Episode 248: From the Cavortex Into the BallardZone
Jim Caviezel is the moist-eyed actor who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ — and has since continued to do so in his own headcanon. He’s also a fan of QAnon, which is why we’ve covered him in the past: Episode 143, Enter the Cavortex, in which we found out how much of a nightmare he is on film sets, and Episode 238, Sound of Freedom, in which we explored his latest child trafficking summer blockbuster. The movie saw him play Tim Ballard, the head of tastelessly-named and questionably-run anti-child-trafficking non-profit Operation Underground Railroad ( OUR). But since the film was released — and promptly vaulted to the center of the culture wars — Ballard has stepped down from OUR, been accused of sexual misconduct, and was even denounced by the Mormon Church. We cover all of that in this episode with our guests: Vice journalists Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman, who’ve been covering Ballard and his organization for a while now.
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QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
REFERENCES
Recent Reporting on Operation Underground Railroad by Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman
Mormon Church Denounces Tim Ballard’s “Morally Unacceptable” Activities
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvjypz/mormon-church-denounces-tim-ballards-morally-unacceptable-activities
Tim Ballard’s Departure From Operation Underground Railroad Followed Sexual Misconduct Investigation
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkaqvn/tim-ballards-departure-from-operation-underground-railroad-followed-sexual-misconduct-investigation
‘Sound of Freedom’ Producer Felt the Naked Breasts of Apparently Underage Trafficking Victim
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3mq5w/sound-of-freedom-producer-underage-trafficking-victim
Operation Underground Railroad Child-Rescue Missions Were Based on Psychic Intelligence
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bpda/operation-underground-railroad-child-rescue-missions-were-based-on-psychic-intelligence
Welcome, listener, to the 248th chapter of the QAA Podcast, the From the Kvortex into the Ballard Zone episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Fields, Jake Rakitansky, and Travis View.
Jim Caviezel is the moist-eyed actor who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.
And has since continued to do so in his own headcanon.
He's also a fan of QAnon, which is why we've covered him in the past.
Episode 143, Enter the Kvortex, in which we found out how much of a nightmare he is on film sets.
And episode 238, Sound of Freedom, in which we explored his latest child trafficking summer blockbuster.
The movie saw him play Tim Ballard, the head of tastelessly named and questionably run anti-child trafficking non-profit Operation Underground Railroad, or O.U.R.
But since the film was released, and promptly vaulted to the center of the culture wars, Ballard has stepped down from O.U.R., been accused of sexual misconduct, and was even denounced by the Mormon Church.
We'll be covering all of that in this episode with our guests, Vice journalists Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman, who've been covering Ballard and his organization for a while now.
But before we jump into the Ballard Zone, I thought I'd catch you up with this handsome doppelganger.
Old Jimmy Caviezel, who's been up to all kinds of QAnon-related shenanigans that have landed him in hot water with just about everybody, including the director of Sound of Freedom, Alejandro Monteverde.
When asked by the LA Times whether in retrospect he thought Caviezel was the right man for the role,
Bonteverde answered, "The lead actor needs to really believe that the atrocities are happening
and have a conviction about it. When I was casting, I was looking for someone very passionate
about the subject matter. His conviction to want to shine a light on this was so deep that he got
The first time I met him, he was crying.
That is probably only, like, a kind of casting tip for Christian movies.
Like, I'm pretty sure if you just go into your casting for any other movie and you start weeping, they're like, okay, well, this guy's gonna be a nightmare on set.
Look, I will tell you, as somebody who spent the better part of a decade in, let's call them, the acting arts, the only time you want to be crying in an acting scenario is when the script tells you to.
Okay.
Yeah, but I mean, I think we all know that Caviezel always keeps a tear just like...
Can you can you imagine like walking into an interview room just seeing like a little boy of a man with like two hands like over his eyes?
Like wet and glistening already like before you even sit down.
You're perfect.
You're hired.
The interviewer pressed him a bit about whether he thought Jim had impacted the messaging of Sound of Freedom.
Monteverde explained, In this case, it did have an impact that was not in line
with who I am as a person, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, and that is the pure reason I am here, because I need to
say who I am.
I don't want to speak about other people's views.
I want to stay as objective as possible to make films that create conversation and open dialogue about important subject matter.
My hope was that this film creates dialogue at the social level about a subject matter.
Human trafficking.
And that's what's happening.
Yeah, so kind of throwing him under the bus, but still being a little gentle.
In another interview with Variety, Monteverde stood up a bit for Caviezel, explaining that he really went the extra mile for the movie.
Jim was at the level of going to a hospital one day.
Like, he was really sick.
But I didn't have a contingency.
If I didn't shoot that day, we will lose the location.
So I went to Jim and I'm like, Jim, we need to shoot this.
He comes out with a bucket.
The bucket was not in the scene.
He was throwing up for real.
He could barely walk.
So I say, I want to rewrite it like you're hungover.
And he could only give me one, max two takes.
I respect that as a director.
To have an actor that is just gonna die for the part.
What they do after?
Everybody's entitled to speak their mind.
Now, on this particular film, yes, it did hurt my work.
And that's why I'm here talking now instead of secluding myself.
It's time for me, the author, the writer, and the director to say what was the motive of the film.
So, old Jimmy with a bucket.
I mean, the funniest thing is he did clarify this in a later interview, and it makes it sound a lot less heroic, which is that they show up to set, they can't find Jim, and they have to go and, like, knock on his hotel door, and he's just, like, in bed, and he's sick with, like, gastroenteritis.
Oh no, poor guy.
So he did end up going to the hospital, like, after this, I guess.
But, yeah, I don't know.
He's just in there with diarrhea.
He's puking.
I mean, this is the sacrifice you have to make for indie filmmaking, I guess.
Yeah, you gotta shit in a bucket, like, halfway through the scene.
Yeah, that's commitment, you know?
It takes a lot.
A lot of people don't have what it takes to make it in Hollywood.
You gotta cry.
You gotta vomit.
You gotta shit.
You gotta cry, you gotta vomit, you gotta shit.
So, let's examine what exactly Jim Caviezel did to elicit these statements by Monteverde.
Well, I'm here to tell you that the famed Cavortex is still in full effect.
Now, a small reminder for those not familiar, this was originally coined by an anonymous person, one of three that I spoke to, who worked on set with him for years, and this is what she told me.
Very intense.
So he could catch you in what we call the cavortex, where it's just him soft talking about three inches from your face.
Total stream of consciousness.
But not a consciousness that was going in a linear fashion.
I've never had a real conversation with him in years of working together.
This is like the kind of guy who, you know, will like wander up to you on set and be like, I was waiting at a red light on the way over to set and I saw, have you ever eaten at Big Boy, at the Big Boy Diner?
You know, that place is owned by a guy.
He came over to California in 1942.
This was shortly during the war.
And I don't know what you know about the war, but a lot of people have a lot of what I would call misunderstandings about Adolf Hitler.
You know, some of his writings, some of his teachings.
And then did you see that they brought the celery sticks?
They're already cut up for the craft services.
You should go.
I think they've even put some peanut butter on them and some raisins too.
Ants on a log.
It's a snack my mother used to make.
It is the type of person that makes me really anxious where within like two or three sentences, they've already broken off into so many tangents that you're like, oh my god, are we ever going to make it back to the main one?
And also, this has already taken up a lot of time.
Do I want it to go full circle?
And so I just start to become alarmed, you know, and just it's hard to listen.
Yeah and if you're like a PA or you know wardrobe department or something you have so many things to do you know you're constantly everybody's constantly scrambling you know to make sure everything's ready so meanwhile you're thinking about like getting yelled at by your boss because you know the costume change isn't set up yet and you're being close talked to by the star who you can't really get out of because you don't want to offend them because they're Yeah.
A small taste, though, of what Jake, as an adult, would be like on set.
Are you kidding?
Are you kidding?
Everybody loved me.
Are you kidding?
Everybody loved me.
Whenever I left the set, they would be like, hey man, we should have you back.
That was great.
That was the only feedback I ever got.
My version was comedic.
Yours, I guess, continues your image as a good guy, friend of the people.
No, it was true.
I'm just stating facts.
Wow, that's incredible.
See, he has no comedy when it comes to his own integrity.
Please do not misunderstand him.
Oh Lord, please don't let Jake be misunderstood.
I reviewed multiple interviews with the likes of Steve Bannon, Jordan Peterson, Fox and Friends, Devin Nunes, and some far-right Christian guy just called Jeff Tarp.
Oh, come on.
Yeah.
Jeff Tarp?
Yeah.
Talkin' with Tarp.
Yeah, Talkin' with Tarp, a new series on SiriusXM.
I'll have you know he runs the far-right Christian channel Elijah Streams.
Talkin' with Tarp, where we put a tarp over Jeff and...
Gotta be careful.
I'm wading into Julian territory.
No good.
Yeah, I know.
If he gets agitated, his name is Jeff Safety Blanket.
You gotta put that little shiny blanket over him.
Make sure there's no air bubbles under there.
Jeff has unfortunately passed away.
The tarp had no holes in it.
Please Lord, please Lord, make Jeff Tarp not be misunderstood.
I've got some fun highlights for you, friend.
But first, let's check in with former future President Donald Trump, who recently spoke at a thing called the Concerned Women for America Summit.
Or as it's known as, Quass.
And you know, Jim Cavazel, who's a big actor, put it very well in the movie Sound of Freedom, God's children are not for sale.
He said that, God's children are not for sale.
Good movie.
That was a good movie, by the way.
