. Are actually helping victims, I think That's a fair thing to ask, especially attention and money from legitimate, potentially more legitimate sources.

Tim Marchman [00:50:14] I would love to answer that. So one way to answer that is to suggest that anybody who's skeptical or want to see more detail is. Is welcome to look up our stories. Just Google Vice and Operation Underground Railroad. We've written tens of thousands of words about this with very clear sourcing. And everybody is welcome to, you know, read, read all those stories in full detail and see what you make of it. But an even easier thing to do is to look up their financial records. Operation Underground railroad is a 501c3 nonprofit, and that means that they have to file disclosure forms on what they spend their money on every year with the irs. Those are publicly available. They're very easily Googled. It's called a Form 990. ProPublica.com has an excellent tool for navigating those for thousands and thousands and thousands of charities. And read those reports because they detail how much money our takes in and how much they spend. And that really speaks for itself. They don't get into the details of specific operations, but when you see a group making the claims they are spending a pretty small fraction of their budget on operations in Central America, say there's nothing really more to say about it than that the organization has raised a lot of money. It hasn't spent the majority of that money on the things it says it does, and it's done things instead, like buy expensive real estate in Salt Lake City. Whether that's a good use of their money or not, or what the reasons are for them doing that isn't really for me to say, but it is right there in the public record for anybody who wants to do their own research to take a look at.

OUR's Finances and Investigation Into the Organization

John Dehlin [00:52:15] Did you want to add anything to that, Anna?

Anna Merlan [00:52:19] There's just one other thing, which is that we focused a lot here on our international operations, which are, you know, super interesting and definitely something that we've spent a lot of time on. But the other kind of side of the our coin is what they claim to do domestically, which is that they claim to work with and in some cases, I think, train law enforcement agencies. And again, that's something where the documentation and the paper trail tell a different story. The story that we found was often that OOR would give sometimes very trivial, sometimes more substantial donations to a law enforcement agency and then claim credit for operations or undertakings that the law enforcement agency did with that money, rather than our being directly involved. For instance, you know, our has given money towards funding Things like specialized police dogs who are said to be able to sniff out SD cards when people are looking for child exploitation material, or funding. $20,000 towards a training, which is admirable work, but then to turn around and take credit for the work of an organization because you're giving them a small amount of funding. In several cases, law enforcement agencies told us that they had opted to stop accepting money from OER because the kinds of representations that the organization were making and the kind of sort of baggage that came with it was, you know, was not worth it, is what a couple people said to us, which was also really interesting. And we have some indication that that may be why the Davis County Attorney's office in Utah started investigating. Oh, you are, to begin with, is that they. The county attorney, Troy Rawlings, implied on Instagram and posts that he's since taken down that there was an organization that they were looking into that seemed to be taking credit for the work of law enforcement. So reading between the lines, that seemed to be what was going on. Again, though, that investigation was dropped. No charges have been filed. So we may never know exactly what was going on in that investigation.

John Dehlin [00:54:31] Really quickly, we shared in the links the 2021990 for Operation Underground Railroad. And it shows, you know, 45, almost $46 million in 2020, 40 million in 2021. And it shows for Tim Ballard, a salary of $335,000. And I'm not shaming. I believe that nonprofits who collect donations who do good with it, I think that's a good thing. And I think CEOs of nonprofits who do a good job as CEOs should be compensated well. I'm an executive director of a nonprofit, and I get paid. What I also know, though, is that our audience, when it comes to the Mormon Church, cares very much about financial transparency and informed consent. And, you know, at least with the Open Storage foundation, what I've tried to do is to give continual transparency reports to let my donors know what we've done with their money so that they can know that their money has been well spent and put to good use. And so I, you know, I think that's something that our viewers and listeners should care about really quickly. Talking about that Davis county investigation and then hearing that the FBI and the IRS got involved, is there anything more either of you can speak to regarding why it would become a federal investigation that included a grand jury, and then why in the world it was dismissed? And does its dismissal mean that they're on the up and up and that everything's okay.

Anna Merlan [00:56:20] I mean, we're never going to know why the investigation was dismissed. As often happens with law enforcement, when the investigation was ongoing, plenty of people were happy to talk to us in various formats. And as soon as the investigation was no longer ongoing and they didn't have a lot to show for it, we have had, you know, trouble getting in touch with our usual sources. So we are very much hoping to figure out what happened with the investigation. We would love to add to the body of reporting on that. The only thing we really know is the article from Deseret News that came out in May. Just talking about the wording was something like it wasn't decided, it wasn't prudent to continue the investigation or bring charges again. You'd have to check the Desert News article for that. So, yeah, we're certainly as curious as anyone else to know what happened there because obviously it went on for such a long time and from our reporting involved so many agencies.

John Dehlin [00:57:16] And do we know of any legitimate concerns about financial mismanagement? Tim getting paid too much?

Lynn Packer [00:57:23] His.

John Dehlin [00:57:23] His wife getting paid, him using the nonprofit to potentially promote and support his personal financial ventures or his books? What are the. What are even the suspicions or the allegations about financial impropriety or do we even know?

Tim Marchman [00:57:41] Yeah, so those go in a couple of different directions. And one thing I want to do here is make abundantly clear I'm not making any criminal accusations when I talk about any mis impropriety or potential misconduct. So one thing we know, just because O is transparent, you know, in accordance with. With federal law, is that he has staffed O from the beginning with quite a number of close associates and family members. His own, you know, the salaries he's paid himself. Those are. Those are matters of public record. Those are things where people can go check it out for themselves, make of it what they will. It is what it is. You know, whether they think that's good or bad, it is what it is. The more serious thing our reporting turned up was whiteboard said to be drawn by Tim Ballard, a meeting and I think think 2019. We basically outlined a web of different nonprofits and for profit ventures. We've published this multiple times. So anybody can go check out this image I'm talking about for themselves. But it essentially draws our. The Nazarene Fund, Mercury One Children Need Families, which is an adoption charity that I believe his wife is involved with. She founded it and other organizations into a row with all of them pointing@timballard.com and he has some things Written on there like there's a box with O and it says Sizzle under it and up on the top of the board it says sell the. Sell the sizzle, lead them to the covenant. Which I think with this audience you can grasp with the probable implications of that are the OOR declined to comment on it to us. So the allegation there I think would less be that there was shuffling of money out of a non profit into a for profit or anything like that. That, you know, that would properly be the purview of the irs. And I'm not going to draw any kind of conclusions there unless the IRS says something and even then innocent until proven guilty. Then in a bigger sense that this network of different organizations are ultimately meant to promote Ballard's entrepreneurial brand. In addition to our, he's written a number of books of pseudo history about how the founders were founding America on Christian ideals and how they were laying the ground for Mormonism. He has a company called Slave Stealers. He's put together a book called Slave Stealers that puts him in the tradition of American abolitionists, essentially morally equating himself with Harriet Tubman. You know, he's got a lot of things going on. And the biggest question about our in some ways might be because it was in a lot of ways started as sort of a reality TV production. How much is all of, how much are all of these mutually reinforcing enterprises ultimately meant to make him a power broker celebrity? We've heard lots of people who know what's going on in Utah for a while talking about him as a potential, potential candidate for higher office. He is someone who is very involved in Republican politics now and quite fringe right wing politics. You know, appearing at Medical Freedom Conference with Lynn Wood, Trump's lawyer, who's one of the main QAnon figures and that's here being advertised for another conference which Michael Flynn was going to appear. How much of all this is about promoting him as a celebrity and how much is about these organizations doing the things they're raising money to do, ostensibly that we really don't have a ton of insight into because that ultimately goes to motive, which is something that only Ballard could really authoritatively tell us. But the people we've talked to who have been in with his inner circle or you know, adjacent to it tend to say that that, that is, that whiteboard that he drew is a pretty accurate representation of what the, the whole of the empire is, is supposed to look like. And it's, it's not a super flattering picture I don't think.

John Dehlin [01:02:35] Got it, Got it. Well, I know you guys are short on time, so there's two really quick things I want to jump to. The first is the movie. Apparently it's approaching $50 million at the box office. It's called Sound of Freedom. It did better than the Indiana Jones movie released, I believe, by Disney. I know at least. Anna, you did a screening of it today. What do each of you want to say about the movie? Whether you liked it, whether you didn't, whether it's problematic or amazing. Anna, you go first.

Sound of Freedom Film and Its Release

Anna Merlan [01:03:07] So I don't think it was released by Disney. I think initially they wanted it to be released by Disney, but Angel Studios, who produced it, I thought it was the Indiana.

John Dehlin [01:03:16] I was trying to say I think the Indiana Jones.

Anna Merlan [01:03:18] Yeah, got it. Sorry. Yeah, that makes way more sense. Yeah, I came right to my office from watching it as a movie, I think it's really powerful. The production values are good, the acting is excellent. Completely understand why people leave the movie feeling emotional, feeling upset, wanting to get involved, you know, and if you sit through the whole movie, at the end of it, you know, Jim Caviezel, who plays Tim Ballard, comes on to give a direct address to the audience to say, I understand that you're feeling upset and here's what you can do to help. And what you can do to help is not represented as, you know, getting involved in your local anti trafficking organization or, you know, funding an organization, you know, that might help with survivor care. What you're encouraged to do is buy more movie tickets so that other people can see the film, which, you know, certainly might go towards raising awareness, but is not, is not exactly taking a next step. But yeah, I was struck by the film. I thought it was really interesting and, you know, I understand why I. Why people are going to see it.

John Dehlin [01:04:31] Anything you want to add, Tim?

Tim Marchman [01:04:35] I thought it was a pretty outlandish movie. It definitely doesn't represent Ballard's career accurately. There's a lot of a team style, daring do, but I kind of enjoyed that part of it. I totally understand why people are finding it really powerful. One thing I would like to add, for anybody who hasn't seen it and might be thinking about going to it, is that it's really, it's a really disturbing movie. There are scenes of abusive children that are, they're not, they're not graphic, but they're, they're very distressing. They feel exploitative. I, you know, they don't. It doesn't feel like they needed to be done in quite the way they were. I suppose the argument might be that you need to bring home the gravity of child abuse people, but I think everybody knows the child abuse is, is terrible. So that I was, I was just saying is almost a consumer warning kind of thing. There, there are definitely scenes that some people might find quite distressing.

Anna Merlan [01:05:40] Yeah.

Tim Marchman [01:05:41] To watch, especially if you're thinking about bringing a. Bringing the family.

Lynn Packer [01:05:47] I.

John Dehlin [01:05:48] What I think, what I think is particularly triggering to me, someone who is raised Mormon about the movie is the combination of the fact that Tim Ballard as a Mormon and the actor who plays Tim Ballard in the movie as a Catholic. Between those two individuals, they represent two of the churches in the United States with some of the most serious allegations of covering up of abuse and of protecting abusers at the expense of victims. Whether it's the Catholic Church and its spotlight sort of stories that have come out or you know, the Mormon Church's admittedly participation in cover ups of abuse of Boy Scouts and the Boy Scouts of America being willing to pay $750 million in a settlement to like the 80,000 plus victims of sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts of America. It's just so odd to have a Mormon and a Catholic talking about, you know, abuse or harm of children out there when the churches that they advocate for and represent are some of the worst offenders. Not just in the past, but today.

