Tim Ballard E7: Too Close to the Sun

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. 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.

0:31There's a moment in a lot of action movies where the hero is tempted to abandon their morals. to take the blue pill, to use the dark side of the force. Stop me if you've heard this one. You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. It's a quote from the Batman movie, The Dark Knight, but it applies to lots of other famous antiheroes who gave into temptation and had a dramatic fall from grace, like Walter White in Breaking Bad, or Tony Montana in Scarface, or Darth Vader in Star Wars and also Tim Ballard? Hear me out. For a decade between 2013 and 2023, Ballard appeared to be on a classic hero's journey.

1:17He received a call to action when he saw how children were being abused and he accepted the call crossing the threshold to start OUR and going on to conduct dangerous missions to rescue as many kids as possible. To hear him tell it, when Ballard started out, he was motivated by only the purest of intentions, and that very well may be the case. But, based on my research and the many people who have spoken to me about him, it seems that at some point, there was a turn. Around 2023, as allegations started to pile up, even his closest allies and longtime supporters had to acknowledge Baldard wasn't who they thought he was.

1:57Not anymore. Maybe the money, fame, and power was going to his head, and he lost track of the reason he started OUR in the first place. In other words, he gave in to the dark side.

2:15This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to the seventh episode of a ten-part series on Tim Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad. I'm your host Sarah James McLaughlin.

2:31In this episode, I dive into Tim Ballard's fall from grace. As the secretive activities came to light, those who had been fiercely loyal began to distance themselves, and the bright future he once envisioned grew dimmer with each revelation. At least somewhat. At least temporarily.

3:09Let's go back to 2013. It was a simpler time, wasn't it? Katy Perry's roar was at the top of the charts. Disney released the phenomenon Frozen. And a little-known man by the name of Tim Ballard quit his day job at the Department of Homeland Security to found Operation Underground Railroad. Now, as we've covered in previous episodes, Ballard didn't make this move on his own. He had help from people like M. Russell Ballard, a high up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Another person who was instrumental in the early days of OUR was none other than Glenn Beck. Yes, that Glenn Beck.

3:52Welcome to the fusion. of entertainment and enlightenment. This is the Glenn Beck Program.

4:07The former Fox News TV personality and longtime host of the Glenn Beck radio program was one of Ballard's first major backers. Here's Salt Lake Tribune reporter Robert Gerke recounting how Tim Ballard first connected with Beck. He wrote this book about how Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was influenced by Joseph Smith and the LDS Church, that landed him in front of Glenn Beck. And after he landed in front of Glenn Beck and started talking to Beck about child sex trafficking, that was sort of where he did the pivot, where he decided to leave Homeland Security, where he and his family members set up Operation Underground Railroad, and the rest is kind of history from there.

4:53Here's Ballard talking about his relationship with Beck after coming off of his radio show. One is just extreme gratitude to Glenn Beck. Glenn took a chance on OUR in the first days when everyone told him not to. Without Glenn, we wouldn't have been able to create OUR. Beck helped Ballard raise the first$1 million in funding for OUR. And for years afterward, Beck regularly had Ballard as a guest on his show. In 2017, Beck even made Ballard CEO of his own non-profit organization, the Nazarene Fund, which, according to their website, focuses on rescuing and rebuilding lives in some of the most dangerous places on earth.

5:37So, it seems safe to say Beck believed in Ballard and OUR's mission. And why wouldn't he? Ballard has claimed that he was inspired to dedicate his life to rescuing children after his involvement in the case of Earl Buchanan and the five-year-old boy he was sexually abusing. Even though, as we covered in episode two, it was still another seven years before he actually quit his job to focus on OUR full-time. Who's to say that Ballard didn't start out with good intentions? But as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with those. And based on all the research and interviews we've done, it seems that if Ballard did start out on the straight and narrow, at some point he lost his way.

6:20I think it's important to note here that the goal of OUR's first rescue missions was to make a reality TV show. The organization traveled to Colombia with a camera crew to film their dramatic undercover mission. Now, as even the most casual consumer of reality TV is aware, oftentimes people aren't in it for the right reasons. They don't care about falling in love or participating in social experiment or whatever the particular show may be about. They're just there for the clout, the opportunity to gain fame and social media followers, to become an influencer and make money. I'm not saying that everyone on TV has ulterior motives or that there aren't perfectly valid selfless reasons for Ballard to have wanted to amplify OUR's mission with some publicity.

