Tim Ballard E1: For A Good Cause

0:00A warning, this episode contains discussion of sexual assault that may be disturbing. Listener discretion is advised. As a note, we reached out to Tim Ballard's attorney to request an interview, and our request went unanswered. And one last thing. After Tim Ballard left the anti-trafficking organization OUR in 2023, it was renamed OUR Rescue. Its new leaders say they do not condone Tim Ballard's alleged actions while part of the old organization. I was molested and sexually assaulted by Tim in four different states. five different countries in the span of 10 months. Tim manipulated and abused and brainwashed me to a point where I didn't know left from right and right from wrong.

0:54He has ruined so many people's lives. As big as that, like my heart was for the mission and I would do anything for the mission, as far as wanting to save kids. Not anything. I should not say that because of what it got me in. Celeste Borys told me her first one-on-one with Tim Ballard was intense. She was working with Operation Underground Railroad, now known as OUR Rescue, or OUR for short, which was an organization that Ballard began in 2013 with the stated goal of rescuing children around the world from sex trafficking. So naturally, the stakes were high. But even under those circumstances, Ballard really laid it on thick.

1:47Celeste was in her office working late when Ballard burst in, slamming the door behind him. He told her that he had asked God who could help him pull off one of his dangerous undercover operations. And he told her that he then saw her face. It must be a sign. They were meant to work together to help free children from enslavement. When someone says that God has hand-chosen you to save children's lives, how do you say no? So, of course she said yes. At that moment, there was no way for her to know what would happen when she and Ballard began working together more closely. There was no way for her to know the ways that Ballard would completely take over her life.

2:31and there was no way for her to know how he would take advantage of her trust in one of the most heinous ways imaginable.

2:46This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to the first episode of a 10-part series on Tem Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad.

3:00I'm Sarah James McLaughlin Remember the summer of 2023? A movie came out that became a surprise hit It was called Sound of Freedom and it was about a former U.S. agent turned vigilante who went on a mission to rescue trafficked children in Colombia You might have heard of it But you might not know, the movie was based on the life of Tim Ballard And you might not know much about him at all. But we're going to fix that. With a 10-episode deep dive into him, his connections, his organization, and the mounting allegations against him. In this first episode, I dive into the story of Celeste Borays and her experience with Tim Ballard and OUR Rescue.

3:45I've spoken with Celeste several times and discussed her shocking allegations, accusing Ballard of unethical behavior during their work together, which have raised serious questions about OUR's methods, leadership, and even its true purpose. But before we get too deep into the specifics of Tim Ballard and the organization he founded, I want to tell the story of Celeste Borees and how she got pulled into OUR's orbit, and ultimately sucked into a black hole.

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5:49Celeste Borey is what's first introduced to Operation Underground Railroad in the summer of 2021. She was 35 years old, living in northern Utah with her husband and two children. Formerly a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, she was passionate about volunteering and helping people in any way she could. So OUR's mission was a natural fit. I joined Operation Underground Railroad to help save kids from sex trafficking. Celeste was fired up about the cause, even before she was officially hired by the organization. She took the initiative to plan and carry out a huge fundraiser, which brought in nearly$25 ,000.

6:36So it's no surprise she was quickly offered a formal position. Celeste was so passionate about the cause, she was willing to do just about anything to pitch in. I said, whatever you guys need me to do, if you want me to clean the bathrooms, if that's going to help keep the lights on for the employees and save kids, I'll do that. Celeste worked for OUR for several months, coordinating volunteer efforts across several states. She was deeply committed to the work, doing whatever was required, attending events, running booths, selling merchandise. In her capacity, she didn't work directly with Tim Ballard, yet.

7:16But she was aware of his larger-than-life presence. There was no way to escape it. What was your first impression of him? What kind of personality did he have? And when Tim speaks to a crowd, you literally, I mean, you can hear a needle drop on the floor. Everybody is like silent. He can draw a crowd in because he's so, you know, his stories are so elaborate and believing. And, you know, you cry because they're so beautiful. And I said, it is creepy how people are so obsessed with you. And he goes, I love it. I remember him telling me that. He goes, I love it. I just love it. It wasn't until October of 2021 that Ballard approached Celeste, albeit in a dramatic fashion, with a new opportunity within OUR.