Tim Marchman [01:07:10] I'm Catholic and I had some very similar thoughts. And it goes to, I think a really important point about the movie, which is that it very much represents a perspective where, you know, child abuse and child exploitation or something that happens over there in other places and it's our role to go and stop them. And there are people, you know, there are Americans who are abroad doing really important work in this area and that's great, it really is. But I think all of us would do well to keep in mind that these things start at home and that it is far more common for children to be sexually exploited or abused by a family member, someone close to them, someone they trust, someone in a religious setting. And not to be paranoid about that, not to keep that, you know, allow that to keep you from letting your child participate in life. Being aware of that and being aware that, you know, the story of a child being snatched from a parking lot is thankfully very rare. But much less rare are stories of, you know, our elders, people in the institutions that are important to us being complicit in covering this sort of thing up when they're not participating in it themselves. Those are, you know, those are the Stories that are close to us, and they're also the ones that are easier for us to affect. You know, I think people feel very powerless in the face of really horrible things. But demanding accountability in your own community is something you can do the same way. There are real changes that people can make, whether it's. It's finding organizations that they feel really strongly are doing good work and support, supporting them with volunteer worker financial donations. It can be things as simple as getting informed about issues like visa issuance. I mentioned this earlier, but a huge problem is that the number of visas that are allocated annually for survivors of trafficking to come into the United States is terribly low. It's below 10,000. There are a few different types of visas, but it's very low. And, you know, the US for quite a while hasn't been even allowing in as many people as there are visas allocated. Right. So it sounds like a, it sounds like a small thing, but that's one thing you can do, right, is you can talk to your representatives, you can get involved in, in lobbying and saying, you know, I want your support for making it easier for survivors of trafficking to get into the US they can get the, you know, they can get the care that they can be provided here. Those are, you know, those are meaningful things people can do. And it's not a one or the other. It's not between, you know, looking at your own church or what's happening abroad, but just being, you know, keeping in mind, this is not something that happens over there. This is something that happens on, on our street. And just being mindful of that

Ballard Steps Away From OUR and Recommended Nonprofits

John Dehlin [01:10:20] really quickly, you all broke the news today. I believe that Tim Ballard stepped away, in the words of your article, stepped away from our. Prior to the release of this movie. Can you speak to what you know about that and if we have any information about why?

Anna Merlan [01:10:42] Yeah. So just to disappoint you, we don't know why, but we started hearing from sources last week that Mr. Ballard had left our. And we frankly just didn't believe it because, of course, this is the organization's kind of biggest moment, right. With the release of this film. They're getting tons of publicity and because Mr. Ballard hasn't mentioned it, you know, he's been on Fox News and talking to outlets like the New York Post about the film and hasn't mentioned leaving. Or you are, I think still hasn't as far as I know. So what we know from a statement from. Oh, you are. Is that he stepped away. Oh, you are stressed that they're, you know, continuing to do the work that they're doing under the leadership of Matt Osborne, who is listed as their president and CEO. He's a long time o you are employee who strangely actually also appears in Sound of Freedom and A Minor Role. And when we asked for more information about Mr. Ballard's sort of current endeavors, we were referred to a spokesperson for him who's also listed as a spokesperson for Angel Studios, the company that released Sound of Freedom. So that was interesting to us. The only other thing that we know right now is that when Mr. Ballard was interviewed on Fox News by Jesse Waters, he was introduced as being a co founder of an organization called the Spear Fund, which we had never heard of before. We looked it up. They have a pretty bare bones website right now. It's Mr. Ballard and a woman named Jessica Munoz, who I believe has been active in the anti trafficking movement and is like an emergency medicine nurse practitioner in Hawaii. So we're trying to learn more about the circumstances of Mr. Ballard's departure, what he's doing now, and if people know anything about that that they want to tell us about. We're both quite easy to find via email, Twitter, multiple other means. So please feel free to reach out.

John Dehlin [01:12:45] Beautiful. Anything you want to add to that Tim?

Tim Marchman [01:12:50] No, not at all. Just with the audience for this podcast, I'm sure there are a lot of people who would have interesting things to talk tell us whether or not about Operation Underground Railroad or anti trafficking at all. You know, we're always looking at all kinds of stories and you can reach us@anna.merlin vice.com or tim marchman.com on an email. And if you have something sensitive that you wouldn't want to share with us from a work device, the best thing to do would be to create a kind of a throwaway email account, maybe using ProtonMail or something like that, hopefully on a non work device. And then reach out to us at one of those email addresses and we can give you a number where we can communicate with you securely on Signal, which is just a encrypted text messaging app that you can easily download to your phone. And that's a very secure way to talk.

John Dehlin [01:13:48] Yeah. And so that's Tim Marchman M A R C h m a n advice.com anna a n n a.merlin m e r l a nice.com and then there's even a phone number 267-713-9832 through Signal, which is an app I use. It's a lot like WhatsApp. And really quickly, Anna Tim I know you gotta go.

Tim Marchman [01:14:13] Are there.

John Dehlin [01:14:13] I know you've already mentioned this, but are there any nonprofits or NGOs you want to give a shout out to that actually, in your experience, have a good reputation for actually helping victims of human trafficking?

Tim Marchman [01:14:29] Yeah. So honestly, that work is mainly done by the government. And that's one thing that I think isn't especially helpful about the, the movie that's come out is it very much portrays government as, you know, wasteful and inefficient, too prone to red tape. All of which are true. You know, I think whatever our partisan leanings, we've all been to the dmv. But that is mainly the work of governmental agencies, especially when you're dealing with people from, from abroad. That is not to slight any of the many amazing private organizations that do that work. I would go to the website of Freedom Network USA because that's an umbrella organization. The organizations that are listed there are doing mainly direct work with survivors. Some of them are going to be governmental, some of them are not. But that's a group of credible organizations. And I would encourage people who are looking for a place to get to start there and to literally do your own research into charities. Any good charity is going to have transparency documents of the kind you discussed before. And all the ones at Freedom Network USA are, you know, going to be organizations that are working directly on this problem.

Anna Merlan [01:15:52] The only other thing I would add to that is that when we talk to people who are experts in the anti trafficking space, they tell us that so often people believe that what they have to do to get involved in the problem of human trafficking is fund these raids and rescues. And that is not true. Labor trafficking is just as big of an issue as sex trafficking. And one thing that you can do directly is, you know, work with a local anti trafficking group to see if you can, for instance, provide apprenticeships. Apprenticeships. If you are a plumber and you want to teach a trafficking survivor, somebody who's been labor trafficked a new skill to, you know, teach them how to do something that can help them earn a living, that is great. If you want to donate hygiene products, if you want to donate clothes, you know, there are other things that folks can do besides funding raids. And organizations under the Freedom Network umbrella often talk about direct hands on things that folks can do. You know, one thing that we learned in doing this work is that the Mormon community specifically is incredibly hands on. There are people who believe very directly in seeking, seeking to make the world a better place in a direct way. You Know, I mean, maybe that comes from having to do missions. Maybe that just comes from, you know, sort of the culture of Mormonism. I'm not sure. But a lot of the people that we talked to who got involved in our did so because they were Mormon and they wanted to find a way to help themselves. They did not view this problem as someone else's problem. They viewed it as something that they needed to be personally involved in. In. And so I would say, you know, if that is you and you have this heart for doing something for people who have been victimized, people have survived abuse, you can do it. You absolutely can. You don't have to just give your money to someone else who makes claims that might be hard for you to verify. There are other things you can do.

John Dehlin [01:17:47] Beautiful. Well, Anna and Tim, I just want to thank you again for your important work for the country and for our community. I'm going to just share again the article, anti trafficking group with long history of false claims gets its Hollywood moment from Motherboard and Vice that was released on July 6. And then, of course, the follow up article, tim Ballard has stepped away from Operation Underground Railroad. Those are two of, you know, seven or eight really important articles you. You all have released along with that podcast episode. And Tim, thank you so much for your coverage. We hope that you'll please keep up the good work and that you'll come back on Mormon stories whenever you want and whenever there's a need.

Anna Merlan [01:18:35] Thank you so much for having us. Thank you for doing this work. And again, if people have questions, comments, if just something about this is bothering you, we are, we are easy to find via email and we do want to talk. So please, and especially if you have tips.

John Dehlin [01:18:49] All right, thanks, Anna.

Anna Merlan [01:18:51] Thanks.

Tim Marchman [01:18:52] Thank you very much for having us.

Anna Merlan [01:18:53] Bye.

John Dehlin [01:18:54] Bye, y' all take care.

Anna Merlan [01:18:55] You too.

Transition to Lynn Packer and Additional Context

John Dehlin [01:18:57] Okay, so don't go away. We have some other really important stuff to come. I'm just going to quickly share a couple more little visuals. I did pull up the little funnel that was referenced. I think everybody really should get a look at this. It comes from the article again from. From Anna and Vice. It says, anti trafficking group with long history of false claims gets his Hollywood moment. And if you scroll down, it shows the whiteboard and it literally shows our as one of the boxes along with several other boxes literally pointing into TimothyBallard.com with monetary amounts with speaker fees and other sorts of things. And that's something that people need to understand when they give to Operation Underground Railroad is that there was an entire strategy to have it funnel into Tim, Tim Ballard's brand. And I don't know whether it's his books or his political aspirations or what, you know, that's something needs to be looked at now in full disclosure. You know, I, I have a personal website and in the past years ago, I did some personal coaching. Margi has done work for the Open Stories foundation and she does coaching. I'm just going to transparently admit that. But I'm also happy we are happy to talk about that openly to We've had board members through an independent financial compensation committee set my compensation set Margi's. And we've been transparent about all of that. And I don't think we've done anything wrong and our board hasn't as well. But I'm also going to just say in the spirit of transparency, that every nonprofit needs to deal with issues of ethics, needs to deal with compensation appropriately. I believe that we have at the Open Stories foundation and we're happy to share that information publicly. But in the spirit of transparency, I'm going to be open and reflective about that. One other thing I'm just going to share is something that Maven shared with us is just this article about the Arizona Supreme Court upholds Latter Day Saint clergy privilege in child abuse case. And I think what's really important about that article to really stress is that if Tim Ballard, Some would argue that if Tim Ballard truly cared about protecting children from abuse from pedophilia, one real clear, direct, immediate opportunity would be for him to speak out against the Mormon Church fighting the Mormon Church fighting laws. That would force the Mormon Church and its clergy to report whenever they become aware of abuse victims. Up until today, it appears, and we've reported on this in the past, it appears as though the Mormon church, through Curtin McConkie, its law firm and through lobbying efforts, has done everything it could in places like Arizona and Utah to prevent its bishops, its stake presidents, its clergy from becoming mandatory reporters. When they become aware of abuse victims in their congregations, they fight mandatory reporting instead of fighting to become mandatory reporters of sexual abuse in their congregations. And if Tim Ballard really cared about children, teenagers, young women, abuse victims, many just argue that is the real opportunity that Tim Ballard where Tim Ballard could really, really make a difference. So just had to share that. Now, without any further ado, we would like to bring on to the program somebody who has done perhaps more than anyone to do local, detailed reporting on Tim Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad. He has his own YouTube channel, I believe, named Lynn Kenneth Packer. We've had him on Mormon stories in the past. And we welcome you on. Lynn Packer, thank you for patiently waiting for us to bring you on to this episode.

Lynn Packer [01:23:49] Hi John.

John Dehlin [01:23:52] Lynn, hopefully you were able to catch some or all of the past hour and 15 minutes, maybe hour and 20 minutes. Let's begin by giving you a chance to to provide any corrections or additions to some of the key elements that we discussed.

Lynn Packer [01:24:10] Well, Anna and Tim have done a great job reporting on the especially the Liliana situation. I hope that they do more reporting on that. The whiteboard, I've also reported about the whiteboard. Theirs is heavily redacted. Mine is not. You can see the whole thing. But they have to deal with attorneys who are cautious about things like that. And you didn't talk about it much or they did just a little about that one rescue where Oyor was trying to find Guardi Marty in the Haitian jungle. That now comes into play with the accuracy of the Sound of Freedom story. And I'm sure we'll talk about that. But they've done good reporting on that as well.

John Dehlin [01:25:05] Okay, great. All right. Well Lynn, you've done so much work on Tim Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad. For those who just want to hear the highlights and who don't have time right now to go back and watch the multi hour episode that we did, do you want to just briefly talk about how you got interested in this case and some of the important things you've covered before we jump to a discussion of the movie Sound of Freedom itself.