7:08It's just to point out that Ballard never shied away from the camera. When the reality show didn't pan out, they pivoted and used the footage for a documentary instead, which was called The Abolitionist and was released in 2016. Footage from The Abolitionist trailer prominently features Ballard, first in his undercover persona baiting alleged traffickers, and then later holding young black and brown children in his arms. If me and my team don't find these kids and go for these kids, no one is going to. It's our job. We have to do something. The optics couldn't be clearer. He looks like one of the good guys.

7:44A hero. A savior. One of the many confounding details about Ballard continuing to participate in undercover missions is how often he's in front of the camera. Whether he's being filmed by a TV crew or his mobile phone, he remains a very public figure. You can find his face on news shows, at press conferences, and all over social media. Here's Robert Gerke again. Every mission that they went on, they would have a video crew. This was partly about promoting OUR and, you know, very much so promoting Tim Ballard. And he became very famous over this and made a lot of money on it. Fame? Check. Money?

8:30Check. Ballard starts to sound a lot like those folks who go on TV for the wrong reasons. And another thing Ballard might have in common with those kinds of people could be an intense desire to feel special, important, powerful. This is something that came up in my interview with former CIA officer Lindsay Moran. In fact, the way Lindsay saw it, these characteristics that Ballard exhibited would make him more likely to be a mark, someone who could be used to gather intelligence from, rather than someone who could do the intelligence gathering. He actually exhibits all of these characteristics that are the kinds of things we would look for if we were looking to recruit someone, these sort of weaknesses, you know, tremendous ego, wanting to be in the limelight, having a bit of insecurity, probably about his own effectiveness or talent or intellect or whatever.

9:30So those are the kind of things that I, as a former CIA officer, I'm like, oh, that's a guy I could recruit because I could prey upon his vulnerabilities. If Lindsay's right about Ballard, that he had this ego and these insecurities, that he wanted to raise his profile, then it seems likely that he could have been more susceptible to getting lured in by the bright lights of fame and power, that he might have even abused this power once he had it. Lindsay also commented on the question of Ballard's true motivation for filming his missions with OUR. There are a lot of red flags that kind of have popped out at me when I watch interviews with Tim Ballard.

10:12Seems pretty obvious to me that Ballard was building a political base for himself. Building a base for himself. Not exactly altruistic. And that's coming from a trained professional with years of experience in the field, sussing out people's psychologies. Lindsey Moran isn't the only one to see Ballard this way. Time and time again, people we spoke to talked of Ballard's political ambitions. Ballard did get involved in politics. He was at the White House. I was thrilled to host a screening at Badminster of the important new film, Sound of Freedom, about the power of faith in overcoming evil. And on Capitol Hill.

11:00All right, the hero will come to order. So, Mr. Ballard. Thank you, Chairman Graham, Ranking Member Feinstein, and members of the committee who hopefully are watching from a remote location somewhere. My intention today is to focus on the millions of children who are caught in the horrific web of child trafficking. And backed by some of his closest friends in politics, like Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes. Ballard even teased the idea of running for Senate in Utah. Here he is on Sean Spicer's show back in September of 2023. We now know Mitt Romney is not going to run again. You live in Utah. Yeah.

11:42There's a seat that's going to be open. Well, that's the very seat that I was asked to look at weeks ago. And I was very seriously considering it then. And how about But now this is a lot easier. I'll be honest, even more so. It wasn't a totally surprising move. In fact, it made quite a bit of sense. Again, journalist Robert Gerke. I think he recognized that there is some overlap here between conservative politics, his religious background, especially here in Utah, and the mission that he was trying to do, you know, elevate this issue of child trafficking and raise money for OUR. So, yeah, I think it was a natural fit.

12:26All of this was coming to a head in September of 2023, and Ballard was coming off of a high as Sound of Freedom, the movie very loosely based on his life, massively overperformed at the box office. But just as it seemed he had reached a pinnacle of power, fame, and wealth, this was when Ballard's House of Cards started to collapse. Here's Miles Klee, a culture reporter for Rolling Stone, on that period of Ballard's life. I think it's not a huge coincidence that we saw him fall from his status right after the film, or even as the film was really taking off. It felt like a flying too close to the sun sort of story.

13:10He had been so good for so long, you know, maybe like a decade as a self-promoter, getting, you know getting close ties to the trump administration getting up to these levels where you you you know you'd be giving congressional testimony and stuff he sort of got high on his own supply maybe and you know reportedly imagined that he was going to become the next senator of utah based on this reputation maybe even run for president someday it it had all the makings of this um this meteor meteoric rise and fall where the guy was totally deluded about who he was and what he was capable of. Ballard was capable of a lot, both good and very, very bad.

