According to officials in Texas, the bars might have served as brothels connected to Mexican drug cartels. Basically, the establishments look like any other normal bar from the outside and even in the front. However, they often organize sex work in the back, in closet-sized hidden rooms with cement floors and soiled mattresses.

Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) chairman Kevin J. Lilly called the bars “an actual house of horrors,” describing sexual abuse “some 30 times a day.”

“There’s a closed-off area, and so it’s kind of managed up front, and the deeds are done in the back,” said David Reid of the non-profit redM. “It’s not as obvious, everything is designed to be hidden.”

The nine bars are under a temporary liquor license suspension after several raids identified their potential involvement in sex trafficking. “As the investigation continues, it’s possible that additional actions could be taken,” said TABCspokesperson Chris Porter.

Houston is a known hotspot for sex trafficking in America, owing to the city’s location with an international port and airport. A recent report by the University of Texas counted over 300,000 sex-trafficking victims in the state of Texas. By Reid’s count, 675 of Houston’s massage parlors were operating as brothels.

As the investigation continues, TABC and Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance personnel are working to identify potential witnesses and any additional victims.

The post Operation Bad Traffic Pulls 84 Sex-Trafficking Victims from Houston Bars appeared first on VICE.

“I felt extraordinarily uncomfortable,” Massaro said, describing what she said were McMahon’s attempts to get her to come to his hotel room alone late at night. “He began calling the hotel room phone and my cell phone nonstop.”

Read Next

Despite Denials, WWE Management Knew Wrestler Said She Had Been Raped on Military Base

As VICE News has reported, WWE publicly denied that its upper management knew about the rape allegation, but that was untrue. A lawyer for former executive John Laurinaitis said that he and “most of upper management” were aware of it, a claim corroborated by previous statements from a former WWE doctor.

A spokesperson for TKO, WWE’s parent company, declined to comment when provided a detailed accounting of the allegations in the statement and questions raised by it, aside from confirming that a top backstage employee named in the statement, Michael Hayes, currently works for WWE and clarifying the nature of his job. A lawyer said to represent McMahon did not respond to a request for comment.

In the previously secret statement, Massaro—who joined WWE as a wrestler in 2005, represented the company as a Survivor contestant and Playboy model, and ultimately was released in 2008—asserts that she saw McMahon “making out” with female wrestlers in the locker room, and that he sexually harassed her. She also says that after she rejected his advances he wrote demeaning scripts for her to perform that she inferred were meant to end her career and destroy her reputation—something that, she said, had previously happened to another female wrestler before she left the company. (VICE News is withholding the name of this wrestler to protect her privacy; she could not be reached for comment.) She also details two of McMahon’s long-serving lieutenants counseling her on how to deal with his behavior.

Are you a current or former female WWE wrestler with a story to tell, or wondering if there’s a point to speaking out? Contact reporters covering sex trafficking at tim.marchman@vice.com or anna.merlan@vice.com. For extra security, download the Signal app to a non-work device and text us there at 267-713-9832. Confidentiality assured.

Rumors have long circulated about a WWE casting couch, in which women were put in position to either yield to the sexual demands of male managers or be humiliated on camera or fired—or both. They have been difficult to substantiate, in part because women believed to have been subject to such schemes have been hesitant to speak out for fear of retaliation from WWE, which until recently was controlled by McMahon and his family. Currently it is controlled by TKO, a conglomerate headed by Hollywood power player Ari Emanuel, whose Endeavor merged its own UFC with WWE last year. McMahon was brought in as chair of the newly-formed company after he had resigned from WWE following Wall Street Journal reporting on secret hush-money payments and allegations of sexual abuse of women who worked for WWE.

McMahon resigned from TKO two weeks ago after being named alongside WWE and former talent-relations head John Laurinaitis as defendants in a civil sex-trafficking suit that alleged he raped, trafficked, and even defecated on an employee. Both men have denied the allegations. TKO has sought to portray the allegations as being in the past and having to do with two men who are no longer associated with the company; the creative and talent-relations roles they held for most of this century are now filled by Paul “Triple H” Levesque, McMahon’s son-in-law and hand-picked protege, who was groomed to replace McMahon over more than 20 years, first as a star wrestler and then as a member of management. 

VICE News obtained the statement from Konstantine Kyros and Erica Mirabella, lawyers who represented Massaro and dozens of other former WWE wrestlers in a lawsuit seeking damages related to traumatic brain injuries. That suit was dismissed in 2018 and appeals, which reached the Supreme Court, were denied; Kyros was sanctioned by the judge and eventually ordered to pay more than $300,000 in fines for his conduct in the case.

As part of the suit, the lawyers collected statements from dozens of wrestlers, including Massaro, and refined them into sworn affidavits. As Mirabella described it, they spoke in detail about Massaro’s experiences in WWE, and then Mirabella wrote a draft affidavit. Massaro reviewed that and then offered feedback, new details, and edits on a phone call, which Mirabella used in preparing a new draft. They repeated this process several more times to come up with a final draft of the affidavit.

“Ashley was extremely detailed, thoughtful, and thorough throughout this entire process,” Mirabella told VICE News. 

The previously unpublished statement was initially included as a section in the finalized affidavit, but members of Massaro’s legal team ultimately decided to leave it out because it wasn’t clearly relevant given that the lawsuit was about concussions. “Our colleagues ultimately decided we should focus only on the sexual assault and physical in-ring injuries Ashley sustained,” Mirabella said, “so I discussed this with Ashley and she agreed that we could remove it, so it was deleted. We then finalized the affidavit, she signed it, and we submitted it to the court.”

The statement reads as follows; it has been reproduced verbatim as it was provided to VICE News with the exception of one redaction.

During my time with the WWE, I had observed Vince McMahon making-out with other divas in the locker room, but he never paid attention to me, and I assumed I was not his type. This changed after my Playboy cover was released. I was fortunate enough to be allowed to fly on the company jet and stay at the same hotels as the executives for a period of time so that I could get home faster to spend more time with my daughter. On one of these occasions, Vince was attempting to get me alone with him in his hotel room late at night and I felt extraordinarily uncomfortable. He began calling the hotel room phone and my cell phone nonstop. I called Kevin Dunn to explain the situation and he said I should tell Vince I was not feeling well and would see him on TV the next day, so I did. Immediately after that night, Vince started writing my promos for me. Vince does not write promos for female wrestlers—that is the job of the creative department—and he certainly wouldn’t have, under any normal circumstances, written a promo for me. But he did, and the promos were written with the clear intention of ruining my career. I brought the first script Vince wrote for me to the WWE employee in charge of Creative at the time, Michael Hayes, and he said, ‘you’re not saying this, who the [expletive] wrote this?’ and I told him that Vince did. He said, ‘Well kid, these are the breaks,’ meaning that Vince wanted to end my career and destroy my reputation on my way out. He is known for this type of behavior and also did this to [REDACTED] upon her departure from WWE. In addition, after that night, each time I walk by him he would make vulgar sexual comments that were clearly designed to make me uncomfortable.

Kevin Dunn, referenced in the statement, is WWE’s longtime production chief, who served as one of McMahon’s loyal right-hand men for more than 40 years; he left the company last month. In Massaro’s affidavit, he is said to be one of the men who attended a meeting in which she was told not to speak about her claim to have been raped in Kuwait, in part because it could harm WWE’s relations with the military. (“He told me not to let one bad experience ruin the good work they were doing,” Massaro said of McMahon in the affidavit.) He could not be reached for comment and TKO did not provide contact information for a representative. Hayes is a former star wrestler who works, as he has for many years, as a member of the creative team responsible for planning out and scripting WWE shows.

The post WWE Wrestler Ashley Massaro Accused Vince McMahon of Sexually Preying on Wrestlers in Previously Unreleased Statement​ appeared first on VICE.

In a sworn affidavit her lawyer released in 2019, after her death, former wrestler Ashley Massaro said that she was injected with a paralyzing drug and raped by someone representing himself as a U.S. Army doctor while on tour with WWE in Kuwait in 2006. Massaro also said that top executives at the company, including McMahon and Laurinaitis, told her not to talk about the incident and agreed to not talk about it themselves, in part to preserve the company’s relationship with the military.

