Tag: human trafficking

Five of Tim Ballard’s Alleged Victims Have Filed a Lawsuit Against Him

Tim Ballard, the founder and former head of the anti-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad whose heavily fictionalized exploits were the subject of this summer’s surprise box-office hit Sound of Freedom, has been sued in Utah’s Third District Court by five women accusing him of sexual misconduct.  The Utah news outlet KSL was the first to report the filing. An accompanying press release issued by their attorney, Suzette Rasmussen, reports that additional suits are likely to be filed by more women in the coming month. 

“The tragic irony is not lost on these five women,” Rasmussen wrote in the press release. “Tim Ballard literally trafficked them for his own sexual and egotistical gratification.” 

In the suit, the women, who all live in Utah, and who filed the suit using initials to protect their privacy, accuse Ballard in detail of “coerced sexual contact.”  The suit alleges that Ballard and/or the co-defendants have committed sexual assault and battery, conspiracy, fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and “outrage,” and accuses OUR of failing in its fiduciary duties, asking for a trial by jury and damages in an amount to be proven at trial. 

The central allegations have to do with the so-called “couples ruse,” which is described in the suit as “a tool for sexual grooming.” 

Since the allegations of sexual misconduct were first reported on by VICE News and Utah journalist Lynn Packer, Ballard has insisted, for instance in a lengthy Instagram video, that the couples ruse, in which a male undercover operative is accompanied by a female one posing as his wife, is simply a tool to rescue children and keep operators from having to engage in the sexual abuse of alleged trafficking victims.

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Over 100 Survivors Rescued and 160 Arrests Made in North East Ohio Human Trafficking Sting, Including EMTs, Nurses, and Educators

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced Monday the sweeping success of a weeklong statewide human trafficking operation, aptly named ‘Operation Buyer’s Remorse.’ The operation aimed to arrest individuals attempting to purchase sex and identify survivors of human trafficking.

“Operation Buyer’s Remorse” is a weeklong statewide human trafficking crackdown in Ohio. The operation was led by the Southeastern Ohio Human Trafficking Task Force and local law enforcement agencies.

“Law enforcement across Ohio teamed up in a concerted effort to stem the demand that fuels human trafficking,” Yost said in a press release.

“The success of this operation is measured not only by the number of arrests but also by the resources offered to survivors of human trafficking and the intelligence gathered that will propel long-term investigations forward.”

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Operation Underground Railroad Child-Rescue Missions Were Based on Psychic Intelligence

It was a tense day in February 2016 for Tim Ballard and operatives working for Operation Underground Railroad, the anti-human trafficking group he founded. They were on what would prove to be a bumbling and ineffective mission to save a trafficked child Ballard believed was being held in a village on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. 

This wasn’t just any mission, however. The child they were searching for was Gardy Mardy, a missing Haitian boy whose abduction Ballard has portrayed as “the case that led us to found OUR.” Joining him and his team of elite operatives was Janet Russon—a psychic medium from Utah whose supposed visions were guiding the mission.

According to documents from a now-closed criminal investigation into Ballard and OUR obtained by VICE News through a public-records request, video shot by a crew hired by OUR captured Russon talking with Gardy’s father, Guesno Mardy. In the conversation, Russon seemed to credit herself with locating Gardy. She assured him that his son was nearby, and that without her visions, he never would have been found. 

“No way you would have found this place, no way,” she proclaimed, according to a transcript of the conversation written by a criminal investigator working on a joint investigation between the FBI and the Davis County Attorney’s Office. 

“Guesno, buddy,” Ballard said during the conversation. “He’s here. We’re gonna get him.” 

In fact, Gardy was not found that day, or any day since. There is no evidence to suggest that he was ever in the village where Russon’s visions led OUR and his hopeful father. Dave Lopez, a former head of OUR’s “ops team” who oversaw the organization’s work in Haiti, told an FBI special agent and a Davis County investigator in October 2020 that Russon’s visions were “the only form of intelligence they were using to locate Gardy.” As far as he knew, he said, OUR had no intelligence even suggesting Gardy was alive apart from what was provided by Russon. This was Ballard’s “most guarded secret,” Lopez told the FBI. 

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Tim Ballard’s Departure From Operation Underground Railroad Followed Sexual Misconduct Investigation

Tim Ballard’s exit from Operation Underground Railroad earlier this year followed an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct involving seven women, according to sources with direct knowledge of the organization.

Sources familiar with the situation said that the self-styled anti-slavery activist, who appears to be preparing for a Senate run, invited women to act as his “wife” on undercover overseas missions ostensibly aimed at rescuing victims of sex trafficking. He would then allegedly coerce those women into sharing a bed or showering together, claiming that it was necessary to fool traffickers. Ballard, who was played by Jim Caviezel in the hit film Sound of Freedom, is said to have sent at least one woman a photo of himself in his underwear, festooned with fake tattoos, and to have asked another “how far she was willing to go,” in the words of a source, to save children. These sources requested anonymity because they fear retaliation.