Lynn Packer's Years Investigating OUR and Ballard

Lynn Packer [01:25:39] I started reporting on Tim Ballard know you are in 2014 right as they were getting started. So I have followed it all along. The reason I began looking into yours because of Sean Reyes. He was Sean Reyes was appointed Attorney General the same month that our was founded. And he quickly had an alliance with Tim Ballard. He went on the rescue that is depicted in part in the Sound of Freedom. He's also an executive producer. The Attorney General of Utah is an executive producer of the Sound of Freedom. And he's already done a video yesterday saying Sound of Freedom 2 and Sound of Freedom 3 are coming and that he will have some involvement with that. And so between 2014 and 2017, I covered our and Sean Reyes extensively. I had my own website. This was all in print. And then at the end of 2017 I just quit reporting on it. And then when the criminal investigation began In August of 2020, I decided to start again. And this time I decided on a video format to publish to YouTube. And they're just all floating around out there and people have asked, well, how do we find your reports? I haven't really logged them all that well. But Damien Moore is a reporter in Las Vegas who is also covering our. He has a website and he's sort of like the Wikipedia on steroids with Operation Underground Railroad information. So if you went to his website, you can just Google American Crime Journal. You'll land there and you'll see all the links and everything that he's got to information about it. So the criminal investigation began in August of 2020 and then since then it continued up until earlier this year when Davis county terminated its investigation. The federal part had been terminated before. Now what no other medium news outlet has reported, and I have just recently, extensively, is that there was also a federal grand jury that had. That was investigation that was going on with the FBI doing the investigating in assistance to the Davis County Attorney's office. And my latest report goes into quite a bit of detail about that. Some hints as to why and how the plug was pulled on the Attorney General's investigation. So it was a year ago that I broke the story that the, that the plot, that the uh, main storyline, primary storyline and operation in Sound of Freedom was just, it's completely bogus and went into tremendous detail. I mean if a viewer says, well, where's the proof? Where are the facts? All they have to do is go a year ago to that particular episode and when you're finished watching it, there is absolutely no question that it is bogus. But interestingly, no local news outlet picked up on the story, no national news. Nobody picked up on it. I was the only one who reported and said, hey, this is, there's nothing there. But remember the movie, There was no distributor for the movie. In fact, I predicted nobody is going to distribute this movie, especially if they read my report, realize it's just all fake. It's just, it's just, it just has come out of Tim Ballard's imagination with help from Eduardo Verastege and his people who helped put the, the movie together. And, and so then all of a sudden Angel Studios picks it up. They're really good at crowdfunding, brought in a lot of money. They also did a fundraiser under a rule, a method with the sec securities and Exchange Commission. So they brought in a lot of money, they raised enough money, the five million dollar limit, that they could go ahead and distribute it and then did so very quickly, this all went very fast, so that the movie could premiere, as we know, on July 4th, actually a day sooner, but officially on July 4th. And so then you're more than aware of the flurry of reporting. Now, that's come because of the tremendous success, remarkable success that the film has had at the box office, the headlines it generated when it beat Indiana Jones one day on the 4th. And so now you have reporters beginning to engage. You've had a lot of critics. The problem with the reports so far is nobody has yet pointed out the that's a fictitious movie. The, the storyline, it's no more real than the movie taken with Liam Neeson. And so the various reports have used words like embellishment, exaggerate, excessive literary license. And then today, I'll just pull this up today. Slate magazine, which usually does good reporting, they did a story on it. And this is the line in Slate. It's a pretty compelling watch, made even more so by the knowledge that the story is rooted in reality, is not rooted in reality. It's rooted in fiction.

Guest [01:32:08] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:32:11] And I think we have a presentation that we've put together that Gerardo helped us put together, where we're going to kind of try and cover that. And I just want to maybe I'll just start with the criticism of what people are about to see. I was talking to a family member right before, and his point is it's probably in his view, sex trafficking and child sex trafficking is so horrific that if a movie is going to take dramatic the first of all, the movie admits, the creators admit, according to some, that the movie takes dramatic license, that it's normal.

Lynn Packer [01:32:47] Hold on a second. About that. I'm not, I'll get into that. But that is not exactly accurate. There's a story about how these sort of admissions or statements have come about and we could get into that as to how that happened. It's actually a long story, but I'm sure as we go along, it will, it will come out.

John Dehlin [01:33:11] Well, I think maybe all I was trying to say is the basic argument is any, any piece of media, even if it's, even if it exaggerates or dramatizes, if it helps protect a child or build awareness about trafficking, even if it saves one child, then it's worth it. And who cares if there's a little bit of fudging or merging of stories or dramatization or even outlight outright lies, who really cares? Now, I guess we're starting with the criticism before we've even laid out the problems. But do you have a quick reaction to that, Lynn?

Lynn Packer [01:33:51] Well, yes, I do, and I get those criticisms. I get several responses to my reports hourly. And the bottom line is, is awareness if it, if you make somebody aware of something that is largely misinformation, false information, that awareness and raising that awareness level is a bad thing, and it's not a good thing. And Tim and Anna already talked about this, is that kidnapping happens rarely when in fact the movie depicts a kidnapping. And then these two kids put into child sex trafficking. That's extraordinarily rare that that happens. And so if you raise awareness about what basically is a stranger danger message, that's a very bad thing. I mean, what the movie is doing, raising awareness, whether the story is true or whether you say, oh, okay, it's okay to fudge it because it's raising that. It's raising awareness. And the sound of freedom, the sound theatrical release is really the pinnacle of Tim Ballard's deceptive and often false, outright false statements about child sex trafficking. And what he's been doing is rehashing the stranger danger scare. The. The. The. That it keeps coming back. I mean, it was the FBI in the late 50s and 60s. I don't know if you remember, probably not old enough, where they sent out posters to almost every school, including grade schools, around the United States. Millions of posters. And it showed a little girl coming home from school and then a guy behind a tree who has a bag of candy or something who obviously is going to kidnapped the girl. And they had a coloring contest where kids would have contests in grade school to color it to make the kids aware. You're not to talk to strangers. You're not to take anything from strangers. And we now realize, or experts realize that was going absolutely the wrong direction and probably made things worse. And you can imagine with all the thousands, maybe even millions of kids that were working on this poster in grade school, coloring it because they're being warned about a danger. You can imagine how many of them, as they did this, were being sexually abused by a brother or a father or a neighbor or a pastor or a little league coach. Yeah, you've just pulled it up. That's what the. The poster looked like, really, in the. In the millions. And it was such a mistake. And. And then it died down. They started focusing then. Then the focus. And you know this better than I do because you're an expert in this area. Then the focus was on teaching kids what was proper and improper touching. That was going on most of the time when I was a news reporter at ksl. And so you're sort of arming the kids. You know, if your uncle touches you here, that's okay. If he touches you there, that's not okay. And so that they could sort of defend themselves in some way. Then that went away. And then you had groups like Operation Underground Railroad come back. And then we had a second wave of Stranger Danger. And now this is the third wave that I know about. And now with the. With this movie. Oh, my heck. This. This is going to make things far worse. This movie is going to put a lot of kids at a greater risk to be sexually molested by someone they know and their family knows when there's just very little risk of being abducted and whisked away and put in a brothel and being sold for sexual and one point I want to make before I forget it is I've asked, and everyone should ask Tim Ballard ou name one time, okay, they've rescued what? Thousands. They say they've rescued thousands of child they call sex slaves, working in brothels or coming to sex parties that they set up. Name one time that you've rescued one person that fits the mold in Sound of Freedom. One time. They're kidnapped. That's step one. And they're taken away and they're sold. Either sold to a madam or a pimp or the person who steals them, starts selling them for sex. And as Ballard has said so many times and raped 10, 20 times a night. And billions of dollars come in and look at the Elizabeth Smart situation, who for a while was with our. She fit the first requirement. She was kidnapped. She was gone. They did not know where she went. That's a pure kidnapping. But was it trafficking? No. The kidnapper sexually abused her himself and no money was exchanged. For. After being a reporter for years, I don't. I don't know of a single instance when somebody has been kidnapped and then pushed into sex slavery.

John Dehlin [01:40:01] I'll share a really quick comment by a friend, Jennifer Harker Lemones, who has been an advocate for victims. She writes the Stranger Danger hype from the 80s and 90s. She writes, I grew up believing that the stranger danger hype was the biggest threat, when in fact the biggest threat was attending church with me on Sundays. And that's the point. I think that's the response to people who say, stop attacking Tim Ballard. And our Any awareness is good. Any advocacy is good, and any good that anyone does needs to be promoted. And I would just say not if it takes our eye or our money or our time or attention away from the real abuse stories that are happening in our churches, in our Boy Scout troops, in our communities, in our families, right under our nose. We mentioned this earlier. If these our Tim Ballard movies get us to think that abuse is happening over there. And all we've got to do is give a bunch of money so that someone else can go take care of the problem that's happening over there in Honduras or Dominican Republic or Nicaragua or Haiti. And it makes us be less vigilant about asking the Catholic Church and the Mormon Church and the Boy Scouts of America to create systems to protect our children, our neighbors, our friends, our family. Then there actually is harm that's being done because our attention, our money, our resources are being redirected away from the real significant, imminent threats right in front of us.

Lynn Packer [01:41:44] Well, exactly. And I don't want to veer too far from talking about the Sound of Freedom, because there's so much to talk about, but.

John Dehlin [01:41:50] Okay, let's jump into it.

Lynn Packer [01:41:51] But I. I may have mentioned before when I was a reporter for ksl, I now live in Kaysville in Davis county. And I covered a trial in Davis county where a man was accused of molesting his neighbor's daughter. They were both in the same high priest quorum, and so they caught him. He went to trial. He was convicted of molesting his neighbor's daughter. Then he got out, just got a slap on the wrist. He said, I'm reformed. I've repented about this. And he went back to living in the same house next to the family whose daughter he had abused. And then it was not longer after that, he was arrested again for abusing the girl's sister. And then he went to trial again, and this time he was correctly punished. So that shows you the lack of awareness of the greater danger, as you point out, that exists.

Analyzing Misrepresentations in Sound of Freedom

John Dehlin [01:42:56] All right, well, we've prepared some slides. You prepared some slides and some video excerpts to kind of talk about the misrepresentations in the movie Sound of Freedom and. And the misrepresentations by what? Angel Media and. And Tim Ballard and those who have gone on to promote. To promote this movie. Where should. Where should we begin?

Lynn Packer [01:43:23] I think Gerardo has. Has. We sort of went through this. Here's the first slide. Okay, this slide is in from my most recent report. What this is is a summary of one of the slides that I did a year ago in my most recent report. I don't spend a lot of time documenting it like I did before, but I'm just going over the main plot that is 100% pure fiction. Now, what is true. But it's not important element in the plot. What is true that in 2006, Ballard helped arrest a pedophile at the border and isolate his five year old victim. And, and, and these are the things that are false. Ballard was not the one who rescued the boy. The boy was not kidnapped, but he was groomed by a serial pedophile, Earl Buchanan. You see Buchanan's mugshot there? The boy's sister was not, he had a sister. She was not kidnapped by anyone. Both they, they, they were not kidnapped in, I think it was Honduras or somewhere, and then rooted up through Mexico into the United States. And he was trying to smuggle him in the United States. The he Buchanan had befriended the family, had taken the boy to Mexico, I think to meet with his father or mother. He was living with his grandmother in near San Bernardino and they were just coming back. And no girl was sold to a Colombian drug lord. There was no daring rescue that took place of, of any kind. What you see, I, I haven't watched the movie because I'm not, I'm not doing a movie review. I'm just checking the facts. And so I'm aware of how it's portrayed in the movie, both from what people write about and also the scene where Ballard in the movie confronts Buchanan has been played during some of the interviews. And so here's what you see in the movie. You see Buchanan in his sport ute with the boy sitting in the back seat. And Ballard, who in the movie has already been tracking this guy, is already aware of who it is and he's been investigating, he's working on the case, which is absolutely not true. So anyway, in the movie he asks for identification and Buchanan, who's given another name in the movie, shows him his own id. And then he shows an ID for the boy sitting in the back seat, who you can see on camera. And Ballard see something fishy about the boy's id, realizes that this is a kid who was kidnapped and is being smuggled in. The United States orders that he's arrested. And then in the shot you see two armed officers grab him and pull him out of the vehicle. What really happened is of course Ballard wasn't there at all. Buchanan pulled up in his suv, the boy was sitting on his lap. And I can see why they wouldn't put that in the movie. He was sitting on his lap and the agent asked for his id and he only had his own id. He didn't have it for the kid. Of course, that aroused suspicion. He was pulled off into the holding area where they searched his vehicle, found a camera in the back of the vehicle, played it. I mean, the guy was brazen. He had video of him abusing the kid who was in the car. And so then they called Homeland Security Investigations, hsi, which is Tim Ballard and his partner. Then they came on the scene, affected an arrest. According to court records, it wasn't particularly well handled, but they had the guy. I mean, this was probably one of the easiest cases they ever prosecuted. Then they got a search warrant for his home near San Bernardino. Ballard says it was a raid. It wasn't a raid. It was a search warrant. And they went up and they found the studio where he was making pornographic videos like the one that he had shot on his camera. I don't know if he was selling them or sharing them with friends or what all he was doing. And so he was arrested, he was convicted. This was in 2006. He was just recently, within the last year and a half or so, released from prison, was sent to sort of like a halfway house. He violated his patrol parole, and then I lost track of him. And Damien Moore, the Las Vegas reporter, tracked down his son. The both of us conducted an interview, and his son said he didn't know whether his dad was still alive because they had broken off. The son's story is interesting that I put in the last report is that Buchanan also molested his two sons, besides these other kids that he had, uh, befriended. But his son said this. His son said, look, my dad is a scumbag. He molested us. He molested these other people. But he didn't kidnap anybody. He didn't traffic anybody. He's being accused. It's bad enough what he did, but he's being accused of something that he didn't do. And he was very unhappy about the way his father was being depicted in the motion picture.