“He told me not to let one bad experience ruin the good work they were doing,” Massaro said of McMahon in the affidavit.

VICE News can report for the first time that the Naval Criminal Intelligence Service opened an investigation into Massaro’s allegations in June 2019. That investigation was closed in January 2020, according to an NCIS spokesperson. Further information, they said, could not be immediately released, as it would need to be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

In the years since the affidavit was released, new information had come to light to corroborate some of Massaro’s claims and cast doubt on WWE’s subsequent denial even before the statement from Laurinaitis’ lawyer. Paul London, a former WWE wrestler who dated Massaro when they were both with the company, has also since said that Massaro was herself a victim of McMahon’s sexual misconduct. The allegations appear in a new light following the filing of a civil lawsuit accusing McMahon and Laurinaitis of raping a WWE employee and McMahon of covering it up by strong-arming her into signing a non-disclosure agreement. (Both have denied the allegations.)

“I’m not surprised by any of it,” London said of the recent claims against McMahon on a podcast released last week. He compared WWE to NXVIM, the cult led by now-convicted sex trafficker Keith Raniere.

Are you a current or former female WWE wrestler with a story to tell, or wondering if there’s a point to speaking out? Contact reporters covering sex trafficking at tim.marchman@vice.com or anna.merlan@vice.com. For extra security, download the Signal app to a non-work device and text us there at 267-713-9832. Confidentiality assured.

“Any allegations that Mr. Laurinaitus helped to cover up an alleged rape allegation is an outright lie,” wrote Laurinaitis’ lawyer, Edward Brennan, in response to questions about Massaro’s allegations. “Johnny, like most upper level management at sometime became aware of the allegations and ensured all proper WWE protocols were followed, including privacy for the alleged victim. We object to the use of the term cover up as no such plan or plot ever took place to hide or assist in the alleged rape.”  

A spokesperson for TKO, WWE’s parent company, declined to comment, and a lawyer said to represent McMahon did not respond to requests for comment. Neither McMahon nor Laurinaitis is now associated with WWE, with McMahon resigning as chairman of TKO the day after the sex trafficking suit was filed. 

Massaro’s road to WWE stardom was far from traditional—and, she said in her affidavit, rife with mistreatment from the start. In 2005, she was cast in the Diva Search, a reality competition of sorts that aired as part of the company’s flagship Raw program. As the winner, Massaro received a WWE contract and—despite being, she would later say, completely untrained—immediately joined Raw as a wrestler. (While wrestling has predetermined outcomes, working with another wrestler to safely execute even basic maneuvers requires intense training.) Over the next three years, she performed as a wrestler and valet—a woman who accompanies a male wrestler to the ring—and represented the WWE brand as a Survivor contestant and Playboy model before being released in 2008.

In 2016, Massaro joined a lawsuit brought by a number of former wrestlers against McMahon and WWE, seeking damages related to the effects of traumatic brain injuries they said they suffered while wrestling. According to a filing in that suit, Massaro said that she had been sexually assaulted in Kuwait and that Ferdinand Rios, a WWE doctor, had reported the incident to “WWE executives who soon thereafter met with Massaro to apologize for their negligence but persuaded her that it would be best not to report it to appropriate authorities.” 

In a filing the next month, WWE called the claim a “stale and baseless allegation” and denied Massaro had ever reported a sexual assault to anyone affiliated with WWE, saying she had been heard telling others that the doctor “had done an inappropriate pelvic exam.” (As headlines at the time about doctor Larry Nassar molesting hundreds of girls and women under the guise of medical treatment would have made clear, this can itself be a form of sexual assault.)

A judge dismissed the case in 2018, after which plaintiffs’ lawyer Konstantine Kyros, whom the judge had sanctioned and ordered to pay WWE’s fees, filed the first in an ongoing series of appeals. Asked for comment, Kyros provided a link showing he has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear an appeal—it has previously declined to do so—and noted that Massaro’s affidavit was made under oath to a federal judge.

The matter sat there until May 2019, when Massaro died; while authorities declined to publicly state the cause of death, it was reported—and her survivors have not disputed—that it was by suicide. Subsequently, Kyros published in full the sworn affidavit Massaro had signed in November 2017, in which she detailed the allegations about her rape and WWE’s response; it can be read in full here. 

In the affidavit, Massaro describes events that she says took place on a 2006 WWE tour—the year is incorrectly given as 2007 in the document—of U.S. military facilities in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait on which she and several other performers and staffers took part. (None could be reached for comment.) Suffering from dehydration, the statement says, she was taken to a military base, where she was given an IV and left alone. After a couple of hours, a man representing himself as an Army doctor and a woman in fatigues, she said, appeared, administered another IV, and took her to another room. 

(Massaro, according to a source with knowledge, was taken to Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, where the clinic would have been staffed by Navy, rather than Army, personnel. This would explain why NCIS handled the case even though Massaro said the rapist purported to be an Army doctor.)

“The woman guarded the door,” the statement says, “while the man proceeded to inject me with a drug that caused me to be unable to move my body or to scream. The man then proceeded to violently rape and sodomize me. I was completely helpless to defend myself against this attack as the drug he injected rendered me temporarily paralyzed. Despite being unable to control my movements, I remained fully conscious for every second of the attack.”

Eventually, the statement says, a WWE staffer began banging on the door; the man and woman covered her with a quilt and left the room, and the staffer carried her away and brought her back to her hotel room. The sequence of events given in the statement, including Massaro falling ill, going for medical attention, and then being brought back to the hotel, is broadly consistent with the one described in a 2006 blog post published on WWE’s website by Jimmy Hart, one of the performers on the tour.

Massaro, the statement says, was not in position to have a rape kit taken, and did not report the incident to authorities; she told fellow performers about what had happened, but told them not to report it to anyone. After she returned to the U.S., though, Ferdinand Rios, the WWE doctor, questioned her about the incident. She agreed to tell him what had happened as long as he didn’t tell anyone else; subsequently, though, the statement says, he informed McMahon, and she was summoned to a meeting with McMahon, Laurinaitis, WWE production chief Kevin Dunn, and other men she didn’t recognize but believed to be company executives or lawyers. 

(Dunn, who left WWE last month after more than 40 years of serving as one of McMahon’s loyal right-hand men, could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for TKO did not provide contact information for a representative for Dunn when asked.)

“Vince,” the statement reads, “led the meeting with these men and asked me to recount what happened in Kuwait. Then he said it was not in the best interest of the WWE for me to make the information about my attack public. I was still completely traumatized at that point and I just agreed. It was clear that there had already been a conversation and that they had reached a decision on their own prior to consulting with me as this was not a debate but rather Vince instructing me to keep this confidential. 

“Vince did at least apologize for what I went through, but then stressed that if I disclosed this incident it would ruin the relationship between the WWE and the US Military. He told me not to let one bad experience ruin the good work they were doing.” 

In a statement issued after the publication of the affidavit, WWE denied its claims.

“At no time was Vince McMahon or the management of WWE ever informed by Ashley Massaro or anybody else that she had been sexually assaulted, drugged, raped or sodomized by a military doctor with a nurse standing guard while on a goodwill tour in 2007 to U.S. military bases in Kuwait,” read the statement.

“At no time was there ever a meeting with Vince McMahon, Kevin Dunn, John Laurinaitis or other company executives in which she told them of such a claim and was instructed to keep it quiet.”

According to what Laurinaitis says—which is corroborated by an interview given last fall by Rios, the doctor—that statement was not true. A TKO spokesperson declined to comment on whether WWE stands by its denial.

A paradox of pro wrestling is that for all the secrecy surrounding its inner workings, there is a remarkable amount of media in which insiders freely discuss them, an entire ecosystem of podcasts and streams where current and former performers discuss how things actually work, what people are really like behind the scenes, and what they saw during their careers. As part of that ecosystem, Massaro’s story has been kept alive in the years since her death by wrestling fans and media, and also by people who knew her.