Jim is a wonderful guy.
Of course, the French actor, Jim Cavazel.
He comes from France, they make great movies over there.
Great movies from French actor Jim Caviezel.
Great guy, great movie, great movie, great chase scene at the end.
Trump must have gotten a note on his pronunciation because this is him later in the same evening speaking at an event called the Prey Vote Stand Summit, organized by the Family Research Council.
I just know he's gonna go, Caviezel!
Like he's gonna make it.
I just know he's gonna overcorrect.
Let's hear it.
What do we got?
And his Jim Caviezel was a great guy.
You know who he is?
The movie, Sound of Freedom, he said, God's children are not for sale.
Very simply.
He did.
He made like a scowl.
Yeah.
You know what?
I think somebody might have flipped the switch on the back of Trump's coattails to 1.5 speed.
He sounds a little higher, a little sped up.
Oh, man.
Both of these events, of course, are organized by quote-unquote faith leaders.
These are moneyed organizations dedicated to imposing their idea of Christianity on the rest of America, for our pleasure.
So, that's why they're concerned.
They're concerned that we're maybe turning satanic, and they want us to, um, let's see, pray, vote, stand.
That sounds like, I mean, breathe must be the next one, too.
It sounds like what you're supposed to do if the plane is crashing, you know?
It's what you read on, like...
Like the little card.
The stop, drop and roll summit?
Yeah.
So, Caviezel, I really want you to understand the power of the Kvortex, listener.
And, sure, some satanic puppets are willing to play you shortened clips of Jim's appearances on Bannon's war room to promote his movie, like Travis View.
But I want to give you a couple of longer clips so you can truly behold the Kvortex at work.
Keep in mind that through all of these clips, Steve Bannon is just trying to get Caviezel to plug the movie's website so they can get their weird pyramid scheme to work and sell tickets.
This is the most powerful movie since The Passion of the Christ is Sound of Freedom.
And let me tell you, that devil, he does not want you to see this.
What does devil mean?
It means divider.
Satan, Satanus, Greek root, accuser.
If there is a God, why do these things happen?
Oh, he's had his fun poking himself at the people that go out and try to do the right thing for God.
But that's it.
St.
Paul says, to live is Christ, to die is gain.
Well, I'm going to take him as his word because if I don't, I got nothing left.
And right now we have our Bibles being ripped from us.
We're supposed to go along with the LGBTQ community.
Where's our Pope?
Why is he not speaking out when poor Catholics are being ripped to kingdom come from the FBI?
These are the things that are going on in there.
It's like a...
A tentacle.
An octopus with arms.
It's many, many arms, but you gotta go after the head of the octopus in this one.
Who is it?
The Central Banks?
The IMF?
The UCB?
The Private West Central Banks?
The Biz?
The Rothschild Banks?
We have a Rothschild Pope.
And there are great Americans out there that are fighting right now.
Fighting with all their hearts, but they don't have a voice.
So I'll be that voice.
I saw what John the Baptist did.
I think about him all the time in this situation.
Would you lose your head for Christ?
Would you?
I would, because I love him.
I love him.
And I know who's Christ in this movie.
Tim Ballard.
Tim Ballard.
And I know you out there that you're going to say, oh, Tim Ballard, Mormon.
Forget it.
Listen to me.
Do you not know the Gospels?
Do you know the story about this?
Let's pretend there was a Catholic who walks by and sees a guy that was beaten up.
He does nothing.
Walks past him.
Say there was a Protestant evangelical walks by.
He sees him.
Does nothing.
Then a Mormon walks by.
Names Tim Ballard.
And he does something.
The Bible is alive right now.
We're all playing different characters.
I got to play Jesus.
Some of us are playing Judas.
Jesus, I am on your side.
Touch me, touch me, Jesus!
You know, he says every single line with the desperation of someone trying to talk a suicidal person off of a ledge.
Just this, you know, this straining, this pain, this desperation to communicate something just really important just constantly in everything he says.
It's kind of exhausting to listen to.
Yeah, it's a big jumble of, like, every single conspiracy.
And you can see there's a great Calvin and Hobbes line where he says that, you know, the way his brain is wired, you can almost hear the fuses blowing.
And that's, you know, I think that sort of applies to Jim here.
I mean, to me, he sounds like Mel Gibson's character at the end of Conspiracy Theory.
You know, when, you know, he's basically got every single conspiracy that's been uploaded into his brain and, you know, it's just causing him to go mad.
After minutes on end like this, Bannon is finally able to break the Kvortex.
When Fox was doing this movie, they didn't want me.
I'm not saying all of Fox doesn't want me.
I'm saying at the power positions they would not hire me and I was one of their main guys.
I did a movie called The Thin Red Line and then suddenly after The Passion I couldn't get a job.
The studios wouldn't hire me, but see, they're all controlled by the central banks.
People have to... Do you really think Biden is the President of the United States?
Do you really think he's running our country?
Please.
Who above him?
Who are the puppeteers?
Here's how you'll know.
Everything I've said is the truth.
When they come out and they just blast me.
They have to.
They have no choice.
Because the devil has no choice in this matter.
God is coming for him, and I'm talking about the Christ Jesus God.
That is the one that's coming after him, and there's a big storm coming, and they know it.
So they have to go and threaten you with everything from Q, Anon, or whatever they want to say.
Do you know what Q really means?
It means question.
That's what one of these people told me, and I said, well, that seems like a good thing.
Anon, question, right?
Anons then go out and research it to see if it's true, because we've been fed their lies.
Think about Monday.
What happened?
A Durham report was dropped.
The FBI, the CIA, the whole...
All of these guys are involved.
Now, I know it's not all of them.
The lower guys are probably just crying.
But I'm asking you warriors to come out and tell the truth.
If we would just unite!
You know, I love that scene from Mel Gibson.
I love that movie.
When he runs out, where are you going?
I'm going to pick a fight.
Well, I'm here to pick one right now.
Because I'll do it for my children.
I'll do it for your children.
Because if you Hang on one second.
We're going to go to commercial break, but I want to make sure everybody can get to what we're trying to accomplish here.
Can I just say that he's actually, he's not being entirely truthful here.
Passion of the Christ came out, I think around 2004.
Yeah.
He fucking was hired on Person of Interest for years!
And TV is where the real money is.
Honestly, because not only are you getting paid, you know, $30,000, $40,000 per episode, and that's on the lower end, you're also getting residuals.
If he became a producer eventually on the show, you're collecting on that as well.
So, you know, he had a great job, you know, for many years.
I mean, Person of Interest ran from, like, I don't know, 2011 to, like, 2016 or something.
I mean, it was a long-running show.
So, I don't know.
I don't know about not being able to get a job.
Yeah, it's just simply not true.
He was literally hired by, like, a liberal Hollywood elite right after this for years on a TV show that was popular.
Yeah, Warner Brothers, my God.
I ran budgets for that show when I worked for Warner Brothers.
You know, he was, you know, he had a job.
Yep, he was doing fine.
Oh, it's such a shame, too, because I really, I loved that movie, The Thin Red Line.
I loved it, and I loved Caviezel in it.
I thought he was so good and so dynamic, and yeah, it's kind of sad to see him in this state, to be honest.
Funny, but also a little sad.
I mean, he's a kind of evil man.
I mean, it's like, and the damn LGBTQ, I mean, if you take away his acting chops and his weepiness, like he is a Fox News grandpa full of hatred.
Yeah, totally, totally, absolutely.
Just an awful man.
I mean, yeah, he basically said that the Catholic Church is controlled by the Jews.
I mean, yeah.
The Jews were like, we don't want it.
The funny thing with this appearance is that Bannon just keeps having him on the war room after this.
In June of 2023, Caviezel's a guest again, this time ranting about the quote-unquote Adrenochrome Empire, calling it, quote, an elite drug that they've used for many years, it's ten times more potent than heroin, and it has some mystical qualities as far as making you look younger.
So, that's not true?
Steve Bannon, during that appearance, tried to walk Jim back from the ledge by bringing up fear and loathing in Las Vegas.
But Caviezel refused to back down and claimed that just like with the Hunter Biden laptop, people who believe in adrenochrome as some sort of satanic elixir extracted from children would be vindicated.
A month later, when Trump organized a private viewing of Sound of Freedom, Steve had Jim on again.
Jim wore a Navy SEAL training long sleeve, which we know he loves that from our episode about his actions on the Person of Interest set, and he borderline, like, thinks of himself as a Navy SEAL.
So, in this one, he had a little rant reserved for the politicians who are pro-choice.
You are the vermin of the highest disorder for what you've done to my Lord and Savior, to my Father in Heaven, to my Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the Blessed Mother who bore that beautiful child.
You are going to have something hell to pay for, for what you've done.
Media, I'm not afraid of you at all.
You Satan.
That's right.
You three-letter agencies that have gone along with this wickedness.
that have torn these children from our mother's wombs.
Like he's like a toddler. He's like, "Ed Media, I am not afraid of you. You Satan."
Yeah, he's like, it's like when I try to do an accent that I have no idea what it sounds like.
It's the same with him, but he's trying to speak as if he's a character in the Bible.
Yeah.
You know, trying to use this kind of biblical style delivery and language.
It's very weird.
Yeah, yeah.
He thinks, he thinks he is.
Yeah.
Like, you know, I mean, I think he, what he was quoted as saying on Person of Interest was, technically I am Jesus.
In all fairness, if I was playing Jesus and I got struck by lightning while I was on the cross during the scene, I probably would think the same thing.
Jake, if you were playing Jesus, God would rain brimstone down on us and end this planet.