13:58In early October of 2023, the world got a taste of the very, very bad things Ballard was capable of, of the very, very bad things he had done. Even his allegations began to swirl about inappropriate behavior while on missions with OUR, even as Ballard was ousted from OUR and the Nazarene Fund, even as the LDS Church made the rare move to speak out against him and his behavior. Ballard still held on to his political aspirations. He planned to officially announce his bid for the Senate on October 10, 2023. But just one day before, he was preempted by another major announcement. Our top story tonight, new insight into the ongoing story involving Tim Ballard and the nonprofit he founded, Operation Underground Railroad.

14:52We've learned both Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad and others are now being sued in a Utah court. Five women, four of whom we've been fortunate enough to speak to for this podcast, came forward and filed a lawsuit against Ballard and OUR, alleging sexual harassment, spiritual manipulation, grooming, and sexual misconduct. Ballard never did announce that Senate run. He had to focus all of his attention on playing defense.

15:28After the break, Ballard goes on the defensive, aggressively. When it comes to growing a business, it's not just about having a great product. It's about making the sales seamless for your customers. That's where Shopify comes in. Just look at Aviator Nation or Untucket. These businesses trust Shopify to connect with customers and grow their sales. Whether you're selling on social media, your website, or even in-store, Shopify makes it easy to reach customers wherever they are. Millions of businesses trust Shopify to do the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Aviator Nation uses.

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16:56His guests include fascinating voices from all walks of life, from FBI profilers and attorneys to musicians and mental health advocates. Each episode is like sitting around a campfire with a friend who's not afraid to ask the tough questions. One of my favorite episodes, The Conversation with Julie Murray, where the heartbreak of losing her sister Mara intersects with a larger story about deception and resilience. So if you're ready to be inspired, challenged, and even surprised, subscribe to The Silver Linings Handbook wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the story. For 10 years after founding Operation Underground Railroad, Tim Ballard enjoyed a wild ride to fame, wealth, and power.

17:42He made himself the face of an anti-trafficking movement, but the reality appeared to be something else entirely. Suzette Rasmussen, the lawyer representing the five women accusing Ballard of sexual misconduct, wrote this in a press release. The tragic irony is not lost on these five women. Tim Ballard literally trafficked them for his own sexual and egotistical gratification. So far, his strategy, if it can be called that, has been deny, deny, deny. Attorneys for Tim Ballard say he's innocent, that he did not sexually harass or assault any of the women who have come forward in the past few months.

18:24And beyond just having his legal representatives deny the allegations on his behalf, Ballard has also gone into the fray, attempting to clear his name. Back in September 2023, Ballard released a statement that said, As with all of the assaults on my character and integrity over many years, the latest tabloid-driven sexual allegations are false. They are baseless inventions designed to destroy me and the movement we have built to end the trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable children. It's worth noting that this kind of paranoia isn't new for Ballard. Sasha Hightower described how years before accusations started coming out against him, Ballard was already worried about people betraying him.

19:09He kept telling me how he had to fire people because everybody had turned against him. He kept telling me how they had to have new female operators because they all fell in love with him. He was really, really like extra, I don't know, agitated or something just about being burned and not trusting anybody. Ballard has even gone so far as to say that the lawsuit is wasting OUR money and, by extension, harming children. Here's Ballard speaking in a 2024 interview with Troy Ables, host of The Last Dispensation podcast. I just don't think people realize how much these lawsuits are hurting kids. It's giving away tactics.

19:54it's it's shut down the whole adoption process 26 kids will never be adopted because we had to use that lawsuit money that money that would have adopted kids to fight these legal battles we're in the millions of dollars now every single group institution person plaintiff who has made these negative comments is hurting kids and that's the part that blows my mind when you lie about somebody, when you say they did something they didn't do, when it comes to saving kids, less kids get rescued. Mallard has taken things even further, insinuating that the women behind the lawsuit, women who volunteer their time, energy, and resources to join an anti-trafficking organization, are themselves involved in trafficking.

20:44He recorded this podcast just this past week where he is insisting that this is all part of a big takedown of him and, you know, and has insinuated that the people who are behind it are people who are involved in sex trafficking cartels. So, you know, it's kind of a little bit a symbol of our times that we live in where, you know, people are going to see what they want to see. And so far, Ballard has benefited from today's intense polarization, where people take sides on an issue and doubled down, despite new information emerging. That's our top story tonight. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints releasing a statement denying their association with the former CEO of Operation Underground Railroad, Tim Ballard.