On one of these podcasts, Cafe de Rene, hosted by former WWE wrestler Rene Dupree, Paul London discussed Massaro last year. London and Massaro were linked together both off- and on-screen in her time with WWE, as the two dated and she also served as his valet. At the time the podcast was recorded, McMahon had recently returned to WWE after resigning in the wake of Wall Street Journal reporting about secret non-disclosure agreements he’d signed and allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse against him.

“I do remember specifically many times when she would be crying to me because Vince was propositioning her to fly on the jet with them,” he said. “Kevin Dunn, Bucktooth Bucky, would be telling her that she has to fly on the jet with them, or every now and then, she was at the—they would always put the divas up at the tv hotel or whatever, [McMahon] would be knocking on her door and trying to get her to answer. I’m shocked this Vince stuff is just now coming out.”

London described WWE as “an onion of destitution” in another interview on the same podcast just over a week ago. “It’s a really disgusting onion full of just layers and layers and layers. As you say, what’s known in the wrestling business is, believe none of what you hear and half of what you see, so there’s always that weighing on one thing. But of course I’m going to believe my girlfriend at the time, especially when I can see her physically shaken and disturbed.

“She was a good actress, but she wasn’t that good an actress.”

A representative for London did not respond to an email; a TKO spokesperson specifically declined to comment on London’s implication that McMahon had harassed or coerced Massaro. (Kyros, Massaro’s lawyer, suggested that her career ended at least in part because she rejected McMahon’s advances on the Banfield Podcast this week.)

Last September, Audible released a podcast called Ashley vs WWE, in which people who knew Massaro offered new corroboration of claims made in the affidavit. Some of this was less specific, such as her cousin saying she’d intimated that someone had attempted to rape her, her best friend saying Massaro had told her that a doctor did something to her and that it was swept under the rug, and an unnamed source saying Massaro had told them that she’d been sexually assaulted and urged by WWE to keep it quiet.

More specific new information reported by the podcast, though, contradicts WWE’s past denials. Reporter Isobel Thompson talked to London, who described Massaro feeling trapped, frightened, and preyed upon when McMahon and Dunn would pressure her to fly on the company jet or when McMahon would come knocking on her hotel door at night. He said that she had told him she was raped after returning from Kuwait, and that she had met with WWE executives who told her not to say anything about it.

Thompson also reached Ferdinand Rios, the WWE doctor whom Massaro told about the rape and whom she said reported it to McMahon, according to the affidavit. 

Rios, who did not return a message left with his office, confirmed to Thompson that while the details are a bit unclear in his memory due to the passage of time, he does remember that Massaro told him about the rape after returning to the U.S. from Kuwait. “I spoke with her and she told me a little bit about it,” he said. He further said that it was fairly widely known within WWE at the time. “Those that went would tell those that didn’t go that this happened,” he said.

While he said he does believe Massaro’s story, his recollection differs from what’s recounted in the affidavit in one key particular. While she stated that he told McMahon about the incident, he remembers that it was common knowledge and a subject of gossip, and that he approached Laurinaitis about it—only to find he was already aware. 

“He already knew and no one wanted to give me any further details about it,” said Rios. “I had nothing to do with it, they said. So, it was just sort of a shock. You know when you’re restricted from saying anything else.” 

(“At some point Johnny heard about the allegations in general, i.e. that Ms. Massaro claimed she had been assaulted in Kuwait,” wrote Brennan, Laurinaitis’ lawyer, in an email. “As to when McMahon found about the allegations, Johnny has no idea as to when or whether.”)

“She was extremely special,” London said of Massaro, speaking of her to Thompson. “I felt extremely fortunate to be in her life and to have her in my life.”

The post Despite Denials, WWE Management Knew Wrestler Said She Had Been Raped on Military Base appeared first on VICE.

The issues are possibly academic in Grant’s case, as in her lawsuit, she says that McMahon didn’t pay her all of the hush money he agreed to pay her in exchange for her signing the NDA, which would almost certainly make the contract void. If similar language was used in NDAs other people signed, though—something a person familiar with the case says is a reasonable inference—they may be able to set aside the agreements.

Such a development would be potentially catastrophic for WWE and McMahon, who the Wall Street Journal reported today is at the center of a federal criminal sex-trafficking investigation. Further complicating the issue, and potentially increasing McMahon’s legal exposure, is that according to a person familiar with the situation, McMahon secretly had the NDAs drafted and entered into them without WWE’s knowledge—which is why, when the company became aware of his hush money payments, it had to issue revised earning statements.

Read Next

Co-Defendant in Vince McMahon Sex Trafficking Lawsuit Says He Was a Victim Too

As VICE News reported yesterday, Laurinaitis’ lawyer, Edward Brennan, denies the allegations in Grant’s suit, which include rape, but asserts that his client, like Grant, is a victim who was acting under McMahon’s coercive control. This would seemingly complicate potential avenues of criminal and civil defense for McMahon, who has denied the allegations in Grant’s suit and said “I intend to vigorously defend myself against these baseless accusations.”   

Brennan said “We will go where the evidence leads” when asked if other WWE executives were involved in or aware of what Grant’s suit depicts as McMahon’s trafficking scheme.

Do you know something we should know about Vince McMahon’s conduct in WWE? Contact reporters covering sex trafficking at tim.marchman@vice.com or anna.merlan@vice.com. For extra security, download the Signal app to a non-work device and text us there at 267-713-9832.

According to the Journal, at least four women who had been signed to NDAs were named in a grand jury subpoena. Among the women named were a “former WWE wrestler who said McMahon coerced her into giving him oral sex” and “a former WWE employee who alleged the head of talent relations at the company at the time, John Laurinaitis, demoted her after she broke off an affair with him”—both of whom the Journal previously reported to have agreed to seven-figure settlements with NDAs attached.

An NDA cannot be used as a shield to prevent a victim from bringing criminal charges or speaking to investigators. If these women or others desire to speak out in public or bring civil suits, though, it’s not clear that an agreement like the one Grant signed would prevent that.

Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer who represented victims of Harvey Weinstein, called the document “poorly drafted.” (Weinstein used NDAs to silence some of his victims for at least two decades, and hid some of the payments he made to women by having them come from his brother’s bank account.)  

Goldberg says the central problem is the agreement’s lack of specificity. Her analysis matches that of Grant’s lawyers, who argue in the suit that the NDA should be voided because the language is so broad that it could prevent her from listing WWE on her resume.

“The NDA makes references to confidentiality, but there’s no definition of what to be confidential about,” said Goldberg. “It’s very vague. Usually there’s super-specific information about what to be confidential about.”

When asked what they understand the agreement to actually cover, a spokesperson for TKO, the parent company of WWE and the UFC, declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

Goldberg noted other issues with the NDA, among them that the copy Grant filed in federal court in Connecticut wasn’t actually signed by McMahon in either his personal capacity or role as then-chair of WWE; normally, all parties would receive an executed copy of the contract. According to a source familiar with the matter, though, the contract was in fact executed, with McMahon secretly signing on both his behalf and that of WWE after seeking counsel from his longtime attorney, Jerry McDevitt, a seeming conflict of interest Goldberg called “bizarre.”

(Neither the retired McDevitt nor the firm he worked for, K&L Gates, responded to questions about the apparent conflict of interest and whether McDevitt was paid by McMahon or WWE.)

Jodi Short, a professor at UC Law San Francisco who’s studied NDAs, believes the agreement is invalid on its face—but that this in practice may not necessarily mean much.

“It is my considered opinion,” she wrote in an email to VICE News, “that NDAs such as the one you sent me are unenforceable under common law contract doctrine. But there is very little case law squarely on point, and litigating such a case would expose an individual to enormous cost and litigation risk. That’s why most people end up silenced by NDAs even if, technically, they’re not worth the paper they’re written on. It’s not just the paper. It’s paper backed by an extreme asymmetry in resources between the two parties.” 

Goldberg agrees, and points out that survivors don’t owe debts to society. It may be that an NDA is worthless as a matter of legal theory, but proving that in court is a potentially arduous process without a certain outcome that could define a survivor by the worst thing that ever happened to them and incur ruinous expense.