Why?
Jesus was a Jew?
This would be, this was, you know.
I would be fine, I think.
Probably not tall.
I probably don't have the hair for it, to be honest.
Yeah, that's why.
Nothing to do with you being Jewish.
You know what?
I would popularize the image of Jesus in a ball cap.
The man who got famous for popularizing working class Jesus.
Oh, that would be huge.
This episode better not fall into the wrong hands.
You wanna see what it looks like if he's a real carpenter?
Yeah.
Yeah, he's a little stouter.
Yeah, he's not on the treadmill every day.
What are you gonna do?
Look, he's decent at 2K.
He's working on his jump shot, okay?
I don't think God incarnate suffers from an anxiety disorder.
I would.
I mean, think about all that stuff you gotta look after.
Who's been good, who's been bad, you know?
You'd wander into the temple and say, hey, moneylenders, could you, like, not a little bit?
I wanna make this a big thing.
We can get along.
Could you just, like, ski that a little bit?
Soon, Caviezel is out of control again, claiming that people are aborting babies after they're born to harvest their organs.
And things get worse from there until he's addressing the Pope himself.
The organ harvesting you don't want me to talk about.
Or the adrenochrome, you elites.
You elite leaders in this world.
And understand, America, there are leaders that you don't even know about that are controlling this whole world system.
Those guys that I'm talking to right now.
My Lord and Savior is coming after you, and I'm not afraid of you.
Remember this to the people out there.
Don't be afraid of those that can kill you.
Be terrified of those that can steal your soul.
I'm just one screaming out from the desert here that God put me in this situation.
Yeah, you could find a guy better to speak.
I'm concerned as in a world what we're doing right now.
God has allowed this movie to come out, a gift.
He gave me a gift.
It's not my gift.
God gave this gift to me.
It was from Something that was, when he spoke to me in a movie theater, you know, will you do this?
Will you do this for me?
I took that upon myself because I was like, man, this God loves me so much.
And that he would do this for me, that he gave me a purpose.
And I'm begging you.
I'm begging you, church leaders.
I'm begging you, Pope of the Roman Catholic Church.
What are you doing?
Why are you staying silent?
Why won't you speak out?
Men see you, and you were supposed to be the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, and you stayed silent!
Don't you fear the Father in Heaven?
Don't you fear the Holy Spirit?
Why won't you go back to Argentina?
Why will they not accept you there?
Are you a Rothschild Pope?
Answer that!
So it's just addressing the post, screaming at him.
God, God loved me so much.
He gave me Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Winston Zeddemore, Egon Spangler.
He gave me these movies.
How?
How?
How did this become about that?
He gave me Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello.
He gave me Splinter.
How?
How?
How, Jake?
How?
Why?
Why?
Alright, alright.
I love this idea, though, that God gives you movies.
This is a great idea.
God wants you to just eat your popcorn, sit for two hours, be entertained.
God gave me this 2K.
He gives it to me every year and charges more for it.
I'm so blessed.
Oh, God has put in the most predatory microtransactions yet.
Oh, thank you, God.
God, God has turned all of my friends against me.
They do not want to buy the game and play with me.
I play alone.
I walk alone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he is so incoherent.
You can really see it here how, like, not very Communicative he is unless he like maybe memorizes something and we know he's not very good at that If you remember he had put a post-it note once on his the person he was acting with his face Just to kind of remember his lines, but I love he's like and yeah, maybe speak me no good God Maybe me best not speech but gift
Pope!
Rothschild!
Bad?
Yeah, just it sounds like he's always doing a monologue.
Yeah, trying to at least.
Yeah, he feels that he's most effective when he's in a scene of some sort.
Everything is delivered in the same intensity.
You know, he's just one of those guys that just like can't turn it off.
Yeah, and like turn this into a whisper and make him three inches from your face and you understand what these people went through for years.
God, I hope he had good breath.
That's... yeah.
Because that would make it worse, right?
If he had bad tuna breath or something?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.
I was thinking about that too.
Like garlic?
Garlic or something?
You know, he's a big, big garlic guy.
Yeah, what if it smelled like garlic too?
To be clear, nobody is aborting babies 28 days after they're born, which is what he was claiming here.
That would be murder.
And he basically just has Facebook poisoning.
This all started by, like, people posting bullshit on Facebook.
I looked it up.
And the Pope, obviously not a Rothschild because he's Catholic and unrelated to the banking family.
So I'm not sure this is worth debunking because this stuff is so crazy and he's just like chaining together incoherent sentences, but you can kind of, if you look into it, you can figure out what blurry JPEG he looked at that day on Facebook.
So that's a little update on where Jim has been at and why the director of Sound of Freedom is basically muttering, never go full QAnon.
Under his breath over and over in various interviews about this movie, which, by the way, the movie sucks, and Monteverde sucks, and it glorifies Tim Ballard, who is nobody to glorify.
I mean, this kind of takes away from the fact that the movie doesn't have a good message, an accurate message, or an interesting message about child trafficking, and it's misleading at the very least.
But, you know, when you have someone screaming about Adrenochrome and the Rothschild Pope, I guess you look sane in comparison, so yeah.
But, I would say that this makes me hope Caviezel directs a movie someday, or at least, like, puts together some community college actors to film a couple of extra scenes and releases a Sound of Freedom main actor's cut where he gets to put in the Rothschild Pope, the CIA is involved.
I mean, Ballard was ex-CIA, which, I don't know, there's so much here that you could do, but of course, we have to, you know, be fed madness.
Yeah, you know, I hope one day, you know, I hope Caviezel starts to direct movies because I feel like he's being constrained by directors who try to get, you know, one or two takes out of him in between his puke and shit sessions.
He needs to like, you know, really let his creative brain fly.
I want to see the Rothschild Pope Adrenochrome movie.
Yes, I totally agree.
That would be amazing.
Unfortunately, by August of this year, Caviezel stopped doing interviews and Monteverde publicly admitted that the actor had hurt his movie.
Not in the box office, of course, which the ranting undoubtedly helped, but, like, in his heart and stuff.
By the end of the month, he dropped a truly devastating and extremely bitchy piece of information in an interview with the Associated Press.
So, here is Monteverde.
After nine actors passed on this film, So nine actors, nine, say no to me.
No, no, no, no.
And at that time there was no politics involved.
It was no because they didn't know who I was, number one.
It was an independent film and it was not a very remarkable film.
So I'm sure a lot of their team was like, ah, this is not for you.
I don't even know if they, I don't know how, It's worth the baggage.
It's worth it.
for the film to nine other people.
And I think, you know, if you ask me, would you cast Jim again?
I would say absolutely, absolutely.
What he was able to do with his eyes, the expression and the pain
that Tim was telling me that was happening, you know, that year, it happened.
It's worth the baggage.
You know?
It's worth the baggage.
Yeah.
So, nine people passed on it, which is, it's like, as a director, dropping that about your actor is, like, very, very, very bitchy.
Yeah.
But, uh, what's really funny is he's like, yeah, I mean, this guy was, like, almost crying all the time, and sometimes he was crying, and, like, that really communicates the pain inside that, uh, Tim Ballard told me he went through.
And by the way, yeah, like, if you look at Tim Ballard talking about this stuff, there's no tears.
Like, he is, like, the weird glassy-eyed psycho that we'll be finding out about a little bit, uh, later in the episode.
In a recent interview with newspaper El País, Monteverde plays extremely dumb about the QAnon connection.
So, the interviewer says, give me an example of a ridiculous label.
That this film is a conspiracy orchestrated by QAnon. It's as if accusing us of getting financing from aliens
I thought this was going to go away But it hasn't people say that this group
Finance the film whoever says this hasn't seen the movie because at the end of the film the credits show who did and
these aren't Normal names these are some of the richest people in the
world. So what?
Like, he's like, no, the elites, the elites financed this!
The elites financed this!
Of course!
That's where independent film come, you know, comes from.
If your producer or your talent, you know, isn't putting up money themselves, you go out to a third party investor who, you know, wants to dabble in the film industry, you know, and, you know, shelling out a couple million is like nothing to them.
This is funny because, you know, the the message of like Angel Studios who distributed the film was like, oh, this was crowdsourced and people who were believe in this message came together to finance it.
But Monte Verde here is like, no, no, no, no.
This filthy rabble made this movie.
Elites, rich people, rich people gave me money to make this movie.
I'm sick of being accused of this.
These QAnon poor morons financing a movie.
Never happened.
Monteverdi also basically blames the hiring of Caviezel on Tim Ballard in what I found to be a very funny part of the interview.
So here's what he said.
People who worked on the film are very passionate about expressing their opinions, and when they did, they took away my work.
I offered the film to several actors.
The reason I hadn't thought of Jim Caviezel is because he's tall with dark hair, and Tim is blonde and not that tall.
One day, Tim told me that he hadn't been asked about who he'd like to have play him on screen.
He told me that he wanted Jim.
He told me that Jim was a man of faith.
Think about how, when agents find child pornography and take it to court, they can't play it because it becomes a crime.
So, Tim's job was to watch the videos and describe them step by step, and that broke his soul.
That's why most people who work on crimes against children last only one or two years, because, psychologically, it destroys you.
And Tim told me that the only way he could survive that was through his faith.
So now I have to imagine Tim Ballard looking through child pornography scene by scene and being like, God is helping me do this.
Uh, and that's, that's a good thing.
That's good.
That is so fucked up.
Yeah.
I just.
Well, you can't feed the video to a AI or a program and it tells you what happened.