John Dehlin [01:49:50] Okay, well, let's go ahead. It sounds like you've given us a pretty thorough overview of the. The slides we're about to see, but let's go ahead and go through the slides anyway, just to kind of reinforce the points. Do you want to set up this first clip we're about to see?

Lynn Packer [01:50:09] Yeah. What's interesting is, is that the. The Eduardo Verastogy, who was the. One of the producers of the movie and played Paul Hutchinson in the movie, played the. The guy, you know, the sex tourist, the pedophile sex tourist in the film. And Tim Ballard and Jim Caviezel have been out promoting the movie. They've been doing, from a promotional standpoint, an excellent job. They have been everywhere and showing up everywhere, but they've only been doing interviews with far right or very conservative religious Publications and political publications. And this shot coming up is one where they're interviewed by Steve Bannon. And what's sort of funny about it, maybe it's not that funny. And I think I put two clips together here is even a couple of these interviewers who are tossing softball questions to him so they get these dramatic answers, would ask questions like, oh, this can't be true. Expecting Ballard to say, this is absolutely true, this all happened. But then watch. Share what happens.

John Dehlin [01:51:33] All right, let's roll the clip.

▶ Video Clip 1

Video Clip 1 [01:51:35] Tim,

Video Clip 1 [01:51:38] the. The movie really starts off with you in progress. It's how true, how much creative license was taken with this script. The reason I'm asking you, because the story is almost so bizarre, you go, they must have made a lot of this up.

Video Clip 1 [01:51:53] Yeah, no, I'll tell you what. Every. Every bad guy is real. In fact, the movie was cut because it got.

Video Clip 1 [01:52:01] It was too long. And remember, we talked about all the.

Video Clip 1 [01:52:04] They had cards at the end telling you, every bad guy's real, every kid

Video Clip 1 [01:52:08] is real, and it told you where they are today. Caviso, is this a true story or was any of this embellished for dramatic purposes? In this. All right, so we did the Count of Monte Cristo.

Video Clip 1 [01:52:21] By way of analogy.

Lynn Packer [01:52:23] You have 1200 pages, 88 characters. Now, people love this movie. We had to get it down to 100 minutes. So I don't have time to show you 10,000 minutes of the heroic stuff that Tim Ballard has done. Okay, see, this is almost, like, painful to watch. They've had all this time to prepare. Somebody was going to say, ask if it's true. And if they had decided that they were going to admit, we've taken two different stories and put them together and then explain what happened with both of these stories, they just sort of dodged the question, saying, well, we've sort of put things together, we moved things around, we've compressed things. We couldn't put everything in at one time. They said, well, there's even worse stuff that we had to leave out. So what you can see is, is that they had already decided they were not going to explain that any part of it was fictitious. There's another video clip that you don't have where Ballard is interviewed more recently, where he starts moving a little bit in that direction, but he is simply not there. And where Angel Studios and our could run into trouble is that, you know, if you're just going to tell your neighbor that, you know, my car gets 100 miles per gallon, you know it's a lie, but it just, you know it's not illegal. You can tell them that. But if you tell your neighbor, my car gets 100 miles per gallon. Buy it. That's illegal under Utah law. Under Utah law, you have to tell him the truth about the sale. And what's really important is you can't leave anything out. You. You. There can not be the way the law reads, no material omissions. You can't on purpose leave anything out. And that's a criminal law. Then over on the angel studio side, you have SEC rules come into play. Now, this is not criminal. This is a. This is civil. Now, the SEC can refer some of the really egregious violations over to the Department of Justice for prosecution. But anyway, the sec, when you raise money through one of the SEC vehicles, it's the very same thing you. When you raise the money, you've got to tell them the truth. You got to tell them what it is, and you can't leave anything out. Which means that both Tim Ballard and Angel Studios should have said almost none of this story is true. We're just doing it because we want to raise awareness, and we need some excitement. We need some drama. We need to tug on some heartstrings. We need to sort of scare people into taking some sort of action. And as Anna and Tim pointed out, the action in the movie at the end of the movie is to raise awareness. By telling more people to buy more tickets.

John Dehlin [01:55:49] Yeah, yeah. It. It. You know, by saying the bad guy is real. What that's missing is the fact that it's really building up like. Like the previous reporters we just had on. And Tim. I guess the movie ends with. With the Tim Ballard figure killing the bad guy. Yeah, but. But, you know, not only that, but I, you know, there were years between, you know, I guess when this guy was abducted. I. There's just. They're really trumping up Tim Ballard's heroics and involvement. And in that way, it's deceptive because he's kind of being. Being the salesman, the brand. He's being called a hero everywhere he goes. But if he had little to no actual involvement in the abduction, in the arresting, you know, in the investigation, then. Then he's being falsely billed as a hero. Is that right?

Lynn Packer [01:56:48] Well, sure. And. And obviously, you're a bigger hero if you arrest somebody that abducts as opposed to someone who grooms, because it's just more dramatic because not only is there molestation involved, they're taken completely away from their families. They have no idea what had. What had happened to him. But I think we've got a slide coming up. Yeah, that robo is prepared that gets into that. Oh, okay. This slide shows the cast of the Sound of Freedom. There at the bottom, if you can see it, is the actor who played Earl Buchanan. And what's interesting is it's Gary. Yeah. And what's interesting about that is that they've changed. He was being called Earl Buchanan for the longest time up until probably recently. And I would guess that the attorneys looked at it and said, you better not use his name. And so they changed it. Now, I haven't seen the movie. If I saw the movie, I could carefully watch to see if they either reshot the scene, which I doubt where they. His name is used, or they probably used overdubbing is that the, the people who dub in dialogue are really good at it. And the, the new name. I just heard it. I mean, I, I heard the fir. The name first from Jim Caviezel when he was using it, and he said Oinsky. Who's Oensky? Well, it's Buchanan and they're both three syllable names. And so that would be easier to dub it in. And so it'd be really difficult for the audience to tell that the name had been changed.

John Dehlin [01:58:40] Okay. Anything else of importance as it relates to that, that listing of the actors?

Lynn Packer [01:58:48] No, you just say Eduardo Verastogi, who plays Paul Hutchinson. They never say Paul Hutchinson. They always just say Paul. I think one of the reasons is, is because Hutchinson and Ballard had a falling out, so they were trying to downplay Hutchinson's role. But despite the falling out, Hutchinson owns a big share of the initial investment in the movie. Hutchinson put in. I don't know how much money. It could have been half a million or something. I. I don't know. Just. It was quite a bit. Then there was another investor, and then there's Tim Ballard. Tim Ballard did a video, just sort of a. What do you call, a Facebook or something video. People were always asking, where's Sound of Freedom? When is it coming out? And one time when they missed one of the deadlines, he went on YouTube and said, I don't have anything to do with this. This isn't my movie. This is not an all you are thing. That's somebody else. I hope it comes out. It would be a good thing if it comes out, but I don't know anything about it. Well, he knows everything about it. He's one of the major investors in it and he may have a bigger stake than I know. I'm just aware of the initial Investment that Paul Hutchinson was involved with.

Examining the Real Case Behind the Film

John Dehlin [02:00:12] Okay, well, the next slide that you have is a slide of a Customs and Border Protection field operations incident report from San Diego. Do you want to talk about why we've included that?

Lynn Packer [02:00:26] Yeah, this just, you know, people say, I, I want proof. Remember, the way the story unfolds in the movie is that this abduction takes place probably late 2013, because he resigns from government service in December of 2013. So you need to have a sequence where the two are abducted. He rescues the boy, he says, find my sister. And then he quickly quits his job and then goes finds his sister. But clearly the story is built around this Earl Buchanan scenario. And that was 2006. And so if people want proof, there it is.

John Dehlin [02:01:13] So in this document, what do you want to direct people's attention to?

Lynn Packer [02:01:18] Well, really nothing other than if they read the whole thing. This is only the title pages of the first pages of these documents. And it goes into great detail about what happened. It says, like, there's several like this. I have a pile of records. These are just a couple of examples. But it goes into great detail how the person was detained. That Ballard comes on the scene later, that they go up near San Bernardino and execute the search warrant, has all that detail. And it's clear from the detail the, the. The kid, there's only one of them. Ballard says two, the kid was not abducted. He. This Earl Buchanan was a millionaire. He was in construction, had a lot of money, and he had befriended a lot of the workers who. They may have been legal, they may have been illegal, but they lived near where they worked. He provided, probably employed them, had a playroom for the kids, which should have been the first real red flag that somebody would do that. He would take him to Disneyland like the. The kid depicted in the movie. He. That wasn't the first time he took them to Mexico, but again, there, there was. There was no kidnapping involved. It was a. The type of thing that you and I are talking about. It's somebody the family knew and, and he was grooming the, the kid. There's a possibility. I'm not saying she did at all because I don't know. But there's a possibility that the grandmother knew about it and knew that a lot of money came to the family because of the guy's friendship with these little kids. Now, the feds, the federal government, I think, only prosecuted him for the scenario at the border, the Calexico border. The state went on to further investigate, and he was later, I believe, on trial, convicted of sexually abusing several others.

John Dehlin [02:03:44] Okay, so this next slide talks about that seven year gap between 2006 and 2013. Can you just. We've already talked about this, but can you just reiterate kind of what the movie claims happened in terms of Ballard's involvement versus what the facts are relative to those two dates, 2006 and 2013.

Lynn Packer [02:04:07] Right. For your viewers who have seen the movie or even just heard Ballard's speeches about it, because he talks about it, is that the boy, when he sees Ballard, runs and jumps into his arms and. Which is not typical behavior of almost any kid. The, the, the, the son knew who the, the boy and the girl were. The son, because he lived near there. And he said the boy was traumatized when Buchanan was arrested. You can imagine you're coming in the United States and all of a sudden he's gone and you're taken into custody. The kid was probably really frightened. And so anyway, the story is that the. According to Ballard, can you help me find my sister? He gives Ballard a. A pendant that has scripture of Timothy on it. And so Ballard says, I wore that constantly after that as a reminder that I need that after, you know, that I needed to rescue the sister. Actually, that probably did not happen. If you look at the OOR website that concedes Ballard didn't kill anybody and no sister, no girl was rescued, they're still sticking by the, the pendant, the, the dog tag, they're sticking by that story. I don't think that's true either, but I'm not sure. I think they lifted that story or Ballard lifted that from an incident in Haiti that involved one of the children that he ended up adopting.