Julie Roginsky is a former Fox News Channel host who became one of the first to sue the station over sexual harassment and was, and is, herself bound to silence by what many could consider an overly broad NDA; she’s a cofounder of Lift Our Voices. She points out that any other issues aside, the NDAs could be voided by legislation currently being considered in Connecticut that would ban workplace NDAs, potentially retroactively. “I’m hoping the Vince McMahon example spurs the Connecticut legislature to do the right thing,” she said.

Ultimately, her thoughts are with survivors who have found themselves in the “incredibly psychologically lonely place” of being unable to speak out.

“You can’t,” she said, “confide in anybody—not your friends, not your family, not your priest, not your rabbi, not even your therapist—about what happened to you. So you can imagine that that becomes a hugely psychologically damaging place to be.”

The post NDAs Vince McMahon Signed Behind WWE’s Back May Be Worthless, Say Experts appeared first on VICE.

“The truth will come out,” Brennan said. 

In the suit, brought last week in federal court in Connecticut, Grant says that McMahon and Laurinaitis sexually assaulted her in WWE’s corporate offices, and that McMahon also trafficked her to Laurinaitis, the company’s former head of talent relations. McMahon, according to the suit, went so far as to schedule appointments for her to sexually service Laurinaitis.

Earlier today, VICE News reached out to Brennan, an attorney in the Tampa area, to confirm that he represents Laurinaitis. He did so, adding, as an aside, “Mr. Laurinaitis denies the allegations in the misguided complaint and will be vigorously defending these charges in Court, not the media. Like the Plaintiff, Mr. Laurinaitis is a victim in this case, not a predator. The truth will come out.”

In response to a followup question seeking to clarify that he was indeed saying that McMahon was the predator and that Laurinaitis, like Grant, was a victim, Brennan wrote, “Read the allegations. Read the Federal Statute. Power, control, employment supervisory capacity, dictatorial sexual demands with repercussions if not met. Count how many times in the complaint Vince exerts control over both of them.”

The complaint, which can be read in full here, details allegations that McMahon instructed Grant to create “explicit content” for Laurinaitis and arranged a threesome between them, after which Laurinaitis declined to answer when Grant asked if this was the first time this had happened. Later, the suit says, she was transferred to the talent relations department, which Laurinaitis headed—a transfer that came, the suit says, “with the expectation, from both McMahon and Laurinaitis, that she engage with Laurinaitis sexually, both physically and with explicit content.”

Do you know something we should know about Vince McMahon’s conduct in WWE? Contact reporters covering sex trafficking at tim.marchman@vice.com or anna.merlan@vice.com. For extra security, download the Signal app to a non-work device and text us there at 267-713-9832.

“In June 2021,” the suit says, “McMahon and Defendant Laurinaitis sexually assaulted Ms. Grant inside Laurinaitis’ office in WWE headquarters while colleagues were busy at their desks. Behind a locked door, the two men cornered her and pulled her in between them, forcibly touched her, before ultimately putting her on top of a table in between them. She begged them to stop, but they forced themselves on her, each taking turns restraining her for the other, while saying ‘No means yes’ and ‘Take it, bitch.’”

“Ms. Grant’s lawsuit is replete with lies, obscene made-up instances that never occurred, and is a vindictive distortion of the truth,” McMahon said last week when announcing his resignation as chair of TKO, WWE’s parent company. A lawyer said to be representing him did not immediately respond to an email.

TKO did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Brennan’s statement. A spokesperson for Grant’s lawyer, Ann Callis, declined to comment.

The post Co-Defendant in Vince McMahon Sex Trafficking Lawsuit Says He Was a Victim Too appeared first on VICE.

In 1992, Rita Chatterton, a former referee with what was then called the World Wrestling Federation, said that McMahon had raped her in a limousine six years before. He denied the claims and sued her, before eventually dropping that suit. Thirty years later, when New York State opened a window during which victims of sex crimes could file lawsuits that the statute of limitations would ordinarily forbid, Chatterton reportedly sent a demand letter asking for $11.75 million in damages—and received what the Wall Street Journal reported to be a multi-million dollar payment to settle out of court.

This was just one of the claims made against McMahon over the years, though in most cases details didn’t come out for years because McMahon paid hush money to accusers—as he did in 1992, when he settled with one of several young men who said they’d been sexually molested by WWF highers-up as teens. In 2005, a female WWE wrestler claimed, McMahon “coerced her into giving him oral sex and then demoted her and, ultimately, declined to renew her contract in 2005 after she resisted further sexual encounters,” according to the Journal, which reported that she received a $7.5 million settlement in 2018. In 2006, a worker at a tanning salon in Boca Raton, Florida told police that he showed her nude photos of himself and groped her; no charges were brought, though police did believe there was “probable cause” to do so. A spa manager at a luxury resort in California, the Journal reported two years ago, said that in 2011 McMahon sexually assaulted her. 

Not only was much of this well-known, poor and degrading treatment of women was a central element of McMahon’s public image. The flamboyant “Mr. McMahon” character he played on his wrestling shows did things like make a female performer get on all fours and bark like a dog—something that, intended or not, allowed defenders to accuse those who brought up the Chatterton and tanning-salon allegations of conflating his real-life and stage personae.

For these reasons, while the details of a civil lawsuit filed against McMahon in federal court this week are shocking, they are not surprising. The suit accuses McMahon broadly of sex trafficking and assault and specifically of grooming a vulnerable woman named Janel Grant, hiring her into a fake job at WWE in 2019, and doing things like defecating on her head during a threesome and then ordering her to continue pleasuring an associate, ultimately having her sign a non-disclosure agreement in 2022. (A McMahon spokesperson has said the suit is “replete with lies.”) An understandable focus on claims about McMahon’s depravity, though, can obscure an important question: Exactly who is alleged to have been aware of his conduct, and when?

One person named in the suit is McMahon’s co-defendant, John Laurinaitis, a former wrestler and longtime WWE executive; McMahon is accused of trafficking Grant to him, and he is accused of sexually assaulting her. Another person who is all but named is Brock Lesnar, for whom McMahon is accused of strong-arming Grant into making “personalized sexual content.” (References in the suit to a WWE star and former UFC champion whose contract was being negotiated in 2021 can only be to him, and the Journal named him as the wrestler in question.) Vaguer references are made to “members of the television production ‘tech’ team, executive(s), [and] producers(s),” as well as to a longtime WWE employee, a referee, four corporate officers, and people who attended meetings of the WWE executive committee. 

Some of these people are not directly tied to the claims against McMahon. The suit says, for instance, that McMahon told Grant he showed nude pictures of her to members of the production team and the referee, but it’s possible, as the suit allows, that he didn’t actually do this, and only told her he did for his own gratification. High-up corporate officers, though, are alleged in the lawsuit to have had specific and detailed knowledge of McMahon’s sexually exploitative relationship with Grant, and to have helped facilitate it, serving as fixers in various ways.

A person referred to as “WWE Corporate Officer No. 1” in the suit is said to have been a high-ranking employee and board member. After McMahon broke off relations with Grant, the suit says, he told her that this person would help her find another job and that if she needed anything, she should contact this person. At one point, the suit says, Grant introduced herself to this person, who said they knew exactly who she was although they would have had no reason to know who a low-ranking worker was.

A person referred to as “WWE Corporate Officer No. 2” in the suit is said to have been a high-ranking employee who initially interviewed Grant, who had never held a job before McMahon arranged one for her, and to have told McMahon that there were rumors about his relationship with Grant. McMahon also, the suit says, told Grant that this person had helped draft a to-do for her ahead of her signing an NDA.

McMahon privately met with these two people at some point, the suit asserts, and “advised these individuals of McMahon’s connection to Ms. Grant.”

A person referred to as “WWE Corporate Officer No. 3” in the suit is said to have been a board member. ”Upon information and belief,” the suit reads, “WWE Corporate Officer No. 3 knew of other instances of McMahon engaging in inappropriate sexual conduct.”

A person referred to as “WWE Corporate Officer No. 4” in the suit is said to have been a high-ranking employee working in legal affairs. According to the suit, there is reason to believe that they were aware of the relationship between McMahon and Grant, and that they were “actively hostile” to Grant because they knew she only had a job in their department because of that relationship. The suit further asserts that this person was an example of employees who ”were forced to resign or were let go if they knew of McMahon’s exploits and failed to assist, support and/or facilitate them.”