I don't know.
This is so weird that there's like a dirty man who has to, you know, watch, watch all, watch all of this, you know, horrific content.
Well, it hasn't stopped him from having an appetite of his own, is the way I'll put it, based on what we'll be hearing soon.
So, at least Monteverde can rely on the subject of his movie, right, Tim Ballard, to remain a good, upstanding citizen?
One would hope.
To discuss the latest revelations about Tim Ballard and Sound of Freedom, we are again joined by Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman.
They have been reporting on Operation Underground Railroad for years and quite recently published several stories with a lot of explosive information.
So thanks again for joining us.
Pleasure.
So you guys have had a very busy week.
Really, really fantastic reporting.
You can sort of see it on the citations.
You dug into lots of public records, which I'm sure must have been very time consuming.
You have a lot of sources close to, you know, Operation Underground Railroad, so there's a lot to cover on the multiple stories you publish, but I think the big one that people are talking about is the reason why Tim Ballard was ousted from Operation Underground Railroad.
So his ousting wasn't made public until Vice News broke the story, and this was months after Ballard actually left OUR.
But the grounds for his removal was basically secret, and you reported that he was the subject of an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct involving seven women.
But you spoke to sources who indicated that there's good reason to believe that the number of women subjected to the alleged misconduct is higher than seven.
So, I mean, really shocking.
But could you help us understand exactly what he's been accused of?
Right.
So it's important to point out that the first person who broke the news that had been due to sexual misconduct was actually a Utah journalist named Lynn Packer, who's really great.
He's old school.
He's been writing about who you are for 10 years and I think has been doing journalism longer than I've been alive.
We reported in July that he had left OUR following an internal investigation and it wasn't until this month that we felt comfortable reporting that the internal investigation was into allegations of sexual misconduct and we basically heard from a few different sources that the misconduct involved allegations about how he behaved On missions with women who had been sort of tasked with playing his wife while he was undercover in these various locales.
Hmm.
Yeah.
The whole pretend to be my wife on my spy mission routine.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
Very, very, very strange.
Now you talk about your, your reporting.
So these, these allegations have been circulating for several months in the Utah philanthropic community.
Yeah, so what happened was, not actually sure when the letter got around.
We became aware of it in, I believe, July.
We reported on it in July.
We were made aware that donors to anti-trafficking causes in Utah had had an anonymous letter Sent to them and it accused Ballard of grooming and coercion and said that he had left the organization after an investigation into that.
So we still haven't been able to talk to the people who sent the letter or the person who sent the letter, but it's been it's been pretty widely circulating for a few months and we were able to independently corroborate the claims made in it.
So you guys are journalists, so obviously you can't perhaps use crude, plain words.
But basically what's happening here is this guy is going out on his little missions with volunteers that are playing his wife.
And then he's like, how far you want to go as my wife?
You know, if you want to really save these children, I could do with a little relief over here.
I wouldn't say that's exactly it.
What we've heard is that the allegation is basically that he claimed women would have to sleep in the same bed with
him, shower with him, because it was necessary to fool traffickers.
But if they didn't do that, their gambit as being people who were not husband and wife could be exposed.
Yeah.
I think a few people have brought up that this raises the logical question, if nothing else, of whether the most effective way to conduct private paramilitary undercover anti-trafficking operations is to go to another country with someone who is
purported to be your wife so that you can pose as a as a couple who's looking
for underage girls or children. Well this is a very Mormon way of thinking of
it right it's like well yeah I'm a pedophile who traffics children but I got a
wife. I don't think there's any accusations that anybody's a pedophile here. No
no I I'm just saying he's posing as essentially someone who buys children, which, you know, I'm not actually accusing him of being a pedophile.
I just love the idea that in his imaginary world where these kind of like mastermind child traffickers are traveling the world, they still have a nice wife.
This has sort of come up, and people who have talked to us about this, they've been like, why would this have made sense?
Yeah.
To say, like, why would there need to be a wife character there at all?
What's more interesting to me is that people who seem to be talking to people in Mr. Ballard's camp have started being like, oh yeah, it's the couple's ruse.
You have to use the couple's ruse when you're undercover.
So I've heard the past couple weeks started hearing the phrase couple's ruse and we were listening to this kind of like right-wing Mormon podcast where some of the hosts seem to have a relationship or be talking to people in Mr. Ballard's camp and they're like well you know what you don't understand about this is the couple's ruse and I was like oh wow this is um this is the thing we're hearing.
I would like to stress that actual undercover investigators for federal agencies we've talked to who go undercover to expose, collect evidence against, and eventually arrest child traffickers have also never heard of this and don't understand how it would make sense.
Well, and even in the movies, if you're doing the quote-unquote couple's ruse, it's with another agent, not a volunteer who wants to be a part of the action or somebody that you've convinced to go along.
I also think it's funny that for the stuff that you did say about sleeping in the same bed and showering together, I mean, what is he saying?
Like, oh, these traffickers, they're watching us at all moments.
They're watching us sleep.
They're watching us shower.
We've got to be doing this together.
I mean, that to me is is pretty insane in and of itself.
So that's the question, if that was what was being relayed to these women.
And I hope we find more out about that soon, 'cause that would seemingly be the only way
that you could have persuaded someone that this was a good idea.
So, you know, common sense would dictate, but you know, who knows, we could be surprised.
And there's a chance that in our reporting, we find out some reason why it was absolutely necessary
to behave in this way, but we have not found that so far.
Yeah, and just to close the loop on kind of the description of why there might be more women.
So, to the best of our knowledge, our sources believe there were seven women who were employees of OUR who came up in the investigation, which was led by OUR's HR department.
But we're aware of other women with whom Ballard behaved either this way or in ways consistent.
with this way, if that makes sense, who would not have been among the seven. So the number is,
we're confident saying higher than the number who are at the center of the HR investigation,
if that makes sense. These would be volunteers. And there are a variety of types of people who
could be implicated here, like volunteers for going on a mission. There are also contractors
who have worked with HR. Like it's not necessarily just W2 employees who would necessarily be the
ones who would come up in an HR inquiry. Wow.
So you're saving the children by systematically convincing women to potentially, allegedly, maybe sleep with you so they can pretend to be your wife, which is super needed out there in the field when you're doing like, you know, I mean, if you, if you see the movie in the movie, it's not like, uh, women play a huge role in it.
But you also have Tim Ballard calling his wife constantly in the movie, and it's like, oh yeah, I miss you, sweetie.
I'm raising all of our big Mormon boys back here at home.
I guess you're out there saving the children.
And he's like, yeah, you want to save the children?
We're going to have to shower together.
I mean, this is Tim Ballard going to go ahead and say, seems like a fucking scumbag.
Seems like Bill Paxton in True Lies.
Well, you might say that.
Yeah, that's not journalistic.
I wouldn't say that.
I'm going to stick within the four corners of what we've reported on Vice.com, but others are free to read our reporting and draw the conclusions they want to draw, whether positive or negative about him.
Baby, uh, baby, you want to save the children tonight again?
You want to save the children again tonight?
Or was it just, uh, you didn't, was it not good for you last time?
Oh, my God.
The day that we're recording this, actually, Mr. Ballard's wife is supposed to go on a local, um, like, talk radio show in Utah in a few hours.
Um, so I'm super curious what she has to say, because I have never heard her perspective on any of these issues.
I haven't talked to anybody who's talked to her, so I'm so curious to hear what she has to say.
I'm gonna go ahead and say that if it was just, even if it was just sharing a bed and showering, which both I would consider already insanely inappropriate, but even if it was just those two things, that OUR and the Mormon Church would probably go to bat for this guy.
They've covered up worse.
So I'm gonna go ahead and say this guy successfully convinced, in my opinion, successfully convinced women using this couple's ruse to, you know, he rused his way into, let's just say they were inducted into the Ballard zone.
And it's obviously not funny that he's convincing these women to do this, but it is very funny when you consider how he portrays himself as this, like, amazing child-saving miracle who was told by God to, like, go out and save the kids in this way that is, you know, obviously, like, Unverifiably, sometimes effective, questionably effective.
Then played by Jim Caviezel, an absolute nut, which we've explored in the earlier part of this episode.
But the whole thing, just what a house of cards.
I mean... If this turns out to be true, it would represent an interesting tension between the ways that he's portrayed himself in public and the ways that he was behaving in private.
Yeah, one of the things we've reported in the last week is that according to investigative files we obtained through a public records request from a joint FBI local criminal investigation into Ballard and OUR.
Someone who is very high up in OUR, very close to him, a former Navy SEAL who led the OUR ops team and oversaw its operations.
In Haiti, it was very clear that Ballard presented himself as and believed himself to be a Mormon Messiah.
And a variety of evidence we've reported on represents him telling people close to him in private that the rescue missions that have been so publicized that were the subject of Sound of Freedom were basically just sizzle to lure in the public and that the stake was leading people to the Mormon faith, converting them.
He called it bringing them to the covenant.
So yeah, there is a there's a very big contrast. Yeah, it was sizzle. It was sizzle to lure in quote-unquote
The the donors the the people giving money, but I think he's also luring in a couple other things here
It seems with his sizzle my god I mean, I wish you could make this shit up because it is
too perfect too perfect with his little dyed blonde frosty tips
Oh my god It's it's almost like maybe we could find out that he
drinks too and drinks caffeine and does all kinds of shit The Mormons are supposed to I was really surprised to hear
about this at all Because this just hadn't come up for us in the first three
years that we reported on this I had no idea.