The total number of women involved is believed to be higher than seven, as that would only account for employees, not contractors or volunteers. One source close to OUR has detailed knowledge of Ballard making sexual advances to a volunteer using methods similar to those he allegedly used with OUR employees. Those methods are also consistent with his conduct toward another former volunteer who spoke to VICE News.

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Operation Underground Railroad spent years downplaying criminal investigation

FOX 13 News was the first to report in 2020 the Davis County Attorney’s Office opened a criminal investigation into Tim Ballard and the non-profit organization he founded, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR).

Now that at least a portion of that investigation has concluded, there’s still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the focus of that case.

An article from VICE News published Friday morning gives a small snapshot, citing information about Ballard receiving “psychic readings” and communicating with the prophet Nephi.

Records show President M. Russell Ballard, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, was at least peripherally involved in the criminal investigation.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints released a statement to FOX 13 News on Friday, citing betrayal and “morally unacceptable” behavior from Tim Ballard.

Tim Ballard is not related to President M. Russell Ballard.

As FOX 13 News first reported in 2020, the investigation began with questions about money. Sources close to the investigation say it centered around potential charges of communications fraud and witness tampering.

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JPMorgan allegedly notified the government of $1 billion in suspicious transactions by Epstein

JPMorgan Chase allegedly informed the government of over $1 billion in transactions related to “human trafficking” by the late financier Jeffrey Epstein dating to 2003, a lawyer for the U.S. Virgin Islands said. 

The Wall Street giant reported the financial activity — which took place over 16 years — as “suspicious” to the Treasury Department in 2019 after Epstein died by suicide, Mimi Liu, a lawyer for the U.S. Virgin Islands, said at a recent hearing in its lawsuit against the bank, according to a transcript of the public proceeding.

“Epstein’s entire business with JPMorgan and JPMorgan’s entire business with Jeffrey Epstein was human trafficking,” Liu said. “The only reason that JPMorgan finally after 16 years reported the billion dollars in suspicious transactions for Jeffrey Epstein is because he was arrested, and then he was dead.” 

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Southwest Airlines Falsely Accuses Mom of Trafficking Biracial Daughter

A woman is suing Southwest Airlines after flight staff accused her of trafficking her child. Mary MacCarthy was flying with her 10-year-old daughter, “MM,” in 2021 when Southwest Airlines staff called the Denver Police Department and reported her as a suspected child trafficker.

MacCarthy is white, and her daughter is biracial. In a lawsuit against Southwest, MacCarthy alleges that she was suspected of trafficking her own daughter “for no reason other than the different color of her daughter’s skin from her own.”

“There was no basis to believe that Ms. MacCarthy was trafficking her daughter,” states the complaint, filed August 3 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, “and the only basis for the Southwest employee’s call was the belief that Ms. MacCarthy’s
daughter could not possibly be her daughter because she is a biracial child.”

MacCarthy and her daughter wouldn’t be the first multiracial family to find themselves facing human trafficking allegations at the airport. We keep hearing about flying families or couples falsely accused of being involved in trafficking because they don’t appear to be the same race or ethnicity.

It’s happened with interracial couples and with parents of mixed-race or adopted children. Cindy McCain, wife of the late Sen. John McCain, infamously fabricated catching a child trafficker when she reported to police a woman traveling with a child who was “a different ethnicity” from her.

This situation isn’t occurring in a vacuum. It comes amidst a decades-long moral panic about sex trafficking generally and child sex trafficking in particular. The panic has taken many forms, including the Department of Homeland Security encouraging War on Terror–style citizen surveillance campaigns (“if you see something, say something”) to stop trafficking; states requiring airports to post human trafficking hotline numbers and awareness signs; and government-sponsored programs to train airline and airport staff to spot alleged signs of trafficking.

Most of the “signs” these people are trained to spot are nonsense—impossibly vague or broad. For instance, Airline Ambassadors International trains airline and airport staff (using a training program approved by Homeland Security) to keep an eye on “children, those who accompany them, and young women traveling alone” and people who seem “nervous.” Training materials also tend to tell people to go with their gut instincts. Unsurprisingly, this leads to a lot of racial profiling, with ill-informed instincts about what a family “should” look like coming into play.

The wider campaign to “stop sex trafficking” via vigilance on airplanes and at airports is itself based on the faulty idea that human trafficking (a category that includes both labor trafficking and sex trafficking) is mostly done by brazen cabals of international traffickers ushering victims into the U.S. and Americans victims out, or shipping victims around the country. But in the U.S., labor trafficking tends to be concentrated in specific industries and to involve various forms of worker exploitation more than the covert importation of human beings. And in the sex trades, exploitation tends to take place at a much smaller scale, with individuals or small groups—often people the victim knows—perpetuating it. It also tends to take place in the communities people live in or with victims and traffickers traveling by car, not using commercial airlines.

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40 human skulls, other bones used as decorations found in Kentucky man’s home, authorities say

Human remains — including dozens of skulls — were found inside a man’s house in Kentucky, according to authorities.