John Dehlin [02:06:02] Okay. And again, I'm. I'm hearing my family member that I talked to before this episode say, look, if he took several stories and merged them together for dramatic effect, who cares? He's saving children, you know.

Lynn Packer [02:06:18] Well, exactly. If you take. I don't disagree with that, but you have to take an element that actually happened and is actually true and then move it into the storyline and the plot, and that just didn't happen. It just, you know, if you were free to do that, you could concoct any kind of story and say this is true, that it's not fiction. All you have to do is look at every single major significant element in the story of Sound of Freedom and conclude that and even look at its origin. Where did it come from if it's not exactly true and you find that even the story, as it originated and has moved into the movie, is not True. And that's where Tim and Anna's reporting may come into play again, because they did a good job. And I also reported on this, but they did a good job about an incident that took place in Haiti. That's the incident that both angel studios say was sort of the inspiration for the story of going into the Colombian jungle and rescuing the girl from a drug lord who was sexually abusing her. So let's take a look at what happened in Colombia, because we're in Haiti, because we know. The search for several years for Garthy Marty, who had been kidnapped at church, was relentless. They were looking for him everywhere. And as the. The story that Tim and Anna broke in Vice was, is that a psychic? A. I think from Utah County, a psychic said, I know exactly where he is. He wasn't sex trafficked, he was labor trafficked. And he's working at this plantation somewhere that's up by the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. So they put together sort of like a. A convoy of operatives of, I think, the government people were around. Certainly Ballard was almost certain they were going. The psychic was going to lead him to Guardi because the father. They brought the father along. And if memory serves me correct, they hired a helicopter to get shots to dramatize this. I mean, can you imagine the news this would have made had they found Guardi and our did it? They. They cheated death. They go into the junk, deep into the jungle to rescue him. And they also used the front. The. They also impersonated doctors, which is what I think happened in the movie. So, okay, so they're doctors. They're going up to this border area with psychic in hand to point out where Guardi is. And they are going into somewhat dangerous territory because you've got these. There are definitely labor trafficking going on, as is common here in the United States lots of places, but in third world countries, it's a lot worse and it's more dangerous messing with these guys. So they're in there looking for Guardi. And remember, I'm telling you a story that is mostly told by Tim Ballard. This isn't one that took a lot of research, although I have talked to a couple of people who were involved in the raid. So the way Ballard tells it is that they go in there and all of a sudden all of these bad guys approach and they're armed and they've got machetes and there could be a bloodbath. I'm suspecting. I didn't check, but I'm suspecting that the OER people Were well armed themselves. There could have been a shootout. Okay, really quick.

John Dehlin [02:10:29] I'm gonna. I'm gonna just read something Gerardo has. Has shared. He writes, I think maybe we're missing the point here. The point. Point here is that the main plot of the movie is that, number one, the kids are being abducted. Number two, the kids are being trafficked. And number three, the kids are being forced to be sex slaves. And that, you know, and that in reality, none of that happened with the characters depicted in the movie. None of those elements of the story are in the real story. So it's a merge. It's not just a merger of stories. It's a. It's a complete fabrication of the story. And Gerardo writes, it's also taking away the focus from the real problem, which is that in the majority of cases, kids are groomed by people known by the family, which is exactly what happened in the real cases that the movie has contorted. Thank you, Gerardo. Do you want to add anything? And again, my. My dear nephew writes, this is some nitpicky does based on true events not cover the vast majority of this. I think that's my response. And that's our response to John Faust. What do you think, Lyn?

Lynn Packer [02:11:45] The question is absolutely not. People can engage in wishful thinking and hope that it's true. Wish that it was true. It's not true. But let me continue with what happened in Haiti, because remember now we have belatedly Angel Studios and our saying that's where he got this part of the story, that no girl was rescued, but there was something that happened in Haiti. And so Ballard's team is confronted by these bad guys that are armed. And that very likely was true and happened. So what did Ballard do? If he's the leader, he walks to the front and. And disarms the situation. Explains. Remember, he speaks Spanish. Now, some of them may have spoken Spanish. I'm not sure if they're Dominican Republic or speak Creole or whatever. But anyway, he could come forward. They. They have Creole speakers with them, translators, and explain what is going on and tell his story. Because remember, he's an. He. He goes in, has done several missions convincing people that he's a pedophile and he wants to do a sex party. So what did he do? Did he do the heroic thing? Lead his team, stand in front, confront these people? No, he went to his car and started to pray. That's what he did. Now, that sounds a lot more cowardly to me than heroic. And while he was praying fervently. He looks outside and the guys went away. And so he attributed it to his prayer. And God is having word. So there's nothing heroic from what happened in the jungle of Haiti that translates over to what happened in the jungle of Colombia. The second thing is, is in Colombia, somebody. The. The story is, is that somebody was rescued. Nobody was rescued. Guardi wasn't there. It was a failed mission. And so if somebody says, oh, that's okay, that's literary license. And if they, if they think that that's close enough, then they do.

John Dehlin [02:14:16] So I'll read a couple quick comments. Ted writes dramatized arrest at the border and dramatized serving of a search warrant does not make it untrue. Lynn admits the man was arrested and his home searched. How can you say it's not true?

Lynn Packer [02:14:36] Again, everyone is entitled to their opinion. The facts are, is that the story is 100% false. None of it happened. Now people want to say, well, something similar happened at some time. I've been through this. I mean, and you and I discussed it when I was on a couple of years ago when I did the Paul Dunn expose. This is what I ran into all the time is it's only embellished. So what? And look at all the people who have come into the church because of Paul Dunn's exciting stories. Well, the stories were not embellished. If, if you say that in World War II, your best buddy and the next foxhole was riddled with shrapnel and died in your arms, and he's alive and well, living in Missouri, it's not true. And it's very similar what happened here. I understand people wanting to believe. I mean, look at what's happening in theaters. People are crying, they're hugging. When they come out, they. They believe it's true. And when they hear, eventually it's going to get out that this story is false, it's inevitable because of all the attention. At some point, other reporters, not just movie reviewers who say, oh, it's just embellished a little bit, are going to get in on the story and say, there's nothing about it that's true. It's fiction. It is no more true than the. The movie Taken. And when Tim Ballard says, somebody says, well, explain the plot of your movie, he says, well, it's taken, but it's true. No, it's like the movie taken. And like the movie Taken, it's fiction.

Who Knew the Film's Story Was False

John Dehlin [02:16:26] Okay, let's go on and talk about the next slide, which is entitled who Knew the storyline is False. Do you want to Talk about this.

Lynn Packer [02:16:34] Right? And this is what I think may have led to our. It. It's. I mean, I don't know, but it's almost certain what led to our and Angel Studios belatedly finally saying part of the story is not true. This is a very interesting aspect of the story, is that Tim Ballard worked out of the San Diego office, even though he was over by Calexico. He worked out of the San Diego office. That is, his cases were prosecuted by the San Diego U.S. attorney's office. And while he was there and this Ballard or this case came up with Earl Buchanan. Karen Hewitt was the United States Attorney. You see her there. And Alessandra Serrano was the, was also the attorney on the case. Hewitt was her boss and signs on the, the documents and Serrano handled the case. They know that this didn't happen. They don't have to guess they were involved with the case. And remember, I report this a year ago. They know that I know nobody else is picking up the story. So I'm thinking, well, maybe we can get away with it. Now here's the rest of the story is both of them were hired by our to defend Ballard. So here you have attorneys who know he's lying about the plot in this, in the Sound of Freedom representing him and passing him off as a, as a, as a, as an honest guy. It's, it's probably one of the crazier parts of the story.

John Dehlin [02:18:34] Okay. All right. I'll just occasionally share some of the good comments that are being made. Jen. Shaman Duthie writes, I've been trying to pinpoint why I'm having issues with this movie. It's not hitting the mark of the true issues of human trafficking. It sounds like it's just a tribute to Ballard. It is a distraction from the real survivors stories. Thank you, Jen.

Lynn Packer [02:18:59] Yeah. Let me add something here. Is that, that Paul Hutchinson, remember he's portrayed by Eduardo Verastogi in the, in the movie, is had the falling out with Ballard and because he had a financial stake in the movie, he wanted to buy out the other partners. And he told him he wanted to buy them out because he didn't want to portray Ballard as a hero. He wanted it as the, the commenter just said he wanted it to focus on the children and he was going to buy the movie, take the footage and rework it and they wouldn't sell. And then he offered to sell his share and apparently they wouldn't buy. So even today, even though Hutchinson and Ballard are at odds, they're still partners. In the initial investment in the screenplay.

John Dehlin [02:19:54] Thank you. That's important. Really quickly, I do want to address something that we addressed at the start of this episode. B Boys Style writes, you guys act like this doesn't happen in real life. I'm going to repeat the disclaimer that I made at the beginning of this episode. Human trafficking is real. Child sex trafficking is real. It absolutely happens. It's absolutely horrific and detestable. We openly and publicly condemn any form of human trafficking, sex trafficking, child trafficking, pedophilia, abuse. We think it's offensive. Anyone who says that if you dare to criticize or even ask questions about Tim Ballard to our, that that means that you're a pedophile and an abuser. But we just want to affirm, and I assume, Lyn, you're going to agree with me, that we are passionate about speaking about Tim Ballard, our and Sound of Freedom. Not because we're trying to protect abusers and perpetrators of human trafficking, but because we feel so passionately against human trafficking and human sex trafficking that we don't want lies and misinformation to cloud and discredit what is a very serious issue. And more importantly, we want the people who are doing real heroic work to support the victims of human and child and sex trafficking to get the support and the attention and the money and, and the financing that they deserve. And we'll just call out your attention to an organization that Tim and Anna highlighted in the previous hour. FreedomNetworkUSA.org is an organization that many feel is worthy and is doing legitimate work to support the victims of human trafficking and child sex trafficking. Lynn, just really quickly, do you want to add anything to, to that, to that disclaimer?

Lynn Packer [02:22:11] Yeah, I do. To reinforce Your point is 2 days ago I did a long interview with a webcaster in Hollywood who knows some of the people who produced the movie. He's very conservative. He's anti liberal media would, you know, essentially be pro Fox, pro conservative reporting. He was incensed by what's going on. And he said the reason is, is that they've crossed the line. He says they're making us look bad. I mean, the, if, if the, the story that Ballard is telling is true, makes the conservative movement the sort of in some ways a little bit QAnon leaning movement. It validates it. But see, he's upset because he's, he's. Well, like he says, he's, he's very upset. He's crossed the line and he's even begun research to compliment my interview. And when he brought it was recorded. So when he broadcast it.

John Dehlin [02:23:21] Okay, really quickly, uh, Lyn, I'm going to ask you a question on behalf of my dear friend Diana Hansen Rivera. She asks, has anyone said where the proceeds for the film will go? Do you know Lynn?

Lynn Packer [02:23:35] Well, sure, they can go various places. This is not the first movie and movie production I've covered. I have covered several. I covered a couple when I was an investigative reporter for ksl. There's various types investments connected with it. And the. The investment that Angel Studios is involved with is the distribution of the movie. The cost, there's a substantial cost in doing that. And so what they did is they crowdfunded and also they solicited investments. So there are people who have invested in the movie. I can't remember how much they get back. Like seem to recall 120%. I don't know if it means 120% or if they get 20% back on their money money. But if the movie makes money and it is, that's a nice investment. And like any investment, they're told you could lose it all. But in the spirit of backing this cause they did invest, that's part of the money. But if somebody really wants to do a deep dive in this, they need to see the report before the one I did a year ago that went through how fictitious the plot is that goes in some detail about how they were trying to raise money. There were two really, what I would say, wild schemes to raise money. One of them involved bitcoin. Another one involved a. An appeal to the QANON crowd saying because this movie I reported on that and Caviezel talks about it. If you listen carefully to Caviezel's pitches when he's pitching conspiracy theories as he's soliciting ticket sales, is that he talks about a year ago in Las Vegas, they had several showings at a convention, a right wing convention, and they were trying to get all those people to donate. Who knows what happened to that money. There should have been a thorough investigation first to see if any our money found its way into the movie. I don't know that any dead, but it should have been investigated and there should be an investigation into the funding of the movie itself to see if any fraud was involved. There were millions of dollars. There were very wealthy Mexican investors in it. And as I've pointed out in two or three reports, three LDS apostles made investments I believe to be around $200,000 each early on and is sort of indicated in that whiteboard that Anna and Tim were talking about. Now they were investing in movie making. Now, I. It possibly is in the Sound of Freedom. I don't know that I asked Church PR for a comment. They would not comment. I left messages with all three of their secretaries saying that this is what I understand, your investment in. In Oor movie making. And all three declined comment.