If you had told me six months ago, I would have found it very unlikely, because it's so central to the way that he portrays himself, you know?
I mean, he's a very devout Mormon.
He has a huge family.
He's been married for a long time.
Like, I just, it was, maybe it's naive of me, but I just didn't see it.
I'd agree with that.
We've talked to a lot of people who know him well, who work closely with him.
And generally, until these allegations surfaced, you know, evidently internally and then made
their way out to the public and now have made their way out to a broader public through
our reporting and Lynn Packer's reporting, people would say, whatever you, you know,
whatever you make of him, whatever you make of his politics, whatever you make of the
effectiveness of OUR, he's a family man.
He really, you know, he really believes this stuff, et cetera, et cetera.
And certainly his public image was a Captain America type, but also, you know, people who didn't even like him and had reasons to speak badly of him, you know, would talk about, you know, he's a very faithful guy, he's a very strong family man, and, you know, is kind of trying his best.
That's people with reasons to say, you know, horrible things about him.
So yeah, it's been surprising.
Maybe we just don't understand the Meisner Method, you know?
Maybe this is just a form of method acting, you know?
You gotta really live the life.
But again, not sure why this trafficker needs to have a wife every single time.
Very, very suspect that he needed a wife every single time.
Like, yeah, okay, we gotta hire a wife again.
I'm going back out into the field.
We need another wife.
Yeah, we gotta go into the background casting tent and pick me out a wife again.
Yeah, just to give a little more context too here, you know, I know if maybe the only thing you know about O.U.R.
Tim Ballard is having watched Sound of Freedom, you might have the completely false impression that he does things like swim into the jungle, go into, you know, like a drug cartel's camp in fart-controlled territory, and kill traffickers with his bare hands.
But the actual way the majority of these missions work And you know, we've reported on this pretty extensively, is that a group of, you know, guys from Utah, like real estate agents, just like normal guys will go to a resort town in like Mexico or Thailand, and they'll just go to strip clubs or brothels and flash money around and say like, Hey, you know, we want younger women.
I mean, we did a whole story on this on this weekend.
The executive producer of Sound of Freedom, where we got a lot of transcripts from investigators of footage of them doing this.
It's basically going to traffickers and traffickers are offering women who appear to be of age, maybe showing photos on their phone.
Maybe the women are there in person and telling these people, no, no, no, I want younger.
I want younger girls.
And the guy saying, I don't, you know, I don't have younger girls and saying, no, no, no, get me some.
So the whole ruse involving the wife would involve going to, you know, as far as we understand in the majority of cases, it would involve just going to like random strip clubs or brothels with your wife and just saying, we're looking to party.
We want some children, which I have a lot of questions about that as an investigative tactic.
Yeah, like, please.
Oh, you're not doing any child trafficking?
Well, could you do some?
So that I could... Me and my wife are here.
Otherwise, we're just partying at a strip club in Thailand, okay?
Yeah, if we don't actually do any good, it's just a bunch of Mormon real estate agents going to party, you know, overseas.
Personally, I love the movie Sound of Shower.
I mean, part of what confuses me about it, too, is if this all played out the way that folks are telling us it did, wouldn't it have made them way more noticeable, identifiable, memorable?
Like, a group of American guys going to a strip club in Mexico or Costa Rica or the DR and then, you know, asking for something extra, you know, probably is pretty common.
But having a woman be there, just to me, I'm like, that cannot be very common.
I've never heard it to be very common.
So we're super, we're super curious about that.
Yeah, it seems way more plausible that, you know, your cover could be blown not by a trafficker peeping through the window of your hotel and checking to see if you're showering together, but you and your alleged wife being uncomfortable with one another out in public at a strip club.
You know, if any of these women are, you know, are already maybe regretting their decision to volunteer for something like this, given Tim's, you know, sort of alleged behavior, you know, to me, that would be much easier to spot, right?
That, you know, oh, well, they don't seem like a real couple, or she seems uncomfortable, or, you know, that's out in the open.
I think that's, to me, that seems way more obvious than being caught in a hotel room sleeping in separate beds.
Oh, you don't trust us?
You won't sell us the kid?
Well, how about we take off our clothes and shower right in front of you?
How about that?
I love the idea also that you're going undercover as a pedophile trying to buy children, but you're like, I keep getting pulled in, and if I go too deep I might become a pedophile.
But I need to go back to the house with you, sweetie, and you're going to have to remind me how I'm into adult women, actually.
I mean, this man wants his cake, and to eat it too, and to be famous.
$200 million this movie has made, and Travis was pointing out to me earlier that this is the worst year of this guy's life.
He is a biopic subject.
It should be the peak.
And of course, why would you make yourself so visible if you know you're doing this stuff?
Even your church now is going to turn on you.
Your church, your organization.
I mean, yeah.
Like why?
Why would a follower of Joseph Smith get the idea that you can preach a holy mission while doing perverted stuff in private?
What do you mean?
What was he doing with those plates, Travis?
Did Joseph Smith do stuff?
Nah, that's a deep Mormon cut joke from Travis.
I got it.
Do you?
Does Joseph Smith?
He married a 14 year old and other teenagers.
Yeah, well that's the other thing too.
If you want multiple wives, the Mormons literally allow that.
Motherfucker.
Well, no, they don't, right?
That's been subject to, like, a huge schism.
Yeah, plural marriage is absolutely not part of the LDS tradition.
Yeah, haven't you seen Big Love Julian starring Bill Paxton, the late, great Bill Paxton?
Another Bill Paxton appearance!
Why does he keep being brought up?
Poor guy.
What I didn't know until we started doing this work actually is that LDS people take sexual fidelity especially very seriously.
When you get married in the temple, they're real clear in your marriage vows that you are not just sort of vaguely threatening, like promising to be faithful to one another, you are specifically taking vows of sexual fidelity.
And so it's a super, super, super serious Matter for Mormon people.
You know, one of our folks that we talk to regularly is no longer Mormon.
I said, well, you know, would you still feel this way about infidelity?
And he was like, yeah, I got married in the temple.
Like I, you know, I said it in that context.
And so I really meant it.
I don't think I'm going to get struck down by lightning, but like, it's a complete No go for me.
So I think it's just kind of important to recognize and also just because this has been coming up a bunch.
One of the things that Mr. Ballard has been sort of suggesting is that we're doing this work and writing about this because we are somehow enemies of Mormonism or hate Mormons and it's just not true.
I mean most of our sources are or were LDS.
So just the idea that somehow we're doing this because we are out to get Mormonism as a faith is it's just not true.
I know he might think that but it just isn't.
So some of these women that are kind of sources of these allegations of sexual misconduct are Mormons or were Mormons?
That's our understanding, but without having talked to them firsthand, we can't say for sure.
But yeah, that is our understanding.
Yeah, our understanding is that's true.
And generally that the women at the center of this investigation would have been specifically coming from the employee pool of OUR, which is heavily, heavily Mormon.
So, this guy is logging into his employee roster, and it's like he's ordering a wife out of a catalog.
A bit like, um... I mean, it's like everything is projection, it seems.
Everything.
It's insane.
Now, speaking of Mormonism, Tim Ballard, like you mentioned, he's a very devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the fact that he indicated that he wants to use this anti-trafficking cause to bring Americans to the Mormon faith.
However, a spokesperson for the church recently denounced Tim Ballard, and this was an unprecedented, very surprising move.
So, what spurred all of that?
So we contacted, Tim contacted, um, sorry, Tim Marchman.
There are too many Tims involved in here.
There are one too many Tims, and it gets very confusing.
Marchman contacted the church for comment earlier this month about, you know, our ongoing reporting, and to our surprise, this is what we got back.
So basically, we obtained a big tranche of the investigative files I've mentioned, and among them were a lot of documents that showed evidence of either business dealings between Tim Ballard and President M. Russell Ballard, who's the acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which is the second highest
leadership body in the LDS Church.
Evidence of business dealings between them. There were text messages, for instance, in which an associate of Tim Ballard's
was attempting to strong-arm a third party into investing in
slave stealers that would oversee the the nonprofit group OUR as well as other Tim Ballard
organizations, some nonprofit, some not. Bring them all together into a web
and use them to allow Tim Ballard to monetize his notoriety.
and build his personal brand.
And in those messages, this associate of Tim Ballard's was saying, "We can bring your business partner together
with Elder Ballard if necessary to make this happen."
It was basically a representation of this very, very senior and revered figure in the LDS church
as a silent partner.
Just the same last name?
and an accomplice in his seemingly sketchy schemes to make money off his notoriety.
So this guy's not the same family, just the same last name?
No, no, no, they are absolutely not related.
I want to make that very clear.
They're not related.
The church also made this clear.
He's like, "Yeah, I'm totally related "to that big famous ballad."
Yeah.
I mean, this guy is a crook in every possible fucking way.
It's astounding.
Yeah.
So as a very, very routine matter, we needed to contact Elder Ballard just to make him aware of the information in the files, see if he had any more information, context, perspective he wanted to add.
We're not going to go on the basis of investigative files and say that, you know, Elder in the church was carrying out illicit schemes with Tim Ballard.
you know, want to know more about it. So we asked for comment and they said they'd get back to us
and they said they'd get back to us and you know we'd check in and they'd say you know we're still
looking at it and we were expecting to get a kind of no comment or a very anodyne statement and
instead we got back a quite startling statement from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints and I just want to read part of it. "For many months President Ballard has had no contact
with the founder of Operation Underground Railroad."
The nature of that relationship was always in support of vulnerable children being abused, trafficked, and otherwise neglected.