In an affidavit, an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted approximately 40 skulls, as well as femurs, hip bones, and a Harvard Medical School bag, were discovered during a raid at 39-year-old James Nott’s home in Bullitt County Tuesday morning.

The skulls were decorated around the furniture. One skull had a head scarf around it. One skull was located on the mattress where Nott slept. A Harvard Medical School bag was found inside the Residence,” Special Agent Sara J. Cunning noted in the affidavit.

Cunning wrote that authorities also found a slew of weapons, such as an AK-47 rifle, a .38 special, Charter Arms, a revolver, ammunition, grenades, and plates for body armor.

The FBI, along with the Mt. Washington Police Department, executed a warrant in connection with a search for guns and trafficked human remains, which led to Nott’s arrest.

During the search, “an FBI agent asked Nott asked if anyone else was inside the residence,” the document noted. “Nott responded, ‘only my dead friends.'”

Nott, who is a convicted felon, as he was arrested on gun charges in 2011, was also linked to a nationwide trafficking ring in which several suspects were accused of purchasing and selling stolen human remains, some of which were tied back to the Harvard Medical School and a mortuary in Arkansas.

The FBI began looking into Nott after he had chatted with Jeremy Pauley, a man from Pennsylvania — who was also being investigated for his role in the trafficking ring.

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Nobody is Torturing Children to Harvest Adrenochrome

There is a certain relatively small, but enthusiastic percentage of the population that are prone to believe in conspiracies. Having been someone who has put in some time debunking conspiracy theories over the years, I can tell you a little bit about their patterns of thought and the way that they argue. Usually, conspiracy theorists have such a poor understanding of the subject that they’re talking about that it seems like magic to them and thus, anything seems possible. On occasion, after being dragged over and over again for their conspiratorial beliefs, they’ll learn a little something about what they’re talking about, but their knowledge is often badly flawed because their goal is to “prove” their conspiracy theory right, not to actually get to the truth.

Their style of argumentation is usually illogical and incoherent. They tend to throw pretty much anything against the wall to see what sticks and then insist that you disprove every single thing they come up with, while completely ignoring the much larger piles of evidence supporting some mainstream belief they’re trying to undermine.

If you talk to 10 conspiracy theorists, they will typically all have different arguments supporting their beliefs. Disproving the pillars of their argument has no impact on them because their beliefs have no real logic or structure to them. If you disprove one of their key pieces of evidence, they just move on to the next. They also almost universally ignore the fact that theories don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re measured against competing theories. If I say the world is round and you say the world is flat, then how both competing theories handle questions and statements like, “If the world is flat, where’s the edge?” or “People have looked at Earth from space and we see that it’s not flat,” matter a lot. They do not look at it that way. They believe what they believe, and no amount of contrary evidence is going to change it.

It also must be noted that conspiracy theories often rely heavily on a “them” that you’re supposed to believe are capable of anything. This leads to statements like, “Of course, they’re behind (insert horrible thing here)! You don’t think that the ‘Republicans/Democrats/Jews/Karl Rove/Bushes/Clintons/George Soros/Rothschilds/Illuminati/Big Pharma/white supremacist Martians from Venus/whoever’ are capable of that? Are you naïve?”

After reading this basic rundown about how conspiracy theorists argue things to get you prepared for the aftermath of sharing this article everywhere someone promotes this idea (hint, hint), let’s start to talk about adrenochrome.

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Panic grips Special Forces community amid investigation into drugs, human trafficking

Panic and fear spread throughout the special operations community at Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, North Carolina as CID and FBI agents investigated members of 3rd Special Forces Group and Delta Force who allegedly were involved in drug and in one instance human trafficking, according to nearly a dozen current and former military sources.

The arrests began Thursday, Jan. 5 and culminated with a 100% recall and accountability formation for 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group yesterday.

It is unknown when the investigation into drug and human trafficking in the Fort Bragg area began, but it is known that the FBI became involved in investigating the deaths of Timothy Dumas and Delta Force operator Billy Lavigne in 2020 when both were found shot to death at a training site on Bragg.

Last week’s arrests began with investigators receiving more evidence after an undercover law enforcement officer posing as an underage girl helped arrest a member of 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group back in December. That individual was known to moonlight as a bouncer at a bar in Southern Pines frequented by the Special Forces community, a military source close to the situation explained to Connecting Vets. The Green Beret is alleged to have been pimping underaged girls to the Special Forces community at drug-fueled parties in Southern Pines.

“This is what happens when there is no war, no direction, and an 18-month red cycle with no mission,” a Special Forces soldier said. “So dudes are fucking around with young kids and the craziest drugs. All these lives ruined because people are just bored.”

Whether the individual rolled on his accomplices or law enforcement ripped the data from his cell phone, it quickly led to the arrest of another Green Beret involved in drug trafficking in 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group.

With the information of additional suspects in hand, CID and military police set up shop at one of the main bottlenecks to entering or exiting Fort Bragg: the Longstreet gate between the post and Southern Pines.

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