McMahon’s personal assistants are also said in the suit to have been aware of the relationship, and so are people who were at WWE executive committee meetings, “which were attended by individuals who had either direct knowledge of McMahon’s sexual exploitation of Ms. Grant or were otherwise suspicious.”  At one of these meetings, the suit says, WWE Corporate Officer No. 3 “motioned for Ms. Grant to sit in a chair near [them] at the Boardroom Table.”

TKO Group, the conglomerate of which WWE is a division, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who would have been in such meetings, and the suit does not give dates for these meetings, but according to a 2020 SEC filing, the executive committee comprised McMahon, his daughter Stephanie McMahon, and his son-in-law Paul Levesque, while a 2021 one adds WWE president Nick Khan.

What the suit alleges, in other words, is not simply that McMahon and another executive exploited and assaulted a vulnerable employee with no family or work history, leaving her entirely dependent on McMahon, but that a broad stratum of the company’s upper management, possibly including family members, either turned a blind eye to this or actively aided it, making them complicit. This is why WWE itself has been sued—it is specifically accused of participating in McMahon’s trafficking venture in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act—and why in a statement to the press, Grant’s lawyer, Ann Callis, described it as an “organization that facilitated or turned a blind eye to the abuse and then swept it under the rug.”

(In a statement to Variety about the lawsuit, TKO said, “Mr. McMahon does not control TKO nor does he oversee the day-to-day operations of WWE. While this matter predates our TKO executive team’s tenure at the company, we take Ms. Grant’s horrific allegations very seriously and are addressing this matter internally.” Callis has not responded to repeated questions about whether Grant has filed or plans to file criminal charges against McMahon or  Laurinaitis. Police in Stamford, Connecticut, where sexual assaults described in the suit would have taken place, said they have no records of reports naming either man.)

The claim about sweeping all of this under the rug is all the more pointed given a final assertion in the suit. 

In June 2022, the Journal reported that the WWE board had hired a law firm to conduct an independent investigation into an anonymous tipster’s claims that an employee—this was Grant, though she was not named—had received a $100,000 raise after commencing a sexual relationship with McMahon and being given “like a toy” to Laurinaitis. That same month, WWE announced that a special committee of the company’s board would investigate allegations of misconduct against McMahon, who resigned the next month. That review concluded in November 2022. According to the suit, the committee “never even bothered to interview Ms. Grant or request any documents despite Ms. Grant stating that she would cooperate.”

Whatever the committee found, in December 2022, McMahon sought to return as head of WWE—a move unanimously opposed by the members of the board, including his own daughter and son-in-law. The next month, he used his power as controlling shareholder to remove three board members and install himself and two allies on the board. Subsequently, his daughter Stephanie, who had been serving as interim CEO, resigned. McMahon then began the process of selling the company, ultimately engineering a merger with the UFC under the auspices of famed dealmaker Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor. With news about hush money payments and allegations of coercion out there, and with a track record decades long of being accused of sexual predation, McMahon assumed a role as chair of the new company, TKO, which listed both the special committee investigation and McMahon’s presence on the board as risk factors that “could have adverse financial and operational impacts on our business” in an SEC filing in the third quarter of last year. 

Two days before Grant filed her suit, McMahon rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange alongside Emanuel, Khan, Levesque—who now runs WWE’s wrestling side, which is now more popular than it has been in decades—and others, including newly-named TKO board member Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

It remains unclear exactly who knew exactly what and exactly when; it seems likely that will not always be the case. What, if any, consequences McMahon, his executives, or the company will face remain to be seen.  WWE broadcast partners Netflix, Fox, USA, and the CW have not responded to requests for comment about the lawsuit and whether they intend to continue doing business with WWE.

The post Vince McMahon Sex-Trafficking Suit Raises Question of Who Knew What, When appeared first on VICE.

The past has a way of not staying buried, though. Jeff Frazier, the man currently tasked with rebuilding OUR—which commands tens of millions of dollars and still enjoys a strong reputation with some donors despite its many scandals—is a longtime associate of Ballard’s who still refers to him as a friend, even as he says he believes Ballard “has made a series of destructive choices.” He’s also the person Ballard brought in to clean up one potential scandal, in which a different associate of Ballard’s was running an OUR-funded orphanage where, people with knowledge of the situation say, minors were being sexually abused. The association between Frazier and Ballard was tight enough that last year, OUR got involved in the negotiations after Frazier was kidnapped by a gang in Haiti.

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This is, on the face of it, difficult to square with OUR’s strenuous insistence that it has moved on from Ballard. In November, for instance, in response to a sexual-assault lawsuit filed by a Marine veteran who volunteered with the group, OUR issued a statement to VICE News apologizing “for any harm or distress that Tim Ballard’s actions may have caused to anyone associated with OUR” and noting that its governance was under review by management. It reiterated these themes in a statement quietly posted to its website just before the holidays. “We are in the process of refreshing the Board of Directors,” it read, “and have initiated a search for a new CEO.” OUR, the organization has made clear, has “permanently separated” from its disgraced founder. 

One thing these statements haven’t mentioned is that OUR’s board is, at least for now, still entirely composed of relatives and close friends of Ballard’s. (A spokesperson for OUR told VICE News this week that “a relative of Tim Ballard who served on the Board recently resigned,” without specifying which one.) Another, which has not previously been reported, is that a new member of OUR’s leadership team—tasked since November 5, according to the spokesperson, with “helping to identify and recruit new board members and a new chief executive officer” and, according to one source, functionally serving as its current CEO—is Frazier.

“We’re all pretty sure that Jeff Frazier is still connected to Tim,” one frustrated OUR employee, who says they learned that Frazier had been charged with restructuring the board around mid-October, told VICE News. Another person familiar with OUR’s inner workings said that Frazier has repeatedly stated that he will be chairman of OUR’s board once the reorganization is complete, that no one is contacting candidates for the board recommended by employees, and that Frazier is angling to staff it with his own friends and colleagues. Employees say they have demanded to see a copy of Ballard’s severance agreement, wanting to be reassured that Ballard did not somehow have sway over who would lead the organization after his departure.

A spokesperson for OUR told VICE News that Frazier is serving in a consulting role, and disputed that he is functionally acting as the organization’s CEO. The spokesperson also said that Frazier and Ballard have not spoken since September 2023. 

“The reconstituted board will elect a chairperson when they are seated,” wrote the spokesperson. “Jeff Frazier has stated that he ‘will serve the cause in whatever capacity is required’ and would prefer that a more experienced director serve as board chair. OUR is casting a wide net to identify accomplished professionals with diverse perspectives and skill sets who are committed to the organization’s mission. As part of this process, we have solicited and vetted candidates recommended by our staff and advisors. We appreciate and welcome all recommendations, and to the extent that candidates with duplicative skills have been recommended, we are seeking to enhance the board’s gender diversity by prioritizing female candidates with law enforcement, anti-trafficking and/or non-profit experience.”

According to his online résumé, Frazier is a former Army paratrooper, father of seven children, and the founder of Thread, a medical research firm, who has volunteered for OUR since 2020. (Like many people in OUR’s orbit, he’s a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and serves as a bishop in the church.) His ties to OUR and Ballard, though, are closer and go back longer than any of that would suggest.

The résumé, for instance, says he founded Stimpack, a Haiti-focused non-profit based in Florida, in June 2022. While Ballard is not listed or mentioned on the organization’s website, filings from last year from Florida listed Ballard as one of the group’s three directors.

Responding to questions through an OUR spokesperson in late December, Frazier said, “Tim Ballard is nominally a member of the Board of STIMPACK, a Haiti-focused non-profit and think tank, until I can appoint a suitable replacement, which I plan to do around the end of the year.” The OUR spokesperson told VICE News on January 8 that Ballard was no longer on the board. 

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In 2020, the Utah journalist Lynn Packer reported that OUR had placed Frazier in charge of an orphanage in Haiti run by Guesno Mardy, father of Gardy Mardy, a child who went missing in 2009 and whose recovery Ballard has often depicted as the reason for OUR’s existence. (Gardy has never been found, despite OUR using supposed intelligence from a psychic medium to plan missions meant to find him; OUR and Ballard fundraised off their search for him for many years.) 