John Dehlin [02:26:54] Okay. All right, thanks for that. Let's go ahead and go to the next clip on the video. Do you want to tell us what we're about to see here, Lynn?

Film Proceeds, Credits, and Ballard's Departure From OUR

Lynn Packer [02:27:08] Right. Someone who watched the movie used their cell phone smartphone to record the closing credits. And I think this is really significant because, remember, I'm saying I reported a year ago that there seemed to be a split, a divide developing within our. Where Matt Osborne, who's president of our and sort of the Ballard's partner, was starting to apparently correct errors or lies that Ballard was telling. And so you could see either he. Because of the conscience or because of an attorney saying, we can't be, you know, telling this stuff. So he's sort of correcting what Ballard just said. And. And so. So you have belatedly, you have our angel studios saying, okay, the child rescue didn't happen. And for your skeptical viewers, that should be the best evidence because they're admitting it themselves. But Ballard, Verastagi and Caviezel are not doing that. They're still out there dodging the question. They're free to say, well, we use this drama to raise awareness. It's fair to do that because it's such an important problem. They didn't do that. They're still waffling and trying to make it sound like it's true. And I think one of the reasons that they're really locked in is what Caviezel says during these closing credits. So you can go ahead and roll it.

▶ Video Clip 2

Video Clip 2 [02:28:53] Okay. Sound of Freedom is a hero's tale, but I'm not talking about the character I play. It's the heroic brother and sister in this film that work to save each other.

Video Clip 2 [02:29:07] They are the true heroes.

Video Clip 2 [02:29:09] The most powerful person in this world is the storyteller.

Video Clip 2 [02:29:13] Together we have a chance to make

Video Clip 2 [02:29:16] these two kids and the countless children

Video Clip 2 [02:29:18] children that they represent the most powerful people in the world by telling their

Video Clip 2 [02:29:23] story in a way only the cinema can do.

Lynn Packer [02:29:28] Whoops. I had a misspelling in one of the supers there. But can. Can you see how this would tend to lock you in where now at the end, people are crying. They're listening to his message. His message is, we need to raise awareness. You need to buy more tickets and he's selling it's about these two kids. And it just doesn't work if they're completely as they are fictitious. So they're still out on the trail, they're still pitching the movie, they're still trying to sell tickets. And it'll be interesting to see if they start coming closer to what oh, you are itself and Angel Studios has admitted.

John Dehlin [02:30:15] All right, well, I'm looking at the remaining slides and I'm pretty sure we've already covered what's on them that Ballard's attorneys knew. We've, we've covered this point, right, Lynn? Yeah, we've covered that the Ballard's attorneys knew that the story didn't happen and that Buchanan's son's reaction. You also spoke about that, right?

Lynn Packer [02:30:38] Exactly. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:30:39] Okay. All right, Lyn. Well, we want to bring Lizzie Mildenhall on to talk about her direct experiences with our as an employee. But we want to give you a chance to sort of provide any final commentary or thoughts or reporting that you think is really important that we haven't covered yet.

Lynn Packer [02:31:01] Well, we're running long, and if you want to hear it, there's sort of a late breaking information that I'm going to include in the report that I'm working on that involves text messaging between a former our operative and the Harmon Brothers Angel Studios that I think is quite important because it indicates the Angel Studios knew about Tim Ballard's problems in great detail before they decided to announce the premiere of the movie. I could go through that if you think we have time.

John Dehlin [02:31:40] We've got Lizzy here waiting. So what I think I want to do right now, Lynn, is just point people to your amazing YouTube channel. So the YouTube channel is Lynn Kenneth Packer. And you can see here there are just so many important videos journalism, talking about Tim Ballard, about Sean Reyes, about Operation Underground Railroad, including, I believe that video 28, which is entitled Ours and the LDS Church's Promotional Movies. That's the, that's the movie you were referring to, right? Right, Lynn?

Lynn Packer [02:32:18] Well, right. There's two movies in that I'm surprised nobody else has reported on the other. And that is is that the church funded for several million dollars a movie about Jesus that was shot in the Mediterranean and then it just vanished. And so I talk about how both of those movies are connected through the president of the Quorum of twelve Apostles, Russell Ballard, because he was involved with both of them at the time. I didn't know that Sound of Freedom was actually going to be distributed. I was just talking about it as Its use as a fundraiser. They've been using it for a couple of years raising money. They go to private, private showings here in the United States and in Mexico to raise funds. Yeah, but the other movie is a mystery movie that we still don't know a heck of a lot about.

John Dehlin [02:33:20] Really quickly, Lynn, do you have any additional insider information about why our appears to have kicked Tim Ballard out of their organization?

Lynn Packer [02:33:32] Well, it's the second time, the first time that, that he was resigned. They say he resigned was after it was disclosed he was making 300 plus thousand dollars a year in annual salary which the board admitted seemed to be excessive, but maybe it was worth it. Then he took no salary. He, he didn't leave completely, but he left. He wasn't CEO or president anymore. He still worked with them. I think he may have helped with fundraising but he was essentially out of the nonprofit. But then for whatever reason they pulled him back in and I think he went maybe another year taking no salary. And then with this last 990 that was just recently reported and I talk about in my latest video, his salary has gone up to a half a million a year. Whether it has anything to do with that, I don't know. I. There are so many things. Going wrong or so much trauma going on within

Guest [02:34:51] that.

Lynn Packer [02:34:51] It could be a lot of things and it could be that he says himself that he suffers from OCD and PTSD and it could be for health reasons. I don't know.

Elizabeth Smart Foundation Cuts Ties With OUR

John Dehlin [02:35:04] Okay, and then really quickly I want to bring Lizzie on but do you know anything about why the Elizabeth Smart foundation withdrew their collaborations with, with Tim Ballard and O?

Lynn Packer [02:35:18] Yeah, I've reported it. If somebody goes back to a previous report for quite a long time Ed Smart was a source, but he was an anonymous source and I reported it that way. And then finally he just because of being upset about how O handled things, he went on the record. He, he, he came. Well, Tim already hinted at this but it went further than what Tim said. Tim said they thought about merging what it is. They thought about full emerging because they had already merged for fundraising purposes. You have to have 501 status as you know to raise tax free money. Our didn't have it but it is legal to have it funneled through another 501c3 and they started out with another Utah non profit that didn't work out too well and then there was going to be this big merger of the two. But they did in fact start working together for a while. Ed Smart was hired, he was working on the computer software that detects online child pornography so that they can track down and arrest people involved in illegal distribution of child pornography. He was working on that, and then he just had a falling out and quit. And Elizabeth really didn't do that much. She made a couple of appearances. She made one in California, but by agreement, I didn't interview her. He said, I'll talk to you if you don't bother her. And I said, that's fine. Fine. So I never could ask her or never did ask her exactly why she never engaged more than she did.

John Dehlin [02:37:14] Okay. All right. Well, Lynn Packer, I can't thank you enough for your reporting and for your willingness to come on today. You do great work. And everyone please check out lynn Kenneth Packer's YouTube channel to watch his amazing videos and reporting.

Lynn Packer [02:37:32] Well, and if I can just add again that Damian Moore at that American Crime Journal, if that. They can just Google that and they'll find it. He has a much better organized than I do.

John Dehlin [02:37:43] Okay. All right, Lyn, take care and please come back, will you?

Lynn Packer [02:37:47] Okay. See you.

John Dehlin [02:37:49] All right, thanks, Lynn. All right, really quickly, I'll just share a couple quick comments. My nephew John Faust, who I love, says it should be noted that the guy in the movie, at the end of the movie just said that the hero isn't Ballard and that the true heroes are these children which act as avatars for real children who are saved. I'm. I'm not gonna deny that that was said. I think the point that's making is, is that when Tim Ballard and others are going around talking about the movie, I know for sure that Tim Ballard is being heralded as the hero of the story, because I've heard podcasters and TV interviewers literally introduce Tim Ballard as the hero. So, you know, John F. And others that I think flies in the face of your point that Tim Ballard is not being lifted up as the hero. But also I think that's how Tim Ballard is making so much money, is because the movie does portray him as the hero in so many ways that have turned out to be completely demonstrated to be false, including the depiction of Tim killing the bad guy in the end, which everyone now admits never happened. Anyway, what I would like to do now, she's been waiting very patiently, is bring on to the show Lizzie Mildenhall. Lizzie reached out to me as someone who started as a volunteer and then ended up working as an employee of Operation Underground Railroad. And we were excited to end today's episode by hearing from someone who worked for the organization. So Lizzie Mildenhall, thank you so much for coming on Mormon Stories podcast.

Former OUR Employee Shares Insider Account

Guest [02:39:35] Yes, thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

John Dehlin [02:39:38] All right, well, do you want to go ahead and talk to us a bit about your experiences and let's just say good and bad with the organization? And anything you want to also share about what you've heard today, we'll just open it up to your. Our story, Lizzie Mildenhall.

Guest [02:40:00] Okay. Yeah. So I started volunteering for our back in 2017. I heard about it through my social problems class at BYU Idaho, and I started volunteering for them a lot. I was raising money for them. I did, like, massive yard sales that would raise money and, like, get the whole community involved. Eventually, I became a team leader in Utah when I moved to Utah, because there was no team in the area. And as I was doing team leader stuff, another team leader became an employee. And eventually she reached out to me and asked if I wanted to become an employee. And it seemed like a great gig because it was work from home part time, and I had kids, so it was perfect. And I loved oor. It was. It was everything I wanted to do. So I was hired on as the community relations coordinator in the outreach department. And so we were, like the face of OUA when it came to, like, the volunteers. So we were with volunteers. We managed them. We kind of ran the whole volunteer program. I loved my. My co workers. They were great. We got along awesome. Like, we. We chatted a lot. We just. We had a great time. But the department itself was, like, a mess. It was so unorganized. There was so many things. And I don't even know how to, like, how to describe it now because I've been out for a couple years, but basically just everything was very disorganized and it was hard for us to get anything done. We were trying to, like, create educational programs for the. For the volunteers so that they can learn more about human trafficking and like, like, know the signs in your area type thing. And I feel like a lot of that did get done, but it was just very unorganized and very. Not, like, efficient, basically. So overall, like, my experience with the people were pretty good. But I did. I'm realizing now, like, that now that I'm out of it, that there were a lot of red flags when it came to, like, the organization as a whole in regards to, like, how it was a cult or a cult, like, I should say. I try not to call things occult too much, but, Like, had a lot of the same features that the church does. We had this employee wide meeting one time talking about the Davis county lawsuit that was out because I was working for OOR at that time. And basically the CEO, which at that point was Brad, because Tim wasn't CEO at that point, he said that, like, you're either with us or you're against us. There's no in between. Like, defend our. Basically, like, why are we even questioning this? Why are we having this conversation? Which kind of blew my mind. I was really surprised that he would say something like that because these were valid concerns. And in the outreach department, we were seeing it the most because we had volunteers left and right who were leaving us because they didn't want to volunteer for us or spend their money with organization that had a lawsuit against them. So that was really surprising to me. And then, yeah, with all of the articles that were coming out, especially the Vice articles, they told us not to read them. Don't read anything about it. Don't look into it, don't talk about it. Like vice stuff felt like anti Mormon stuff for the church. Like, don't even look into it. And so I didn't, I didn't. Most of the time I would start reading the article and I would get too, like, triggered about how like incorrect I thought they were, that I would just stop reading it altogether. But with, with the, with the Vice stuff, actually with Mormon Stories was the first time I heard about Mormon Stories was when you came out with the Operation Underground Railroad episode a couple of years ago. And like they talked about that at an employee meeting. Like, oh, Mormon Stories podcast came out with this episode against us. Like, just so everyone's aware, you might see some repercussions from it. And I was like, what's Mormon Stories Podcast? And that's when I found you guys. But anyways, so like, there was a lot of articles coming out against Oor. And again, it was that mentality of like, don't read it, don't engage in it. And so as employees who worked with volunteers, we were asked or yeah, we were asked a lot. Like, like, can you give any feedback about this article? Because people were reading it and they wanted to know like what we had to say. And we got like one or two sentences from marketing department telling them what to say. Say, you can only respond with this response. Response, do not give them any other speculation. Don't give them any other response. Don't give them your opinions. This is the only response you can give them. So it felt very controlled and very like, again, culty. It's, it's the same Thing with like the church. Like, I'm seeing so many parallels now. And one of your guests earlier said something about how much is this about promoting Tim as a celebrity versus like about the cause? And it's the exact same thing with the church, you know, how much is this about, you know, the stupid things like tithing or the prophet or whatever versus, like Jesus, you know, so it's again, it's so much. It's so much like the church. The worst thing about my time there is that there was no HR department. And that was really wild to me because at this point I was with our as an employee in 2020, 2020-2021. And so they had been an organization for a long time at this point. And so it was really surprising to me that they wouldn't have an hr, especially with the amount of employees that they had because they had probably close to 100. And so that's definitely enough to have an HR department. And so because of that, things were just not handled well. My boss above me got fired, which is a whole story I want to talk about. But everything was just handled so poorly in regards to any like hr, HR department thing.