Once it became clear Tim Ballard had betrayed their friendship with the unauthorized use of President Ballard's name for Tim Ballard's personal advantage, an activity regarded as morally unacceptable,
President Ballard withdrew his association.
President Ballard never authorized his name or the name of the church to be used
for Tim's personal or financial interests."
So this was a quite startling and near unprecedented condemnation
from a major world religion, this major world religion, of an individual member of the church.
And to our eye, the substance of it was that it was pretty extraordinary,
but also that it was a pretty routine interaction.
We had information, we sought comment from someone, they gave us comment and...
You know, once we had our story together, we published it.
But it's been a very weird thing because the fact that the statement was given to us and the fact that the statement was not directly published to the church website, which there's no reason it would be, has set off a great deal of discussion in various circles about whether the statement is authentic.
And in fact, Tim Ballard, for most of the last week, has been in public Referring to it as an alleged statement, intimating, suggesting, or otherwise stating that he doesn't believe it was actually a statement from the church, or that if it was, it didn't actually represent the church's opinions, which culminated yesterday, as we're recording, the governor of Utah during a press conference in which he was asked about this, stating that he had personally looked into whether it was an authentic statement, and he had satisfied himself that it was.
Wow.
I mean, yeah, I mean, it is a combination of, I mean, strange things.
Like, why would a major religion issue a statement, you know, through a news outlet and then not public?
Yeah, it was all very confusing.
And in fact, even the governor of Utah got involved in this matter.
Yeah.
So the governor of Utah was asked about it during like a just routine press conference that he does, you know, every week, I think, with local journalists and journalists from Fox 13 said, you know, what do you think about this statement?
He said, oh yeah, I reached out to the church.
To make sure that it was legitimate and was assured that it had been, forget exactly the wording he used, but like it had gone through all normal procedures to be issued.
So again, the governor is LDS himself and he is a Republican.
So again, he doesn't have any particular reason to back us up on this, but I think it got to such a point of conspiracy theorizing and sort of weird alternate suggestions about what the statement meant and where it had come from that he decided to confirm that it was real, which I have never in my life had.
First of all, I've never had a major world religion issue a denunciation by emailing us, and I have definitely never had the governor of a state, especially not a Republican governor, be like, oh yeah Vice, Vice's reporting was right.
Like just the everything about it is so strange, and so on some level the super conservative Uh, Mormon folks who are like, just, this can't be real, I understand why they feel that way.
Like, I would probably feel that way too.
It just seems like Ballard is so exceptionally shitty, and there's enough potential proof, at least in their eyes, uh, you know, that you guys obviously are kind of being very journalistic about, but it seems like things have gotten so bad that, you know, Big organizations that are essentially like the fabric of this man's life are just like, no, he is trash.
This man is bad.
It's a very strange setup.
And what I think you guys would appreciate if you went into the weeds on it, as we have been forced to over the last week, is on the one hand, you have these like, I don't even know how to describe it.
You have this faction of like hip young Mormons who are basically like baking statements and coming up with fanfic about our reporting.
You know, they're like, well if you, you know, if you read it in the light of the third moon, this is what this really could mean, really what could be going on here.
When it's a very straightforward and boring interaction between a news outlet and an institution, you know, they're contacting for comment.
Yeah, one thing that happened is that the spokesperson didn't put his name on the statement initially when he gave it to us.
He asked it just to be attributed to a spokesperson because, you know, he's speaking institutionally.
He's not speaking on behalf of himself.
So that, too, became the subject of all this, like, Well, maybe Vice thought they were talking to a spokesperson within the Mormon Church, but actually it was just some guy who, you know, issued a rogue statement and is about to get fired.
He actually got like kind of one step below doxed on Twitter where people were kind of passing around his resume and going through it and being like, well, you know, the things that he's liked on LinkedIn are suspicious.
And it like, it got real weird for him, I imagine.
Yeah, when you're pouring through somebody's LinkedIn likes, you know, no good can come of this.
And I have to imagine that Tim Ballard, you know, upon hearing this is like pulling his hair out, you know, being like, what?
These people were my friends!
I thought they were my friends!
You know, it's like when you find out on Facebook that your girlfriend has been cheating on you and she posts, you know, in a relationship with somebody else or whatever.
What we're talking about here is the church itself issuing a statement and OUR itself issuing statements.
You know, obviously we had information from many, many, many highly credible sources about the investigation that preceded Ballard's departure from OUR, but we went to OUR and we went to Ballard for comment, as we always go to all involved parties to see what they have to say, see if our See if our reporting is wrong.
And OUR did not deny it.
They issued a very rightly, we're talking about an HR investigation here, lawyerly statement, not disputing our reporting, just saying, you know, there was an investigation, you know, Ballard resigned, Ballard is permanently separated from the organization, and we're not going to say anything more about it out of, you know, concern for the privacy of all affected parties, which is a very normal thing to say.
But yeah, you really have these organizations that have been at the center of Ballard's life, the church itself, OUR itself, issuing these statements that are, you know, either outright, you know, maybe a little bit more implicitly condemnatory, and are certainly not disputing any of our reporting.
And then you have this this kind of Weird faction of, you know, people who just refuse to believe any of it, which goes along with what he's saying in public, which is like, everything is a lie.
Don't believe any of it.
Nothing is true.
And, you know, logically you're in the position of, so we shouldn't believe, you know, vice, which, why would you?
But you also shouldn't believe, you know, the church.
You shouldn't believe OUR.
We're kind of like the conclusion that the only person you should listen to is Tim Ballard, which is, you know, interesting.
Well, you see that a lot in, you know, people that are sort of elbow deep in the conspiracy world, either via belief or, you know, an influencer or a disseminator of conspiracy theories, is eventually what you get down to, you know, if you become visible enough that facts start coming out or, you know, information contrary to what you've said starts coming out, You know, I cover the anti-vaccine movement and that's where it ends up, typically, right?
you know, you can't trust anybody.
Everybody else is lying but me.
And anything you see that doesn't come from me, you should be, you know, suspicious of.
Yeah, you know, I cover the anti-vaccine movement and that's where it ends up typically, right?
'Cause at first you choose not to believe whatever, what your pediatrician is telling you about shots.
And then eventually you have to end up all the way at the CDC, the United Nations, the, you know,
world governments are all lying to you because you can't, it doesn't really stop where you want it to
because you have to incorporate more and more kind of mythology into it.
So I don't know, at some point Mr. Ballard might have a different take, like as of the last statement he issued he was suggesting that maybe the statement was fake, but he might come to a different conclusion at some point.
Man, I mean, Tim, you talked about the weeds and you guys have clearly been, you know, deep looking into this stuff.
I'm willing to go even deeper, to go undercover and get to the bottom of this.
But Jake, I need you to come with me and we are going to have to shower together.
And we are going to have to sleep in the same bed.
I don't understand.
Why can't we have a separate hotel room?
We can still be married, but maybe our marriage is going through a little bit of trouble right now.
You know, maybe we pretend to get into a fight in the hotel room and then I storm out and get my own hotel room and sleep and the traffickers can go, oh, trouble in paradise.
I'm uncut.
This is a real couple here.
I'm uncut.
You're coming with me.
So another shocking report that came out very recently relates to an executive producer of Sound of Freedom named Paul Hutchinson.
And he touched the naked breasts of an apparently underage trafficking victim.
And this is according to a description of a video of the incident, which was written by an investigator with the Davis County Attorney's Office.
And this is something else you discover through your, you know, fantastic public records request.
So, I mean, this is pretty mind-blowing.
So this is part of an investigation that is now closed, correct?
So how, I mean, what was this and how did we learn about it?
Yeah, so this is something that, candidly, we, you know, heard quite a lot about.
In the course of our reporting over the previous few years, and we weren't expecting to find information about it in the documents we received under our public records request, there was video taken during an OUR operation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico in, I believe, 2016, where OUR had some videographers who were working with them, and they went to this resort town at the far south of You know, the Western Peninsula, and they were looking to to find traffickers and expose them or whatever.
So according to the investigators descriptions of the video, which Hutchinson, the executive producer in question, affirmed, although he has an important disputation we'll get to in a second, the OUR operatives went to a sex club.
A girl who appeared to be 16 came down a staircase and Hutchinson grabbed her naked breasts.
She pushed his hands away and pulled her shirt down.
And then immediately afterwards, the operatives left the club and they started talking about how she appeared real young.
A voice that was described by the investigator in the file said something to the effect of, you know, they felt 16.
There was discussion of whether it was a good idea to have grabbed the trafficking victims' naked breasts and, you know, they went from there.
And then there was another discussion that was captured on video that was acquired by the investigators, where Hutchinson and a man named Matt Osborne, who's an OUR operator and is currently the president and COO of the organization, discussed how it wasn't a good idea to bring it to Homeland Security Investigations or the The American Embassy, but that, you know, it wasn't a concern with Mexican authorities.
So they're roleplaying pedophiles, but they're just doing the thing then now at this point.
It's no longer... Well, I want to make one very important clarification here, which is that we obviously contacted Hutchinson for comment.
And he said that he had zero regrets about this, zero regrets about the work he'd done undercover or his behavior there, but that the Mexican federal police had conducted an investigation and concluded that she was at least 18 and that he had an affidavit to support this.
We asked him many, many times to provide us with a copy of this affidavit.
He hasn't done so, but that is his assertion.
And OUR has also backed this up and said that they turned the material over to authorities.
They conducted an investigation and concluded that she wasn't 16.
But what does that matter?