As far back as 2018, Frazier was also associated with a now-defunct organization called The Gardy Effect, which intended to “Light the load and the road for freed slave children,” per its mission statement, and which described itself as “an Operation Underground Railroad project.” It appeared to list Frazier as a point of contact, according to an archived version of its website, and a donation button for The Gardy Effect led to OUR’s website. Other ties between Frazier and Ballard date back at least to 2015, when Frazier tweeted enthusiastically about welcoming Ballard to Thread headquarters “to save children.”

The OUR spokesperson told VICE News, “The Gardy Effect was an OUR-sponsored program led by Mr. Frazier as a volunteer. The goal of the program was to oversee the sizable donations that OUR was making to support an orphanage in Haiti known as Foyer de Sion. The orphanage was owned and operated by Guesno and Marjory Mardy.”

Within OUR, the most-discussed elements of Frazier’s relationship to the organization are his ties to the Haiti orphanage, as well as a bizarre incident from earlier this year. According to a note OUR president and COO Matt Osborne sent to staff this May, Frazier was “kidnapped and held hostage in excruciatingly painful conditions” while in Haiti on non-OUR business in April, before being freed due to the efforts of OUR and “elements of the U.S. government.” 

People who work at OUR, including those with direct knowledge of this incident, have raised a number of concerns about it to VICE News. Chief among them are questions about why OUR was involved at all in negotiating or paying for the release of an associate of the organization who was in Haiti on “non-OUR business,” whether donor funds were used, and whether the organization has been repaid if so. 

According to several people with knowledge of OUR who spoke to VICE News, Frazier is believed to have reached out to someone working for the organization after being taken captive, with negotiations being handled at least in part by a longtime Navy SEAL who works for the group in the Caribbean. (This person did not respond to a request for comment from VICE News.) Frazier is believed to have escaped his captors at one point, and some people heard audio recordings of him being tortured with a stun gun. The FBI—which declined to comment to VICE News on this matter—is said to have been involved.

It isn’t clear why Frazier would contact OUR, whose own international operators say it has no capacity for hostage negotiation or rescue, especially since he was kidnapped while on non-OUR business.

Asked about the kidnapping, and why OUR was involved in negotiating for his release, the OUR spokesperson provided a statement from Frazier: 

Mr. Frazier’s wife was instrumental in securing his release, with support from certain members of the OUR team that were friends of Mr. Frazier and local security and logistics contacts in Haiti. Zero assistance is provided by the U.S. government. Mr. and Mrs. Frazier reached out to whomever might be willing to help. 

Any funds that were provided to Mr. Frazier’s family to help secure his release were never utilized and were returned to OUR by wire transfer shortly after Mr. Frazier’s return home.

Questions also remain about the orphanage in Haiti. According to several people who have worked for OUR, Frazier was sent in by Ballard and the organization to investigate what was happening at Foyer de Sion, which was founded around 1999 and run at the time by Ballard associate Guesno Mardy. (Neither Mardy nor an intermediary responded to VICE News’ requests for comment.)

Frazier is said by people familiar with the situation to have found more than 100 children living in deplorable conditions at the orphanage, with poor sanitation and not enough food. The children living there included eight that OUR had placed there following one of their purported “rescue” operations. In addition, at least one girl living at the orphanage is said to have been sexually abused by an adult staff member, who subsequently took her to obtain an abortion. 

“They tell the public every aftercare home is safe and has holistic services,” one frustrated OUR employee told VICE News. “But this is their most funded aftercare home.” 

It’s unclear what the current conditions at Foyer de Sion are; OUR’s involvement with the orphanage has apparently ended.

Contact the reporters at tim.marchman@vice.com or anna.merlan@vice.com. For extra security, download the Signal app to a non-work device and text us there at 267-713-9832.

“OUR was one of the sponsors of Foyer de Sion,” Frazier told VICE News, through the spokesperson. “I was on a small volunteer board that was asked to oversee OUR’s donations. It was decided at some time in 2022, that OUR and its mission were not compatible with Foyer de Sion and its mission. OUR made one final donation and informed Guesno Mardy that there would be no further donations to the orphanage.” Frazier declined to comment on allegations of sexual abuse at the orphanage.

In recent weeks, OUR has taken a more aggressive approach in countering the civil lawsuits filed against them by women who say they were sexually abused by Ballard. In December, the organization filed a countersuit against a married couple, Celeste and Michael Borys, who are among those suing the organization. The countersuit accuses Celeste, who says she was groomed and sexually manipulated by Ballard, of defamation; the organization is also suing her for fraud, and has filed a motion to dismiss the Borys’ suit. 

In response to the allegations against Tim Ballard, Frazier, through the OUR spokesperson, told VICE News that he believes “my friend Tim may have lost his way and is suffering from mental illness.” His quote reads, in full:   

To be clear, I don’t speak for OUR and have no legal authority on these matters to date. However, I’ve been trained to believe people that claim to have been victims of sexual misconduct. I plan to approach each situation from that perspective and deal with each allegation separately on a case-by-case basis. I also recognize that these situations can be bewilderingly complex, requiring patience, temperance and empathy. The scars of trauma run deep and are often long lasting and even confusing. Although he and I have not spoken since before all of these allegations were made, I believe my friend Tim may have lost his way and is suffering from mental illness. While I believe he has made a series of destructive choices, I believe he deserves patience, temperance and empathy as well. Prolonged exposure to traumatic situations is extremely dangerous. I believe that all men and women involved in the fight against child trafficking need better protection from the ravages of trauma that often accompany this work. I plan to use my influence to encourage additional support for OUR team members and its law enforcement partners to further safeguard these individuals from duty related trauma. My hope is that such efforts will minimize the risk that these selfless guardians face now and in the future.

As for righting past wrongs, I hope to offer all parties involved in these cases a path to peace that will allow for healing for all and for OUR to focus entirely on the critical need to fulfill its mission.

The OUR spokesperson told VICE News that “OUR is not aware of a pending criminal investigation.” (This despite the fact that Attorney General Sean Reyes, himself a longtime Ballard friend and OUR booster, said in early December that his office would launch a criminal investigation into both Ballard and the group.) The spokesperson also reiterated a statement they previously issued on December 8, which reads, “OUR intends to cooperate fully with any potential investigation conducted by the Utah AG’s office. We are confident that the facts are on OUR’s side and remain committed to the work that our strong, resilient team of dedicated operators, staff and volunteers is doing to help fight human trafficking.” 

Tim Ballard, an attorney representing him, and a public relations spokesperson previously said to speak on his behalf all have not responded to repeated requests for comment from VICE News.

The post A Longtime Associate of Tim Ballard’s Is Rebuilding Operation Underground Railroad appeared first on VICE.

It was the third day of a selection being held by Operation Underground Railroad, the anti-sex trafficking group Ballard founded in 2012 after, he has claimed, being told to do so by God. OUR had invited about 60 people who had previously worked for it as operators on what it portrayed to the public as undercover paramilitary missions abroad aimed at rescuing women and children from sexual slavery. These people had paid their own way for training, which largely involved sitting through slideshows on topics such as how to get information from someone without them knowing you’re doing so. The draw was clear: OUR leaders responsible for distinct geographical regions would be choosing members for their teams from among the participants. 

Alison, who had worked one mission on Ballard’s ops team in the Caribbean, was hoping to be recruited to the Thailand team. She had heard that it had operating protocols and arrangements with the government, and it was often held up as OUR’s most functional and effective region. Just as important, to her, was that Ballard had nothing to do with it.

VICE News is referring to Alison, 42, by a pseudonym due to her concerns about her safety; she stood out among the class of operators, which included some former military, some former law enforcement, and a lot of people from church. She was a licensed clinical social worker specializing in the treatment of people with extreme childhood trauma, including sex trafficking. She had served six years in the Marines; had specialized tactical training related to work with a government agency; and had volunteered as part of an anti-hijacking team in South Africa. She was also one of only four women among the operators, and the only one with any relevant background. The others, she would later say, were “beautiful, beautiful, sweet, clueless young women.” 