John Dehlin [02:46:29] Yeah. Well, Lizzie, this is so great to hear. Gerardo's texting me behind the scenes, how disturbing it is, you know, for example, to be told as employees of our that you can't read the news reports that are coming out about our. Yeah, I can tell you that there have been times people have made accusations against me or against the Open Stories foundation, and I've had staff or employees, you know, and I encourage them to read the false reports and then I show them the truth and then they compare that with the false reports. And I've got nothing to hide and nothing that I'm afraid about. So I would literally never tell an employee or staff to like never read or never listen to or never talk to because for me it's all about focusing on what's true and what the evidence is. So that truly is a cult like tactic for the leadership to tell its employees to not read the material. That's definitely disturbing. And so that's really important for you to share with us. I will say, Lizzie, and this isn't me defending our that running a nonprofit is hard. And so often when you start with a nonprofit, it's just like somebody trying to do good and you don't really know how to run a business. You don't know the rules of a nonprofit. So more often than not, I think almost all nonprofits start disorganized start without an hr, start in a chaotic way.

Lynn Packer [02:48:11] And.

John Dehlin [02:48:12] And so I'll just say we've been chaotic, we've been disorganized. We haven't had all those HR staff to handle things. And so I'm going to say on that count, that's almost every nonprofit that I've ever heard of. And so I guess I'm going to say us too, in that regard. Not to invalidate your concerns, but I just want to be fair and honest that. That it's very common for non profits to be chaotic and disorganized. I wish that weren't true, but in my experience, that's more often true than not true. I hope you're okay with me sharing that opinion.

Guest [02:48:53] Yeah, no, and that's fine. Like, I understand. Like, I want to go into the non profit world as well. I just think for all the issues they've had, they should have already had an HR. Like, they've been around for. Since 2013 or 14. Right. So it's been a long time. And I don't know.

John Dehlin [02:49:12] I just have to say Gerardo makes the point that Mormon Stories and the OBA Stories foundation isn't earning 30 to 40 or $50 million a year, you know? You know, during a lot of our growth years, it was 40,000 a year, 50,000 a year, $80,000 a year. You know, even now, we're certainly less than a million dollars a year. So I guess they say where much is given, much is required.

Guest [02:49:36] There you go. Yeah. No, and I just feel like maybe with all the disgruntled employees. Disgruntled employees that they've had, like, leave, that maybe it would be best just to protect themselves. Even. Like, I'm just surprised that they wouldn't already have that. And that's another interesting little factor there, is that that's kind of how they talked about employees that left, like, not on a good note, that they were the ones that had the problem, not us. You know, they're the ones that are angry ex our people, you know, and so that was really interesting too. And so we always, like. Like, I always kind of thought of them, like, I'm not gonna associate myself with them. Like, I don't know, they're just kind of angry at Oui and I don't want to be a part of that, you know?

John Dehlin [02:50:21] Yeah. Okay. Really quickly, if I can ask you, like, this issue of jump teams that go to developing countries and in some sort of paramilitary way rescue victims and then save these children or these women and then provide them with the support they need to get better. As a former our employee, can you speak to a whether what you know about whether they did or didn't have effective jump teams and did or didn't have effective programs for the victims that they allegedly rescued, was that the validity of those rescues and the validity of how they were helping victims allegedly, was that ever discussed? And if so, what was discussed that you can share?

Guest [02:51:17] So I don't know a lot because they do not share much with us as the outreach department. What I do know is I was looking to eventually make my way into Aftercare because I have a degree in social work. And so I thought that would be a perfect place for me. So I did try to learn more about the Aftercare program and what they did. What I do know about Aftercare program is that it didn't always exist, which, you know, fine. Like you said, like, things were unorganized in the beginning and I'm going to give them some leeway for that. I don't know when the Aftercare program started. I just know it was there when I was there in 2020. And with that, there was only a handful of people in the Aftercare program. None of them were social workers, psychologists, therapists, anything like that. There's no licensed therapist, no licensed social worker, which really surprised me because I told them, like, oh, I want to come in like, as a licensed social worker, not for therapy necessarily, necessarily, but for like case management or just other social work type things, because that's kind of what you do there. And there's interesting, there's like, interesting politics about it. I don't know how to describe this, maybe just in the sense of like, favoritism or not nepotism, because it wasn't quite that. But that definitely happened at one point. But anyways, the politics felt weird. The person who's in charge of Aftercare, she's kind of very protective of it from what I've seen and from what I've heard. And so she kind of has rejected people who have degrees in social work. And this is mostly my speculation. And from other employees also said the same thing, that like, she didn't want anybody above her basically in terms of like licenses or whatever. Like, she wanted to run things her own way and she didn't want people who were like certified or licensed to kind of like, say, oh, that's not ethical, or, hey, that's not. I can't do that because of my license or whatever. So that was kind of interesting thing. And that kind of bothered me for sure. The other thing that I know, I have some notes here from my. From my boss who was fired from our.

Tim Marchman [02:53:28] She.

Guest [02:53:29] She had some thoughts on this too, but basically that they did not keep track of any of the kids they rescued the way aftercare would work. Like, the whole purpose of the department was to find, like, orphanages or some sort of care for the kids that they rescued in that country and send them there. And they were supposed to be vetting these places to make sure it was a safe and reputable place for them, but they would not keep track of any of the kids after that. And so there's no real way knowing. Like, yes, we. They sent them to this place, so they didn't just, like, leave them to. To their own defenses. But there's no real way of knowing if they ended up back in trafficking or not. There's no real way of knowing if they received all the support they needed after being in that facility.

John Dehlin [02:54:16] Okay. Were there ever discussions about compensation? You mentioned nepotism and. Or misappropriation of funds. Anything you can share about that?

Guest [02:54:28] The only thing that I ever heard about that. Well, nepotism in the beginning because Tim got a lot of his family's members to be a part of his nonprofit and fine, whatever. But it just kind of felt like those were the people who maybe got, like, the raises or the promotions or whatever. But as far as funds go, the only thing I ever knew about that was that we had. We were sitting on a lot of funds. And the reason being that I was told was because in 2020, got really popular. So all these donations came in and, like, they weren't prepared for that, basically. Like, they. They like to do so many missions at a time, so many rescue missions. And so because of that, they. They couldn't, like, spend their money fast enough, basically. And so that was their experience excuse for not spending the money that they had.

John Dehlin [02:55:19] Okay. All right, well, Lizzy, you've provided really important insider information. Are there any other points you wanted to make about your experiences with our. Including, you know, what. What made you leave?

Guest [02:55:36] Yeah, I. I would love to share that. That. That was a wild ride. Even with all these, like, red flags and stuff. I was pretty ignorant to it or I closed my eyes to it until my boss got fired and she was fired, like, so out of the blue. It was just wild. So what happened was, in my time with Oor, like our department, like I said, unorganized and messy, and we were trying to fix that. And my boss. Boss was trying to fix that too. Like, she was Trying to like, really make a process for all of us so that things would just be easier in the future. In doing this, she was trying to like, communicate a lot with other departments to get some like, collaboration with them. And this was kind of seen as like, like her stepping out of her bounds, maybe like being too pushy, I don't know. But basically they ended up demoting her without having any discussion about it. They didn't give her any warnings. They didn't say, hey, like, you're not doing this right. You're not doing this right. They just demoted her out of nowhere. And then within the same week, there was a employee wide meeting. And on the board of all the employees, like with the chart that says, you know, who's what, she wasn't on there at all. And she was really confused. Our whole department was really confused. And so she reached out to the cxo, I believe, and she said, like, what. What's going on here? Like, am I even an employee anymore? And they said, like, talk to me on Monday. You know, like, they didn't give her a straight answer. And so the whole thing was just handled so poorly that whole weekend. Like she was like freaking out, wondering if she was still an employee or not. And then the following Monday, they fired her. And they couldn't give her a real reason. They, you know, one, one person said, oh, like, you know, department changes. One person said, there is no real reason. There is no HR department. The HR department was put in shortly after this, I believe within, I think six months after she was fired. And I think that was a big reason why. But anyways, so this whole thing was just handled so poor, poorly. And I do believe it was completely sexist because the person who took her place is a man. And he's, he's great. But he said that he's pushed back harder than she ever did. And they haven't fired him yet. So it's just really unfortunate to see the sexism. And that came, that came from the CEO at the time, that came from Brad. She had written out this letter to Tim to say, like, what was going on because she believed that he, he wouldn't stand for it, but no response from him. And, you know, that email eventually got leaked to her boss, which was a big reason why she got fired too. In the end, they said, like, if you speak out about your experience, we will, we will sue you. And that's a big reason why she didn't want to be here today because she's trying to move on from it. And she doesn't want to be sued. And so that. That's crazy to me that they would even threaten to sue her because of her experiences with this. So after all that went down, it kind of, like, opened my eyes that this wasn't the perfect organization I thought. And at the time, I still believed in the mission. So I eventually quit. Within. Within the month, I was done.

Anna Merlan [02:59:07] And.

Guest [02:59:08] And after that, I was just gonna, like, lay low and, like, say, like, I still believe in the mission, but I can't, like, personally support it anymore. And eventually I started, like, finally reading the. The articles, listening to the podcasts about it and realizing that it's not. It's not a good organization. Oh, man, I cannot hear you.

Tim Marchman [02:59:39] Audio is off, John.

Guest [02:59:40] Okay, there we go.

John Dehlin [02:59:41] Oh, thank you. Thanks, Ron. I'll ask again, Lizzie, does it surprise you at all to hear that Tim Ballard has apparently been removed from Operation Underground Railroad and is no longer the CEO? Do you have any. Do you have any information or even speculation as to why they would get rid of their founder, you know, and of their chief spokesperson and fundraiser?

Guest [03:00:07] No, I have no idea. When I saw that, me and my former boss, we were just chatting about it, and, like, we. I have no clue. I was just flabbergasted because he's kind of been, you know, the. The main spotlight. It has really been about him. So I don't know why they would take away, you know, the face of O. R. Unless, I guess, unless they're trying to change that. Like, if they were wanting to make changes to make it more about, like, the kids rather than Tim, then good for them. But other than that, I have no idea why he would step down.

John Dehlin [03:00:35] Okay. All right. Well, Lizzy, I really appreciate you coming on and giving your perspective. In fairness, I'll just say, you know, sometimes in businesses, including nonprofits, management and employees don't get along or employees don't get along, and people have to be terminated for whatever reason. A lot of times you can't speak about reasons publicly. A lot of times terminations happen just because of vision disagreements or personality disagreements. And I don't want to give the impression that just because someone was terminated or even terminated in a way that they or you felt bad about that, that means necessarily, it's got to be a bad, you know, nonprofit. But at the same time, every nonprofit, the more wealthy the nonprofit is, clearly the better it should be managed.