If he's out in the field and he thinks she's 16 and he's doing this stuff, like what the fuck does that say about him and their whole way of conducting this stuff?
I'm sorry, but like, you know, as Jim Caviezel once said, never trust a pedophile.
I certainly think, you know, it's the significant fact there is that every bit of available evidence they had was that she was not of age and that regardless of her age, she was a trafficking victim.
And so, you know, OUR certainly isn't defending it.
I forget the exact term they used, but I think they You know, they broadly described it as unacceptable whether or not she was 18.
I just do want to throw that out as an element of the story.
Regardless of her actual age, I feel like this incident really is validating of a lot of criticism that OUR has received about their tactics in allegedly trying to help trafficking victims.
Yeah, I mean, OUR sent us a statement after publication that said, you know, that they had flagged it to the federal police, that the police investigated the incident, that they didn't press charges, but they also said, Mr. Hutchinson has never been employed by OUR in an official capacity.
OUR ceased any affiliation with him shortly thereafter.
The actions by Mr. Hutchinson do not represent OUR's standard operating procedure and were inappropriate regardless if the woman was an adult or not.
So this actually seems to be a rare situation where everyone involved agrees that it happened,
is telling us that it happened, but have sort of different interpretations of it that would,
you know, change how they feel about it. For instance, Mr.
Hutchinson essentially is telling us like, you know, that he did what he had to do when he
was undercover. That seems to be the rationale. I mean, what is OUR then?
Tim fucking founded it.
He's not OUR.
Whoops.
Cause he did all this stuff.
And then this guy's not OUR.
I mean, explain to me exactly what OUR is except for a fucking spring break for these Mormons who want to either fondle underage girls or have like a fake wife out in the field.
What the fuck?
I mean, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that's been, so some of the criticism has been broadly that, okay, if OUR can't figure out how to go on these missions without, you know, say, perpetrating acts of assault against, you know, women that they come into contact with, like, that's not, that's not a great sort of testament to what was going on.
I think people have started telling us recently that they view OUR as separate from Mr. Ballard and sort of his friends, and are trying to suggest that they're kind of two halves of the organization, that we're kind of at odds.
We've heard that a few times now, so we're kind of looking into that.
But yeah, I mean, the other thing too is that obviously, like, since Mr. Ballard left, OUR is trying to sort of present themselves as, like, saying that they're on to OUR 2.0 now.
We watched a very sweaty press conference with them.
Matt Osborne, who's the current president and CEO, and some other people, they managed to, and I would personally not have recommended this, they managed to make it only men at this press conference on Zoom, which again, like I would have, I would have found a lady, just one.
But yeah, basically we're talking about like, you know, OUR 2.0 is very committed to the sort of mission that we set out on, and you know, when somebody asked, you know, why Yeah, I mean, we don't need a 2.0.
We don't need a 2.0.
We want a 0.0.
We want a beta.
We're going back before the beta.
We're undoing OUR.
on the call, they said, you know, we do have women working for us.
They were just not available today.
Yeah.
I mean, we don't need a 2.0.
We don't need a 2.0.
We want a 0.0.
We want a beta.
We're going back before the beta.
We're undoing OUR.
It's over.
It gets back to this point about whether people are doing what it takes, which is the substance
of Hutchinson's comments to us and, you know, to many comments we've seen from Internet
users defending this behavior about, you know, you've got to do what it takes when you're
And just the very basic and central point that these are not law enforcement officers of any description.
They're not people who are operating under color of law.
In any description, you know, I have family members who've been undercover law enforcement officers.
And the movie scenario of like, you have to snort the biggest line of cocaine that you can cut out with a knife
to prove you're not a cop is not reality.
And the idea that you have to feel the naked breasts of a girl who appears to be and who you believe to be underage
and whose age wouldn't matter if she's a trafficking victim.
You have to do this while on a private paramilitary action.
It's just like, it's absurd.
It doesn't add up.
To defend that, you have to go against every known canon of investigative work and law enforcement work that I'm aware of.
No more sending Mormon bros into strip clubs.
Like, we can't just have Mormon bros going down to Mexico to save the children anymore.
It's not... I mean, I would go broader than that.
I think just American, Australian, and British men, just no more.
No more.
No more.
They go away.
Because when we talked to... For a story previously, I talked to a sex workers union in Thailand, and they were like, we've never heard of OUR, but we can tell you about 20 groups just like them.
And they're all, you know, white men from Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I feel like this is New Zealand duration.
Oh yeah, was it New Zealand too?
know, the strip clubs and the brothels and say that they're saving us.
It's always the same thing.
So, you know, one could suggest that the market is saturated and that it doesn't
have like a super strong sort of track record of discernible success and maybe
they should try something else.
Yeah.
That's what I'm saying.
I feel like this is New Zealand duration.
Oh yeah.
Was it New Zealand too?
Yeah.
I've only heard Australia.
I have not heard New Zealand.
Do you remember hearing New Zealand?
Yeah, I have heard New Zealand.
Let's throw in the Belgians.
Let's throw in the French.
Let's throw in fucking Luxembourg.
I don't know.
It seems like it's mostly English-speaking countries.
And again, I don't know why.
Like, what's up with us?
God, it's the weirdest thing, isn't it?
I can't figure that out.
Maybe someone can do a dissertation on it.
Well, anyone who speaks English is a sex tourist, basically.
But I mean, Tim, you brought up a point that I was, I've been, you know, bubbling to make, which is every, everything that we've been talking about and everything that's in your guys' reporting, it really highlights this idea that a lot of this seems like it can be, and I'm just, you know, I'm just sort of freestyling here, but it seems like it can be boiled down to the fact that you have people who are not professionals in this.
You know, if you go under, if you're an undercover officer in law enforcement, there is extensive training that you have to go through.
Whereas, you know, these guys seem like they're going along for the ride.
They're rich, they're bored, you know, they want to be able to tell their, you know, their buddies in the cigar lounge that they spent the weekend, you know, saving children.
But they're going into these, you know, they're going into these things, they're getting too into character, you know, it's like a video of an extra that's, you know, really hoping to get seen by the director so they can, you know, get bumped up to a speaking part.
And you're just putting them in these situations where they're getting so caught up in it that they're actually potentially doing the very thing that they set out to sort of prevent.
If not, like, signing up for it, cuz, like, what is the- this is literally- it's like they're creating the perfect cover for people who want to do this and still get away with it.
It's like, yeah, oh, just get me near the children.
I'll save them.
I swear to God. Yeah, and it's like, I don't want to, you know, make an appeal to authority on the
base of our anonymous law enforcement sources. But I will say that there is just a fundamental and
profound difference between a private actor and, you know, someone working in law enforcement,
someone who is theoretically accountable in addition to being trained. Yeah, I mean,
in fairness, this has been raised as an issue with, you know, vice squads, for instance,
is the fact that, you know, sometimes police officers who are tasked with doing this can
also be sexually inappropriate with the women that they're supposed to be saving or helping.
But, as Tim points out, there is an accountability process if you are a law enforcement or a sheriff's deputy or whatever, and you are sexually inappropriate, and it comes out.
Whereas with OUR and with similar organizations that practice what's called the raid and rescue model, it's not clear to me how that How that accountability would take place.
And so there's a reason why a bunch of organizations who pioneered this work before OUR, like in the 90s, stopped doing it.
Because they got a ton of criticism, both because it was, you know, potentially traumatic to the people they were trying to save and because, you know, it could be quite dangerous.
And also, yeah, because, you know, because of issues like what we're discussing here, like there's a pretty obvious issue to sort of anybody who looks at it, even a little bit.
In terms of, yeah, accountability if somebody on a mission does something inappropriate.
Finally, I wanted to ask you about another report.
You reported more details regarding Operation Underground Railroad's use of a psychic medium.
So you report all the way back in 2021 that OUR relied upon the supposed psychic powers of a woman from Utah in order to attempt to find the location of a missing Haitian boy.
And you dug up more details, including some photos of what really went on.
So how was the psychic medium used exactly?
Yeah, so in these public records that we got, there was more detail about this woman whose name is Janet Russin, and basically what is contained in the documents, which kind of comports with what we already reported, is that Ms.
Russon was sort of hired to provide psychic intelligence to help OUR decide
where to look for missing children, including this Haitian boy you
referenced whose name is Gardi Marti. And Gardi, finding Gardi has been like a
central kind of storyline for OUR. He's never been found, but they've
continued looking for him. So Ms. Russon, according to the documents, was getting
paid, you know, to yeah to provide sort of what they described as like operational
intelligence I think.
or what was described in the documents as operational intelligence, which means psychic visions.
Yeah, she was specifically communicating with dead figures from Mormon history,
including the prophet Nephi, who is said to have died 600 years before Christ. And what she was
doing was telling OUR where specific missing or trafficked children could be found. And that we,
you know, this one case we've reported on accompanying operators on a paramilitary
mission and telling the father of a missing child that he was about to be found and that she was
communicating with his, the father's, dead mother and sister. So it's quite...
quite, quite bizarre.
And this was an ongoing and central force in OUR.
The county attorney who was doing the investigation emailed the attorney general of Utah
and the records we have saying that he had 10,000 pages of her readings, which we don't have access to.
Of course, we would dearly love to have access to and have tried to get access to.
But this was this was not a kind of weird one-off.
This was how in many cases they were identifying where the children were to be found at the same time they were promoting to their donors and the public that they had sophisticated intelligence operations, Yeah, bewildering stuff.
SEALs, former members of special forces, ex CIA, to get the intelligence that the government
couldn't or was too lazy or indifferent or even compromised to get.
