The founder of anti-child trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad, whose undercover exploits inspired the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, has been sued by five women for sexual abuse and harassment.
The lawsuit, filed in Salt Lake City Monday, alleges that Tim Ballard coerced women, who were part of his organization, into sexual acts during sting operations to catch sex traffickers. The allegations centre on a “couple’s ruse” he employed, in which the women posed as his wife to fool traffickers into thinking he was a legitimate client.
The suit comes a month after it was revealed that Ballard resigned from Operation Underground Railroad in June, after the organization hired a law firm to investigate allegations of Ballard’s sexual misconduct.
Ballard dismissed the abuse allegations last month and defended the couple’s ruse in an Instagram video. He said the tactic lets undercover male operatives explain why they can’t participate in sex acts with children or trafficked individuals, because their female partner won’t allow it.
“Hundreds, maybe thousands, of children have been rescued using this amazing tactic,” Ballard claimed.
But according to the five plaintiffs, Ballard subjected them to “coerced sexual contact” in private accommodations during these sting operations, because they had to “maintain the appearance of a romantic relationship at all times in case suspicious traffickers might be surveilling them,” the lawsuit claims.
“Is there anything you wouldn’t do to save a child?” Ballad allegedly asked each woman.
The women said the ruse would begin with Ballard and the female operative taking cross-country trips to “practice” their “sexual chemistry” with tantric yoga, couple’s massages with escorts and performing lap dances on him.
Then, during the missions, Ballard encouraged the women to share the same bed and shower with him before eventually coercing them into sexual contact, the lawsuit alleges, which included “several sexual acts with the exception of actual penetration, in various states of undress.”
“When these women found themselves questioning the legitimacy of tactics involving sexual contact, they often doubted their own instincts, relying on Ballard’s breadth of knowledge about rescue missions to convince themselves that such tactics were normal,” the lawsuit reads. Ballard is a former U.S. Homeland Security agent.
While promotional materials portrayed Operation Underground Railroad’s overseas missions as “paramilitary drop-ins to arrest traffickers and rescue children,” they mostly involved “going to strip clubs and massage parlors across the world, after flying first class to get there, and staying at five-star hotels, on boats, and at VRBOs (vacation rentals by owner) across the globe,” the lawsuit reads.
Ballard also allegedly used his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to persuade the women to trust him, and used a passage in the Book of Mormon to justify performing “unconventional” tasks. Most of the plaintiffs were or are Mormons, the lawsuit notes.
Ballard said a high-ranking church leader, M. Russell Ballard, no relation, gave him special permission to use the couples ruse “as long as there was no sexual intercourse or kissing.” Tim Ballard also allegedly received “prophecies” about his own greatness and “future as a United States senator, president of the United States and ultimately the Mormon prophet to usher in the second coming of Christ,” the lawsuit further reads.
The church in a September statement condemned Ballard for “unauthorized use” of the church leader’s name for personal advantage and “activity regarded as morally unacceptable.”
Ballard has categorically denied the allegations raised in the lawsuit through a lawyer for the SPEAR Fund, his new anti-trafficking organization.
“The SPEAR Fund did not exist during the time of the alleged conduct and had nothing to do with it. Mr. Ballard vehemently denies the allegations brought by these unnamed women. He looks forward to vindicating his name in the courts where evidence, and not unsubstantiated accusations in the media, decides the outcome,” Mark L. Eisenhut writes.
The lawyers representing the five plaintiffs said “the tragic irony” of this situation “is not lost” on them.
“Tim Ballard literally trafficked them for his own sexual and egotistical gratification, all while using the noble causes of fighting trafficking and serving God as his ‘Ruse,'” write lawyers Suzette Rasmussen and Alan Mortensen.
— With files from The Associated Press
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