8:08He said that he was in the middle of working on an operation in London and he needed to get another female job or operator. It was a sensitive mission. According to Celeste's victim impact statement, filed as part of her lawsuit against Tim Ballard, this new female operator would need to pose as Tim's girlfriend and get close to a woman who they suspected was being trafficked to help gain information about how to take down the ring. And he's like, I've been having the hardest time thinking who I could bring because I need somebody right for the job. These things are so particular and I need somebody right.

8:55And he goes, I was just driving down the road and I just closed my eyes and I said a prayer. And he goes, I just, I don't, I just saw your face just popped in my mind. And he goes, and now it's crazy. I walked in the office and you're the only one here. You're the only one here. I was just like, okay. So he didn't even have my information. So he had me write down my phone number. And when I left that night, I was driving home and I literally was like, what the F? Like, that is so weird. Weirdness aside, Celeste wasn't sure she was cut out for going undercover to break up child sex trafficking rings.

9:42For one, she didn't have the background or the training. But instead of addressing her concerns, he merely brushed them off. Instead, he tried to boost her confidence. I always thought operations were like big guys, like with combat boots running through the door. I go, that's not me at all. And he goes, you'd be surprised some of the best operators are women. And I was like, really? And he said, yeah, he goes, he goes, women are the kids talk to women on, on operations. And so women are some, some of the women are the best operators and have saved so many kids on our ops. And that just made sense to me.

10:32Eventually, Celeste was convinced to join Ballard in his high stakes operations. From the beginning, there was a sense of cloak and dagger secrecy. Ballard directed Celeste to head to California for training. Ballard was there for a big OUR board meeting, which Celeste had helped plan. This wasn't a normal work trip. He had also challenged her to get to California without telling anyone else where she was going or why. Bori's safety was of little concern. She was traveling alone, and only Ballard knew her whereabouts. If anything were to happen to her, her family wouldn't even know where to look for her.

11:14And he would have plausible deniability. And I wasn't allowed to talk to anybody about it. And that was the first kicker. Like, that was actually like my first test. And he's like, I need you in California this weekend so we can train you. And I was also like, it all happened so fast because it wasn't normal. And he said, but we're going to see if you can get there without anyone seeing. It's like, it was almost like combat training. It was like, let's see if you can get there without anyone knowing. So Celeste booked herself a flight. When she arrived in California, she was put up in a hotel room and Ballard came to give her a rundown on how things work in operations.

12:04In Celeste's victim statement filed as part of her lawsuit against Tim Ballard, she writes that she felt uncomfortable when Ballard came into her hotel room. I remember thinking the very first time he walked into my hotel room, the first time, even as little as like, okay, he's in my hotel room by himself. I felt really uncomfortable. But I couldn't say, hey, maybe let's go to the lobby or let's go to a conference room. Because if he were to disagree with me, how awkward would that be? So of course he wouldn't do anything wrong. Of course, he's Tim Ballard. He's Tim Ballard. He's Tim Ballard. So I really had to normalize things until I was so desensitized to the most heinous things.

12:49Ballard launched into an explanation of his undercover alter ego, Brian Black. He would regularly become this character with a fairly low effort disguise that included a wig and fake tattoos. He also laid out a strategy called the couple's ruse. We'll get into this more later, but basically, the couple's ruse was a tactic used by Ballard and OER to provide cover for their operatives. The idea was that when infiltrating sex trafficking rings, OUR members would seem less suspicious if they appeared to be a couple. Working in pairs, they could sort of block each other from having to participate in unethical or compromising behavior.

13:34According to Celeste, one example that Ballard gave was a hypothetical situation where two OUR operatives were gathering intel at a strip club. If a dancer tried to give the male operative a lap dance, then the female operative could block this by sitting on his lap instead. Ballard laid out the rules for operations. No kissing or touching private parts, and no being alone with escorts. But Ballard warned that certain things had to be convincing to pull off this ruse. Celeste says Ballard warned that traffickers could smell pheromones, and so they had to make their chemistry seem real, which might even involve simulating sex.

14:21Now, granted, people engaged in risky illegal activities like human trafficking would be on alert for potential undercover agents. But it's a little over the top for Ballard to say they could smell pheromones. Traffickers are still humans. They don't somehow have a superhuman sense of smell. So Ballard was probably playing up the threat of exposure to manipulate female operators. So he basically told you you needed to pretend to be his girlfriend, and that if you deviated from that, that you were putting children at risk? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you found yourself in this situation, did you trust him?