Yeah, bewildering stuff.
And I mean, there's, I mean, you've reported on so much, but I really get the sense that
we're only scratching the surface of what happened because they're, you know, they're
generally it seems like a pretty tight knit and sort of contained organization that doesn't
like to leak these kinds of things.
So I'm sure whatever the hell is going on is a lot worse than what we've been told.
So really, thanks a lot for your very diligent and thorough reporting and trying to, you know, unpack what the hell is going on with this weird organization.
Yeah, thank you guys.
I feel like we keep saying we keep thinking we've come to like the last thing that we can possibly find out and then we get a phone call or we get an email or we get a tip and there's another thing and it's like peeling just an endless nightmare onion.
So I would love to think that we're at the end of the onion, but I don't think we are.
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
And the layers are just starting to become rotten.
Right?
You know, with the green root starting to, you know, starting to peel out of it.
You've now gotten to a psychic, soon, you know, unmarked burial ground, ghosts, goblins.
I mean, who knows?
Who knows?
I mean, hopefully that would be, that would be exciting.
Yeah.
I mean, like, it's like, the one thing I would say here is that we're being obviously super lighthearted, but if the, if the tips that we're getting are accurate, like the women involved, who are now accusing Mr. Ballard of sexual misconduct are,
according to people we've talked to, said to be super traumatized. Absolutely. Yeah.
And have, you know, expressed feeling very, like, very betrayed.
So we'll see if that turns out to be true, but if it is, you can understand why they would feel that way.
Yeah, and I would also say this isn't entirely theoretical.
We're still working off the cache of public records we've received.
We have stories that we're still doing some reporting on, but that are distressing.
And we're also hearing from more people.
There's a little bit of a snowball effect as more information comes out.
More people feel comfortable talking so I, you know, I unfortunately do think there's more to this and it's good to know people are interested in this because, I hate the cliche, but at the end of the day, Ballard is, as far as we can tell, on the verge of announcing a Senate run.
He certainly was before we ran off this run of stories over the last week and every public statement he's made suggests dogged determination to mirror Lincoln In the days before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation and push his advisors to one side, do what needs to be done.
And we've seen the, you know, we've seen the political dynamics in this country and the idea that with this kind of information out there and these kind of allegations against him, he could forge forward, gain significant power, not just despite, but in some ways because of all of this is a very real prospect and It's not my job to say that shouldn't happen, but it would be very interesting if it did, despite what we now know about this figure and his associates.
If I could say one last thing really quick, Anna, you made me think about this, talking about the trauma of these women.
One thing that I didn't really think about that I think is worth pointing out is that
if these allegations are true, this isn't something that's happening on American soil
in a weird hotel or whatever.
You have somebody you can call.
You are in another country completely dependent on this person, Tim Ballard, and people on
the team for your safety.
You know that you are possibly getting involved with people in that country, criminals in
that country who are extremely dangerous.
So to be taken advantage of or potentially coerced into these completely inappropriate
situations, I think is exponentially scarier given the circumstances where, you know, where
are you going to go if you are in Thailand or you are in some other country and essentially
your lifeline is also this person who is somewhat of a predator as well.
I think that that's worth just imagining to put ourselves in the perspective of just how awful this situation, you know, could be.
Yeah, and it's worth noting that that is the situation that trafficking victims have described to us.
Like, being taken to another country and being dependent on someone who is forcing you into sex acts.
Like, I would not say that, you know, we are at this point accusing Mr. Ballard of that, but that is certainly how people have described their experiences in trafficking situations.
Sorry Tim, am I gonna get sued?
No, I think that's totally fair.
I said it first.
Yeah, true.
But yeah, I mean this is something we've been talking about a lot, is just what it would be like to have this happen, especially somebody who you trusted and viewed as like a real moral authority.
and you're not like a trained agent.
You don't have resources on your own.
You're there as a volunteer.
You know, you are, like you said, maybe a W2 employee of OUR,
and now you're in Honduras, you know, or somewhere and you're feeling unsafe already,
and now the person that you are relying on for safety is also an unsafe person.
I mean, it is absolutely a total nightmare scenario.
Yeah, it's not great.
It's one of the central questions that's been driving our reporting all through this
is just, well, they're kind of technical and boring questions,
the ones we've really tried to get answers to, in the sense that when American citizens
are in another country, the State Department has obligations to them.
And the State Department, the CIA and other government agencies have kind of obligations to be aware of as regards what U.S.
citizens are doing there.
And so we've gotten some You know, we've gotten some very interesting answers to this.
We wrote a whole story that was largely about the complications of the visa process, what with OUR having claimed to bring women from a foreign country into the US and permanently settle them by routing around the visa process, which isn't what happened.
But while these can sound like, you know, very academic questions when set next to the moral urgency of saving the children, they're very important ones and they raise You know, a big question at the end of this, which is, does the U.S.
government have more of an obligation to be monitoring the activities of, you know, what people are doing abroad and perhaps preventing them in some cases?
I don't think the U.S.
government has turned a blind eye to it, but we've clearly seen that citizens of the U.S., as well as of England and Australia and New Zealand and other countries, are doing these raid and rescue missions and operating You know, in some sense, with the idea that the government has their back.
It raises a bunch of very, very tricky questions, and the one you're pointing up is one to think about, is would someone in the situation that is at the center of these allegations, you know, feel comfortable going to the embassy and saying, this is what's happening to me, and can I get myself out of this situation?
And how does that parallel the experiences of trafficking victims?
These are kind of the questions ultimately at the heart of a lot of this.
Well, and I'll tell you this, if I went out, if I, you know, left this interview and went out into the street and put on a police uniform and started pulling people over, I think they would be on me very quick.
I don't know, Jake.
I think you should just try it.
You should just try it.
If I dressed up in a Navy SEAL Halloween costume and got an airsoft rifle and started pulling raids on people's houses, I think I would probably be picked up pretty quick.
So you would think, you know.
Not that I'm not going to do that for anybody listening who's worried.
I don't even own a police anything.
I think you should.
You should.
So Anna and Tim, where can people go and find your work as you continue to peel back the layers of the onion?
You can find us on vice.com under our names, Anna Merlin or Tim Marchman.
And we're also on, we're both still on Twitter for now under those names until it becomes untenable to do so.
That is where we'll continue to be.
And we're both on Blue Sky now, but I'm just using Blue Sky for, you know, like photos of what I'm baking and stuff.
I'm, you know, haven't fully committed to it as a work platform yet.
Thank you so much.
Thank you guys.
Thank you guys.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash q anon anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and all of our mini series.
We've got 10 episodes of trickle down with Travis view.
We've got 10 episodes of man clan with myself and We have Annie, and we have an ongoing series called The Spectral Voyager with Jake Rakitansky and Brad Abrahams.
And Travis, I hear that Trickle Down Season 2 might be brewing somewhere?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
As soon as Jake wraps up his really excellent Spectral Voyager series, we're gonna do some more Trickle Down stuff.
I found some really...
crazy things about how Gatorade influenced the science of hydration and be talking about some of the more ludicrous exploits in the history of forensic science.
So yeah, just be a just a parade of disastrous incompetence from people who ought to know what they're talking about, but don't.
And I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but I'm also preparing a little something something, maybe with one Liv Agar for the next little 10 episode run.
Let's just say it's a little perverted.
Yeah, it's a little perverted.
Yeah, I wonder what the two most melted minds of the QAA crew are going to set their sights on.
I'm sure it's going to be totally wholesome and not going to break my brain.
Yeah.
I'm ordering books to properly research breaking your brain.
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
He's got books.
He's got books, people.
He's got a Barnes & Noble account.
I just want people to know that I'm literate.
I can read.
Thank you.
For everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener.
No.
No.
Hey, listener.
No.
No, people aren't gonna like that.
You don't think they'll like it?
No, bizarre.
Bizarre.
May the force bless you and keep you.
You don't think they'll like it?
No. Bizarre. Bizarre.
Great.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
Can you make of a situation involving Tim Ballard?
Uh, what do I make of it?
Uh, I, well, I, I make of it what I've read in the media.
I, you know, I, I don't know Tim Ballard.
I think I met him passing through an airport once.
I know he was terminated from OUR, which I thought was very interesting that the organization
that he created was the face of, was the hero of, that they would terminate him and remove
themselves from him.
And so I wondered, like everybody else, what was happening.
There had to be something out there.
And then of course, to have the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issue a
statement like that, a very strong statement, very rare that they do something like that.
I know there was a lot of pushback, like did this really come from the church?
Did it come from a rogue spokesperson?
I reached out to the church personally and was assured that that did come from the church, that it had been vetted through all the normal church processes.
And then to have, again, allegations.
Everybody is due their day in court, and we believe in a system where people are innocent until proven guilty.
The allegations, though, of several different women are It's incredibly disturbing and just awful.
And if true, just unconscionable.
And so, what do I make of it?
It's very disturbing and I hope they're not true.
I truly hope that those allegations aren't true.
But it would seem like now we have multiple organizations that are speaking out and that's deeply troubling.
Do you have any concerns with his relationship with Utah Attorney General Shawn Reyes?
Tim said that they're like this.
Well, again, I'll let Attorney General Reyes respond to those questions.
I don't know.
I know that from the very beginning of his time as Attorney General that Shawn has cared deeply about preventing human trafficking.
And that's, to me, the troubling part of this is that human trafficking is real, and it's just awful.
And we should be doing everything possible as a state, as a nation, as a community to prevent human trafficking.