That day, they were training in hand-to-hand combat in the CrossFit gym under OUR’s offices outside Salt Lake City. The training was of questionable utility given the nature of OUR’s undercover operations, which mainly consisted, as far as Alison had seen, of sitting around in bars and strip clubs hinting that you were looking for a wilder scene. But she intended to set an example. She was worried for the other women, and about what the men would make of the female operators. It was important to her to not just be a pretty face.

In the exercise, teams of two were placed at the four corners of a large mat, at the center of which were dummy knives; the point was for each person to pass their teammates’s guard and reach the knives. Alison remembers thinking that she, or someone, was going to get hurt as everyone dived toward the knives, and that there should have been headgear. But she didn’t consider opting out. 

“I can’t be the one to say, ‘No, I’m not going to do this,’” she says now. “What’s that going to look like?” 

A video of what happened shows two young men grappling on the corner of the mat opposite Alison. One pushes the other off the mat; then both turn and dive toward the knives. As they jostle, one dives past the other, his knee catching Alison, who was spread out on the mat, flush in the side of the head. She instantly goes limp as the other man, scrambling for the knife, catches her again.

Alison doesn’t remember being knocked unconscious, or any pain. She remembers whiplash and a crunching sound as the bones around her left eye shattered. She was on all fours, vomiting uncontrollably, bleeding, and unable to see. 

Two of her fellow operators from Ballard’s team, with whom she’d spent two surreal weeks earlier that year, helped her off the mat. They were tending to her when, she said, Ballard announced that they couldn’t call an ambulance. One of them was a woman who will be referred to in this story as Kailyn, who believed that having a sexual relationship with Ballard was necessary to save children and because it was God’s will. (Ballard has denied he ever acted improperly with any of the operators he worked with.) The other was Matt Cooper, OUR’s director of security, to whom Ballard had acted as an older brother or father figure for around a decade. He bundled Alison into his truck and took her to the emergency room.

(Kailyn corroborated Alison’s version of events, but otherwise declined to comment for this story. Cooper initially hung up when reached on the phone by a reporter identifying himself as being with VICE News; he subsequently asked for questions to be sent to him by email, but did not respond to that email or to a text message detailing the allegations in this story and asking for comment.)

It was an abrupt end to Alison’s time with OUR, which began the year before when she volunteered as an educator in her own community. Handpicked by Ballard for his own ops team, Alison spent time with him on a private island, where he claimed to directly communicate with God, before shadowing him as he trawled massage parlors and strip clubs across the British Virgin Islands, despite there being no intelligence to suggest that these activities would help to fulfill OUR’s mission of ending child slavery, or even that any trafficking was going on at all. Alison’s experience exemplified the critique outsiders as well as former operators and volunteers have made of OUR under Ballard’s leadership, showing it to be an erratic organization led by a man whose decisions put those around him at serious risk for no obvious purpose.  

Contact the reporters at tim.marchman@vice.com or anna.merlan@vice.com. For extra security, download the Signal app to a non-work device and text us there at 267-713-9832.

Citing God’s will, Ballard assigned Alison on the fly to deal directly with a suspected trafficker. He took an untrained hairstylist into a meeting with a cartel and then sent her through customs on a commercial flight with a recording of the meeting on her phone; lost track of which operator had which burner phone, leading him to inadvertently send Alison a sexually suggestive text message; and directed Alison to engage in communications with a foreign national that could have the effect of encouraging him to traffic women and girls. In planning and execution, the work was amateurish and dangerous.

Alison witnessed sexual misconduct of the sort that is at the center of recent lawsuits a group of women and one couple filed against Ballard, in which he is accused of sexual assault, grooming, and coercion. (A lawyer for the women went so far as to say Ballard “literally trafficked” her clients—a claim experts have told VICE News is plausible, if what women say about his behavior is true.) She also experienced sexually inappropriate behavior herself. Within minutes of meeting Ballard, he had made clear his intense desire to find out which of his associates she wanted to have sex with. As a participant in what Ballard called the “couples ruse,” which he has described at length as a technique meant to protect him from traffickers and from having to touch trafficking victims, Alison says Ballard repeatedly and continuously—and unsuccessfully—pressured her to be intimate with Cooper. 

Alison says that it became clear to her that the OUR hierarchy was fully aware of what Ballard was doing. Her experience shows that, as similarly alleged in court filings, other top members of the organization besides Ballard were themselves participants in the couples ruse, and Alison says that when she discussed Ballard’s erratic and dangerous behavior with OUR’s current president, he acknowledged that everything she said was true and said that their role was to prevent Ballard from doing too much damage to himself or others. (Through a spokesperson, OUR’s current leadership declined to comment for this story.) 

In total, Alison’s story—which is corroborated by people with direct knowledge of events and by physical and digital evidence including OUR planning documents—depicts an organization focused on allowing its celebrity founder, who had become completely detached from reality, to live the lavish lifestyle of a wealthy sex tourist and sexually manipulate and abuse volunteers under the guise of saving children. This focus was so intense that it overrode concerns about the safety and welfare of the very operators at the center of OUR’s fundraising. The organization raked in a quarter of a billion dollars in donations over a decade by depicting volunteers like Alison as the thin line protecting thousands of women and children from sexual slavery; Alison, meanwhile, was left with what are likely to be lasting eye problems and a sense of severe disquiet about what she’d witnessed. 

“A lot of these people are gonna go down with the ship,” Alison says now—people she says are well-meaning and kind, who have long believed in and worked towards OUR’s mission of rescue and recovery. “They just aren’t going to be able to take in the information and let go.”

Tim Ballard, who left OUR earlier this year after a sexual-misconduct investigation and is now associated with the Spear Fund, a new anti-trafficking organization, did not respond to a detailed accounting of the allegations made in this story sent to him personally, as well as to his representatives. OUR declined to answer questions about the allegations—which, a spokesperson wrote, “should not be interpreted or reported as a concession from OUR that the information is correct”—aside from noting that Ballard directly participated in few operations in the couple of years before parting ways with the organization. 

“OUR is currently working with two individuals who, in consultation with the board, are evaluating wholesale changes to the organization,” the spokesperson wrote. “As OUR has stated previously, they have engaged a legal firm specializing in international trafficking policy and law to help review and update their mission operations policies. They also have initiated an additional financial audit of the organization.” 

The pandemic had been dragging on for half a year when Alison first decided that she wanted to get involved with OUR. Social media was flooded with OUR’s urgent depictions of heroic missions to directly free women and children from sexual slavery, and she thought that given her background, she could contribute. What compelled her was the idea of rescue—of preventing people like the trafficking survivors she treated professionally from ever needing such services.

“I’m in this chair, talking to people,” she says. “I can’t go back in time and save them. I’m seeing these people, frankly, who will never be okay. What if we could rescue somebody, you know? What if I could help rescue someone before they’re broken forever?”

For about six months, she volunteered with an OUR group in her region, which is far from OUR’s Utah home base, focusing on raising awareness and training organizations on how to recognize child sex trafficking. She persistently felt, though, that she could be doing more, and talked to her local volunteer coordinator about submitting her résumé to the part of OUR that dealt with overseas rescue operations. 

It took a while for anything to happen. The coordinator had no way to put her résumé in front of anyone, or even a means of contact for the operational side of OUR; he referred Alison to the public website. If it’s meant to happen, if it’s meant to be, it’ll be, she figured. Her opportunity came when OUR sent an email to volunteers asking for licensed clinical social workers who could be vetted to do crisis response, via telehealth or in person.

Everything that happened after she responded made sense to her and increased her confidence in OUR. She was, for example, asked to get fingerprinted and to submit to a background check before even doing a screening interview with a female OUR employee. They need to know about you, Alison remembers the woman telling her. And Alison agreed. (When reached for comment, the woman, who asked that her name be withheld, said that Alison was initially interviewed for a therapist role before expressing an interest in operations. The woman added, “I told her that I was not part of operations and that she would need to talk to others in the company that hire for those positions. She enthusiastically asked for her information to be passed on to the team that handled hiring in operations, so I shared her information with the CEO through email and helped arrange a meeting with the CEO. I do not recall what the method was, but could have very well been Zoom. That was the extent of my involvement in the hiring process.”) 