15:12It wasn't even that. It was more so my life was at risk. In her victim statement, Celeste recalled being gobsmacked by all this information and wondering if HR was going to pop out of the closet to stop what Ballard was doing and saying. But no one showed up to question what was happening. The organization seemed to promote a culture that said, this is business as usual. And so Celeste was pulled deeper into Ballard's schemes. Yeah, I mean, it was stressful because it wasn't normal. It was stressful, but it was stressful in a sense that I wasn't a trained operator. But it was normal for Tim. Tim said it was normal.

15:56This was normal work that operators do. As if it wasn't bad enough that Ballard had sprung all of this information on Celeste, he then proceeded to physically force himself on her. According to her victim impact statement, before Ballard left her hotel room, he hugged Celeste, then lifted her shirt to look at her stomach. He commented on her body, saying he didn't know she was so hot because she was always covered up at the office. Ballard then pulled Celeste into him and kissed her neck. With all of their clothes still on, he had her lay down on the bed, wrapped one of her legs over his shoulder, and thrust his hips forward, demonstrating how to simulate sex without actual penetration.

16:48Ballard had taken her passion for helping children and used it to lure her hundreds of miles away from home, get her alone, and take advantage of her. And Ballard swore Celeste to complete secrecy about her operations training and made her keep up with the full-time job she was already working on top of her new duties. That meant she was essentially working two jobs for the price of one, and it left her with little time for herself or her family. I was Tim's executive assistant for the better part of 12 months. During that time, I was the closest person to Tim. I traveled with him around the world, thinking we were saving kids and doing something good.

17:39Over time, Ballard became increasingly unstable and emotionally dependent on Celeste. She said he would call around the clock, straining her relationship with her husband to a breaking point. Ballard further manipulated Celeste's emotions by claiming that he would, quote, put a bullet in his head if she ever left him and the organization.

18:22I worked tirelessly day and night for the good of the cause. I sacrificed time I can never get back from my family, my kids, and my husband. For my efforts and my sacrifice, I was left with a broken marriage, a broken spirit. it.

18:45Up next, Tim Ballard's mind games and manipulations escalate, dragging Celeste across the globe and leading to multiple criminal allegations. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. Do you ever feel like you have to put on a mask to get through interactions? We all wear masks sometimes, whether at work, with friends, or even around family. But wouldn't it feel amazing to take off that mask, to accept all parts of yourself? Therapy can help you do that. It's about learning positive coping skills, setting boundaries, and becoming the best version of yourself. With BetterHelp, you can start your journey towards personal growth.

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20:50Sign up for your$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash opp, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash opp to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash opp. Now, back to the story. In 2021, Celeste Bore started out volunteering and fundraising for Tim Ballard's Operation Underground Railroad, now called OUR Rescue. She was soon offered a full-time position and swept up into Ballard's shadowy inner circle. Ballard began training Celeste to go undercover using a highly questionable and thoroughly manipulative strategy called the couple's ruse. It wasn't until I was in another country in the middle of a very hard position in a operation, different country, not speaking the language, completely ambushed that he threw me in a couple Drew's that I had no idea what how to get out of.

21:58Right. Like you were kind of in a vulnerable position where you had to listen and you had to do what he said. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't even know I didn't even realize. So fast forward till to the beginning of this year, like when I was out of all of it. I did not even understand how I got into all the positions that I was in. In 2022, Ballard took Celeste with them to Ecuador to conduct another practice operation to prepare her for the mission in London. While undercover, Ballard and Celeste went for a couple's massage with two young female massage therapists. Celeste didn't speak Spanish, but Ballard did.

22:48And she says he appeared to steer the conversation with the young women towards sex, ostensibly to see if he could get any leads on traffickers. Ballard asked the women how often they masturbated and how they touched themselves. One of the massage therapists offered to demonstrate on Celeste. Ballard then physically rolled Celeste over onto her back, clearing the way for the masseuse to sexually assault Celeste, moving her hands over Celeste's genitals. Believing that there were children's lives at stake, Celeste did her best to stay in character, despite being extremely uncomfortable. But when she felt fingers penetrate her, it became too much for her to take.