21:31For example, when the LDS Church first issued a statement condemning Ballard for morally unacceptable behavior, he denied the accusation completely. The Church put a statement out saying that I betrayed my friendship with Elder Ballard. It's the most offensive thing that's happened. I say the church, I don't know what that means, people inside. They came out and said that I betrayed my friendship with Elder Ballard and used his name. And the only solace I have is that I know he's on the other side and knows the truth. He also tried to spin things to make it seem like the accusations were coming from people who were out to get him.

22:16Through his new organization, the Spear Fund, Ballard released a statement. It said, in part, Evil pedophiles will stop at nothing, and they have allies in government, in the media, in big corporations, and even in public institutions. They continue to lie about and attempt to destroy my good name, and they will never stop. Look, I don't know about you, but when I hear people talk about evil pedophiles who will stop at nothing, and their allies in government, in the media, and big business, my mind immediately thinks of the wildest QAnon conspiracies. It's outrageous. The kind of talk that sounds absolutely insane, but somehow it's become more common these days.

22:59But here's the thing. Ballard's spin worked. To a degree.

23:08He's very well supported, even though the LDS Church has denounced him. He recently held a Zoom event that was through high members of the LDS Church at the stake that he used to attend. So it's not like he's completely separated from them. I did a report on it, and it's just crazy that he still has his supporters out there, and they feel that this is all a big lie and conspiracy to continue the exploitation of children. Speaking of big lies, it should also be noted that Ballard has had ties to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Under the former president, Ballard was appointed as the head of an advisory group tasked with recommendations for anti-trafficking policy.

23:53He's definitely involved in Trump world, right? Trump put him on this task force, this child trafficking task force. They screened Sound of Freedom for Trump down at Mar-a-Lago. So, you know, he's recognized that there's big support for him in that world. And for that brief moment in time when Ballard was actively trying to launch a political career, he was going to align himself with Trump's brand of politics. He was actively pursuing a Senate candidacy, right? And he was going to run very much in the Trump lane in Utah, right? He was, when Mitt Romney stepped aside, everybody was expecting a Trump candidate to step up.

24:36And that was going to be Tim. And before his precipitous decline. It makes sense that Ballard and Trump would be aligned. They have similar values when it comes to how they want to be perceived as tough, heroic, doing things that no one else can to crack down on the bad guys. And as it turns out, Ballard and Trump both have similar strategies to maintain that image, even in the face of damning allegations. Namely, never admit to wrongdoing or defeat. And if anyone attacks or accuses you, say that it's a witch hunt. Over the years, Trump has faced all kinds of accusations, sexual assault, corruption, money laundering, mishandling confidential documents, you name it.

25:20And time and time again, he's claimed innocence. Here he is at a Florida campaign rally back in 2016 after allegations of sexual assault. These claims are all fabricated. They're pure fiction and they're outright lies. These events never, ever happened. In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Then there's the next level of defense. Turn the accusations back on the accusers. Make them into the bad guys. That's a play that both Ballard and Trump have run over the years. Here's Ballard on that podcast. There's a lot of people out there that want us down. And I just find it so sad that everybody who has come out with negative smears, lies, lawfare, they are accomplices to child trafficking.

26:19Their actions are causing children to suffer, to be raped, to be tortured. And that's the truth. And I know that sounds harsh, but that's the truth. That's the truth. And Trump at that rally. What is going on is egregious beyond any worse. People that know the story, people that see the story, people that know the facts, they can't even believe it. It's reprehensible beyond description. It's totally corrupt. They knew they would stop at nothing to try to stop me. But I never knew, as bad as it would be, I never knew it would be this vile. They sound pretty similar, don't they? And once you make your accusers the bad guys, then you can play the victim.

27:17You can even claim there's a whole shadowy conspiracy against you, like Ballard did. We don't know if this is being funded by some other place. You know, this all began, the lawsuits, within a week of me announcing I might be running for Senate. I think I told you I got a phone call from a very recognizable name and said, hey, your alliance with Trump, people in Utah don't like Trump, There's people in Utah who do not want you to run for Senate. And they just put$2 million into an opposition research. And then there's the coup de grace. Use the accusations against you as a way to raise money. Something Trump has done through his campaign and his media company.