Anna Merlan [03:01:27] Right?

Guest [03:01:27] For sure.

John Dehlin [03:01:28] Yeah.

Guest [03:01:29] My last couple thoughts. Just if I could throw them in real quick. Just something that my boss was talking about. She. She had learned that someone may. This was an allegation. So it's just speculation that the person that she replaced who left Oor anyways, sorry, let me get back to this. There was. There was a rumor that went out that a survivor was sexually assaulted by someone at a rehab center that, like, our put this kid in. And they didn't do anything about it and they didn't, like, you know, change rehab centers and things. So that was a big red flag, the last red flag that I saw. I know you've talked about Elizabeth Smart a couple times, and I asked about that when I was working there. I said, like, why. Why don't these people partner with us? Why doesn't Elizabeth Smith Smart partner with us? And there was a couple other organizations that we talked about potentially partnering with us, but then ended up not. And the reasoning was that, like, there was jealousy, which is just crazy to say now, but like, that there was jealousy amongst these organizations and that Oor was getting a lot of the limelight. And because of that, other orgs didn't want to, like, partner with us or like, they just didn't. They just didn't want to be associated with us. And I thought that was so strange back then, but that was. That was the reasoning that they gave us back then. So that was just.

John Dehlin [03:02:57] So basically, they said that they parted ways with the Elizabeth Smart foundation because the Elizabeth. Elizabeth Smart foundation was jealous at all the attention that Tim Ballard was receiving. Is that what you're saying?

Guest [03:03:11] I think so. Again, I. There were a few other organizations as well, so this may be clumping it all in one, but there were other organizations were jealous of what we were doing, and so they didn't want to be with us. I'm not sure if that's specific to Lizzo Smart situation, but it was kind of clubbed together when they talked about it.

Final Reflections and Closing Thoughts

John Dehlin [03:03:30] All right. All right, Lizzie, any final words you want to say? Because again, to my. To my dear nephew's point, there's a lot of people out there, number one, that were inspired by the movie, number two, that care deeply about human trafficking, child sex trafficking, sex trafficking in general, child abuse, pedophilia. And they feel like anyone who speaks out against Tim Ballard or our or the movie Sound of Freedom, that they're basically, in effect, at best, you know, preventing others from being solutions to this problem. And at worst, they're pedophilias. Pedophiles or abusers or intentionally protecting abusers or pedophiles or traffickers just by speaking out against Tim Ballard our or the movie. So, you know, there's an argument that says regardless of the lies, regardless of the deceptions, regardless of the financial misappropriations, if any of those things are true, let's just say they're all allegations. There are those who say regardless of all of that, we should just stay quiet, support this movie. Support Tim Ballard. Support o you are. Because it's an important issue. Any final thoughts you want to share?

Guest [03:04:55] Yeah, sharing things that are fear mongering, detracts from the truth. And so like, like others have said today, if we're focused on something that's not even happening, we're going to miss exactly what's happening right in front of our eyes. And especially in the United States, the way human trafficking works is not anything that we see in the movies. So to, to say, like, oh, we're taking away, like we're, we're taking away from the cause by speaking out against this is a little bit ridiculous because I would say that, you know, by ouar coming out with these kind of narratives, they're taking away from the cause. They're the ones that are pulling our attention to something that's way more sensationalized because that's what grabs people's emotions. Emotions are evoked easily. And because of that, like, people are drawn in and it's just, it's just that's not how it is. We need to be focusing on the real signs of human trafficking within our families, within vulnerable populations, you know, low socio, socioeconomic status populations. Like those are what we need to focus on. The vulnerable people, not, you know, these kids are being kidnapped out of nowhere. And, and it's unfortunate because I see it in the Facebook groups that I'm in. Like locally, people are talking about like, oh man, like I think my kid almost got trafficked. And like, it's super good to be aware. We always should be aware of our surroundings. But it's, it's fear mongering to believe that our kids are ever going to be kidnapped. It's, it's less than 10% of, of trafficking total. And that comes from Polaris because I've looked at setup before. But if you want to be like part of the solution, you should be looking at like reputable organizations like Polaris or local organizations like I know in Utah there's like Dalia's Hope and just try to start there.

John Dehlin [03:06:42] I love it. And I guess I'll go ahead and one more time highlight the resource that the reporters highlighted. Freedom Network USA at freedomnetworkusa.org, advancing human rights to address human trafficking in the United States. That's another organization that has been recommended. It is not that we are trying to say that human trafficking doesn't exist, that it's not a problem, that it's not other than like genocide and war, you know, one of the most horrific things on the planet. It certainly is. We're just saying the organizations that are actually supporting and helping victims the most are the ones that deserve the most of our time, attention, and money. And that's why we're talking about this today. Right, Lizzy?

Guest [03:07:41] Yep. Absolutely. Totally agree.

John Dehlin [03:07:44] Well, thanks for joining us, Lizzy. We really appreciate you being on today and sharing what you've learned.

Guest [03:07:51] Yeah. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much.

John Dehlin [03:07:53] All right. Stay in touch. I'm going to go ahead and just make the final point that I've already made. I'm just going to make it again. You know, Tim Ballard is a member of the Mormon Church. And we all know that the Mormon Church, along with its law firm, Curt McConkie and its lobbyists, have explicitly lobbied in states like Utah and in states like Arizona to make it so their bishops, their stake presidents, their mission presidents are not mandatory reporters to the police, to social services when they discover that ward members or stake members or missionaries are abusing children. And so the Mormon Church literally actively fights to prevent child abusers, pedophiles, and even human traffickers from being reported to the police and from being processed through the criminal justice system. And what I want to do is, is I want to highlight that to Tim Ballard and to anyone else who stands up and says they're against the abuse of children. If you want to make a difference, Tim Ballard, in protecting children like Sam Young did, like Sam Young did, getting excommunicated by the Mormon Church for trying to protect children. If you, Tim Ballard, want to truly protect children, one excellent place to start is to call out the abuse that's happening within the Mormon Church and to call out Mormon Church leadership and Curtin McConkie leadership in keeping the Mormon Church and its leaders from reporting abuse and abusers to law enforcement officials. You, Tim Ballard, could call out the Mormon Church and do more than anyone to protect tens of thousands of children within the Mormon Church. And again, if you want to expand that, you could call out the Catholic Church and evangelical Christianity for all that they do to prevent child abusers from being reported to authorities and to police and all they do to protect abusers and at the expense of victims. That's my little rant today. Because I think that one of the biggest costs, one of the negative costs of Tim Ballard our and of this movie Sound of Freedom is that it takes our attention away from the abuse that's happening right under our noses in the Mormon Church and the Catholic Church and the Evangelical church by clergy and by members of the church in good standing. It takes our attention away from that very prevalent abuse and it redirects our attention to fictitious abuse of kidnapping and trafficking that is very rare that is allegedly happening overseas. That probably is happening on some level, but not in any way to the prevalence that Tim Ballard and our are claiming. And, and certainly, you know, not being resolved or addressed or fixed and the victims care being addressed in any way like Tim Ballard and our have claimed that they've been addressing and helping in these paramilitary jumps and in the aftercare programs that apparently are not doing the job that many of the donors think they're doing. So that's my rant. I hope that makes sense. I hope that we will all do our part to fight abuse, to fight sexual abuse, to fight pedophilia, to fight human trafficking, but do it in ways that really, really impact positively and that take care of the victims. And yeah, so that's. That's my little rant. I want to thank Gerardo for helping to produce this episode. I want to thank Maven as well for helping to moderate the comments. And I especially want to again thank Anna Merlon and Tim, Tim Marchman of Vice.com for their excellent reporting. I want to thank as well Lynn Kenneth Packer for his reporting. Please check out his website. And I want to thank all of you who support Mormon Stories and the Open Stories foundation and make all of this possible. We have a $50 super chat donation from Jeff Edmondson that says keep looking for the truth in all things. Thank you, Jeff for that donation. Thank you to travelers. He writes. Thanks for covering the story. I believe Tim Ballard has become popular because QAnon conspiracy theorists are obsessed with trafficking. Thank you so much for your donation. Thanks to Carol Barnard for her support. We really appreciate all of you who make Mormon Stories in the Open Stories foundation possible and for your donations. Thanks to Kara Skinner who writes. Thank you for discussing this. I am excited to hear your opinion. And again, to everyone else who through super chats or through just regular, regular donations to the Open Stories foundation, make all of this possible. I will say again that we at the Open Stories foundation stand squarely against abuse, stand against human trafficking in all its forms. We stand for financial transparency. That's why we publish our 990s every year. We stand for discussing openly what we do with our money and how we use our money. And we do our best to use our donors money in the exact ways that we claim that we're using the money. And we do our best to responsibly and ethically pay me, pay my wife Margi, pay our staff through an independent financial compensation committee by the board. And I invite anyone who has concerns about how I'm compensated, how Margi's compensated, how other people on the staff are compensated to write our board and to express their concerns because we do our best to be as transparent and as honest and as open as possible. A couple other super chats are coming in. Thanks to Julie Bennion for that $50 donation. And thanks to Ann Casillas who writes thank you for addressing this. Yeah, thank you. And thank you Julie. And thanks to everyone who makes this possible. This, this podcast possible. Maven writes, any organization sheltered from scrutiny or accountability is a haven for real predators. Thanks Maven for that comment as well. And I want to just encourage any or all of you who care passionately about these issues to please speak up and donate to the causes that you think are important. Speak up and speak out. I'll share a couple more comments that have been highlighted. Art of Floundering Media rights I contacted our in 2017. I am a former Marine with some skills I thought they could use. I quickly determined that Ballard and our are running a grift. That's a very strong accusation. That's Art of Floundering Media's opinion. But you know, as a former Marine, he's entitled to that opinion. On the positive side, for Tim Ballard and our I'll read my nephew John Faust. He writes, let's say you are right, this is all a lie, which I am skeptical about. So all these people see the movie cry and have an emotional experience. Ballard created a myth that brings attention and inevitable funding to child sex trafficking. Claiming this movie somehow takes away from child victims who were groomed is insane to me. This isn't about all child victims matter or a competition for who has it worse. A child victim who is molested by their bishop versus a sex slave. I'll just say thanks for sharing your opinion. John Faust we welcome Unlike other outlets, we welcome varying opinions. I hope, John Faust, you feel like we have shared your opinions fairly on this show. I've done my best to address the point that undue attention to dishonest narratives, undue money and time and attention directed at dishonest or unproductive or unhealthy organizations does a disservice to the organizations that need money, that need attention, and that are doing an important job at helping victims. And the final point I'll make is, in my opinion, honesty matters, truth matters. And, and like the Mormon Church and like Joseph Smith, frankly, who apparently have dealt in deception of overt knowing, deception of members, of leaders, of participants, the ends do not justify the means. Mormon Stories John de Lynn we do not believe in telling lies even for a good cause, even if it's for a just outcome. We do not believe that it's ethical or moral or good to tell lies, and certainly not to make large amounts of money by whipping up people's emotions in the telling of those lies, even if it's for a good cause. So if I, or Mormon Stories or the Oba Stories foundation have told lies and whipped up emotions, we want to be called out, we want to be corrected, we want to be held accountable. Because I will never feel okay about telling lies, whipping up people's emotions to earn money for me or my organization, even if it's for a good cause. So I'm just going to say, Nephew John Faust I'm going to just have to say, we're going to have to agree to disagree on this point. Thanks again to everyone who supports us today and please be good to each other, be kind to each other and share the word. Share this podcast with everyone. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Please subscribe and follow our Facebook channel. Follow us on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, on Facebook, wherever you find our information. You know the best way that we can grow is by subscriptions, by liking, by commenting, and by spreading information and word of mouth. So please support us if you can. You guys take care of each other and we hope to see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Bye everybody.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.