23:33She got up, went into the bathroom, and cried. Ballard went after her while she was still undressed and vulnerable. Celeste says he complimented her, saying she was a badass and that she had done better than any other female operative. Basically, he broke her down by obliterating her boundaries and agency so that he could build her back up with words of comfort. Then, he would play his signature move, reminding Celeste of all the kids they were going to save. He even said he had gotten some information from the masseuses, which would lead to trafficked children. He assured Celeste that she shouldn't feel sad or guilty about anything that had happened, because all of her pain and discomfort was worth it.

24:24And so from then, it was like an ambush. But my next stop was London, and it's like my brain didn't have the capacity to even understand what had happened. But he normalized it by the time we got to the ambush couple's ruse technique. That word normalized is key here. Because if Ballard had come right out of the gate putting Celeste in uncomfortable sexual situations, she likely would have backed out right away. because that would have felt inappropriate and unacceptable. But by slowly pushing her boundaries further and further, he was able to trap her in a cycle of justification. Like, you had a really normal, because he was fine.

25:18He was fine. And here I am going, this is my boss, the CEO, founder of Operation Underground Railroad, and who everybody lifts up and who is respectful. And not that I'm explaining him that I idolized him, but he just made it seem so okay that I had to normalize it. A couple months later, Ballard took Celeste to Mexico City for another practice operation. To gather intel, Ballard ordered two female escorts. This time, Ballard upped the ante and had Celeste pretend that she wanted to become an escort herself. He even had her take full-body, scantily clad boudoir photos to support the cover story.

26:06Here's where Ballard pushed Celeste's boundaries even further. Celeste wrote that the ploy ended up with her sitting on the bed, watching while a naked woman crawled all over Ballard, giving her tips on how to please a man. Finally, after months of practice, it was time to conduct the London operation, which was what Ballard wanted her help with in the beginning. The goal was to confirm whether a certain escort was being trafficked. To get this information from the escort, Ballard ordered her services for the night, and then, so they didn't seem like narcs, he had Celeste again participate in the couple's ruse.

26:49This time, Ballard made Celeste straddle his lap while he pointed out the different chakras on her body, one of which is in the chest area and another is in the groin. Ballard then put on a show, pretending to take a shower with Celeste and even making sex noises to sell the performance. Apparently, that was enough to earn the woman's trust to the point that she gave them the information they needed. So, mission accomplished. But after that, Ballard didn't just let Celeste go back to her desk job. He had more and more missions for Celeste to complete, including a disastrous operation in Mexico, where Ballard escalated his manipulation and abuse to new heights.

27:34I was like a disaster. The whole weekend was a disaster. But after, so when I got to the office and this, when I, it was just the whole, from walking into the, up to his office and him just standing in a towel right out of the shower was shocking in itself. But every time something like that happened with Tim, it was so uncomfortable that you really had to normalize it to feel comfortable. That he was able to normalize what happened next really is a testament to the months and months that he had spent manipulating situations and eradicating Celeste's boundaries. According to Celeste's victim impact statement, she and Ballard were at OUR offices preparing for a trip to Mexico, this time for Ballard to meet with the country's attorney general in addition to another information-gathering operation.

28:34Celes was gathering the supplies they'd need for the mission, including the wig that Ballard wore to transform into his alter ego, Ryan Black. During these rushed preparations, Celes said Ballard ambushed her. When I got there and I said, get dressed, I'll go get the wig, and I knew the wig was in the closet around the corner, I waited a few minutes and I asked if he was dressed And he said, yes. And when I went back to the bathroom, he was standing there completely naked. And it's almost, I like, I remember freezing and he, he pushed me against the wall and like slammed me.

29:18He could be one second, this charismatic guy who is mesmerizing a whole thousand people crowd talking about spiritual stuff. and you feel it you're like oh my gosh this guy is like this has saved so many kids this is so cool and then he could walk off the stage and get in the car and be psychotic and neurotic and like and crazy and that's how it was it was like it was a flip of the switch like you never knew what was coming after you and so it was like as soon as I walked around the corner when he you know slammed me against the wall it's like lights out like I had no idea but it was like animalistic like right coming after me and then I lights out and then the next thing I know I'm just like wipe you know like wiping like you know and um I couldn't keep I the whole thing it's like it's you're just trying to come you're just trying to make sense of everything you're just trying to make sense of everything but everything happens so fast with Tim and he's always so out over and you don't know if he's in Brian Black mode or Tim Ballard mode.