Two months later, the woman called Alison and asked if she was sitting down. She said she was the executive assistant to Brad Damon, who was then the CEO at OUR and is no longer with the organization. The woman hadn’t wanted to email Brad about Alison, because Damon received hundreds of emails every day, she said. While OUR staff had generally been working remotely due to the pandemic, though, she had recently found herself in the same room with him. After she gave him Alison’s application and told him he had to look at it, he asked how soon they could get Alison in front of him. The female employee wanted to know if they could talk on Zoom the next day.

Damon, Alison thought, was a very nice man who clearly had no experience in operations. Her impression now is that he was mainly making sure she fit the general profile for volunteer operators. (Damon did not respond to text messages or a phone call from VICE News reporters.) 

Four days later, Alison was on a plane and set for a meeting at OUR’s headquarters in Draper, Utah, just outside Salt Lake City.

The minute she met him, Alison thought that there was something wrong with Tim Ballard.

It wasn’t, when it happened, a meeting she’d expected to have. On the day of her interview, Alison got dressed up and headed to OUR headquarters, about a five-minute walk from the Hampton Inn where they’d put her up. In a bland, cramped office with a fridge full of energy drinks, she met several men, among them Damon, Cooper, and David Jacobs, an OUR volunteer who worked for the Glenn Beck-founded Nazarene Fund, an anti-trafficking group of which Ballard was, at the time, CEO. (“I recall how impressed I was with her,” he now says.) The group made small talk for a while before one of them said, “Tim will be here soon, and we’ll get started.” Alison had had no idea she would be meeting him at all, much less that she was, as the men told her, there to interview for his ops team.

It seemed a bit odd to Alison that Ballard even had an ops team; if not a household name, he was nonetheless the face of the anti-trafficking movement. He’d taken meetings at the White House with Donald Trump and been featured on ESPN’s Sunday Night Football; Sound of Freedom, a movie in which Jim Caviezel played him, had been made and was awaiting distribution. He was presumably too well-known for undercover work, not to mention presumably too busy as the head of OUR. The men, though, took it lightly. Ballard, they explained, wore colored contacts and dyed his hair.

Oh, my gosh, okay, Alison thought. I’m interviewing for Tim’s ops team. Wow, that’s special. Soon enough, he walked in—“vibrating,” she says, “with personality disorder.”

Ballard dashed over to her, Alison remembers, and gave her a big hug. They sat down and he told her about the leadership structure and about his team, which was responsible for the Caribbean and Mexico. He was excited she was there, because he thought she’d be great for his team; what they had to do was see if she was everything she appeared to be on paper. And within 30 minutes after he arrived, he was talking about the “couples ruse.”

The so-called couples ruse is central to the lawsuits filed against Ballard and OUR. As he’s explained it, it’s a way for male operators to keep from having to engage in sex acts with children or trafficked women, by having someone there to play a jealous wife or girlfriend who “won’t let” the operator do so. The women who sued Ballard said in their filings that he’d insist they stay in character even when they were alone with him, leading to sexual manipulation and what they viewed in hindsight as grooming. The women allege they ended up participating in “coerced sexual contact” with Ballard, including being subjected to couples massages and tantric yoga, showering in front of him, frequenting strip clubs, and him dry humping or groping them, all of which he justified as ways to practice their “chemistry” in order to be able to maintain a convincing front with traffickers.

(In recent weeks, Katherine Ballard, Tim’s wife, has vigorously defended the couples ruse, and Ballard’s public image more generally. In an appearance on conservative talk radio host Rod Arquette’s show, she said the allegations were the result of Ballard’s work. “When you decide to come out against sex trafficking, people come after you,” she told him, adding quickly, “I don’t know what to say. I’m not trying to claim it’s all orchestrated and some one big person is behind it all.” On a joint appearance with her husband on comedian Adam Carolla’s podcast, Katherine said she knew he had saved children with “complete faithfulness to me.” A press release supposedly jointly issued by the Ballards appeared to suggest that child trafficking cartels could somehow be behind the allegations.) 

In their meeting, Ballard presented the ruse solemnly as something absolutely central to the work his team did, justifying it to Alison in much the same way he’s since justified it in public. Both she and Jacobs recalled Ballard describing the boundaries such that the male operator would only touch the female one like he would touch his mother. It sounded strange to her, on the grounds that a sex tourist seeking children from traffickers would perhaps be unlikely to bring his girlfriend, but the idea of working as a team did strike her as plausible as a way to gather information and a way to fit in. Many traffickers are women, in part because they tend to be more comfortable with children and to be able to make children more comfortable with them. It made sense to Alison to have a male and a female operator working in tandem.

“I’m thinking it’s a way to have a woman be involved and talk to other women,” she says, “like other women traffickers, to be able to infiltrate the whole female side of that world and have that happen in a way that makes sense in a way that’s actually safer for the operator.

“That’s not what it was.”

As Ballard explained it to her, the main idea was that the woman could “cock block,” preventing the male operator from any sexual interactions a trafficker might expect and helping to pull the plug when needed. (This is consistent with what one of the women suing him alleges he told her, which is that she would be a “cock blocker.” She also alleges that he claimed the scheme was a revelation from God, “because there was no way he could have thought up such a brilliant ruse.”) Maybe that works, Alison thought. You say it works. If you say it works, you’re the expert.

Ballard further told her that they had a thing they did on his team, Alison says; he got up close to her and asked, with an intense, focused demeanor, if she thought it was something she could do. “I’m a professional,” she said. “And if this is something that needs to be done, this is something I can do.”

What she’d need to do, Ballard said, in her recollection, was do the job 24/7. She would need to act as part of a couple at all times, including behind closed doors. (Jacobs does not recall this. “That type of discussion would have never taken place in front of me,” he says, “because that behavior would have been completely unnecessary and not justifiable in any way.”) Ballard  asked her to look around the room and tell him who felt she could most naturally do the couples ruse with. She held his gaze and told him that because she was a professional, it didn’t matter.

He asked the men to leave the room; he had a personal question for her, he said, and didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. Being alone in a room with him didn’t make her especially comfortable, but she stayed quiet. 

At the time, Alison had a drastic undercut. “I don’t want to make any judgment,” Ballard said in Alison’s recollection, “but I see that you have your head shaved. Are you gay?”

She said she was not.

“Are you bi?”

She said that she was.

“Oh, that’s excellent,” he said.

“He got so excited that I was bisexual,” says Alison. “Oh my God, he got so excited.”

Ballard explained that his team went into a lot of strip clubs and that she might need to interact with girls as if she wanted to buy them. If she was actually attracted to them, he said, that would help. (VICE News has previously reported on another OUR volunteer who described a superior treating it as a matter of course that operators would find trafficking victims sexually attractive.)

He summoned the men back into the room. The vibe, Alison remembers, was strange, and she felt an urgent need to clarify what had happened when they were alone. “Hey guys,” she said, “Tim just asked me if I was bisexual. And I said yes. And he’s really happy about it.”

(“It wasn’t an issue with anyone and no judgment was passed at all,” says Jacobs.)

Alison spent the rest of that day on the range, shooting and doing combat first-aid drills. This made no sense to her, as undercover operators didn’t carry weapons. It was also strange given the general inadvisability of putting a weapon in the hands of someone you don’t know. But she figured that it was a test to see if she had the skills she said she did. She then went to a strip club with Cooper, the director of security, to carry out the couples ruse, which involved getting “really physical with each other,” she says—she sat on his lap, they whispered in each other’s ears and so on. This was ostensibly meant to assess her undercover skills. She was asked, for example, to find out what make of car a random patron’s mother drove. (OUR leaders’ obsession with strip clubs was a source of bafflement not just to her but to other operators, as well as OUR employees.) 

After a few hours, Cooper decided he’d seen enough and, she says, told Ballard that she was great. That was enough for Ballard, who said he wanted her to accompany them to Mexico, on an operation that was slated to begin within 10 days.

“I’ve had no training, nothing,” says Alison. “They’ve known me for two days. They now want to take me into Mexico on this operation where they’re undercover with cartels. In 10 days. I was like, ‘That’s crazy as hell, but I’m game.’”

The next day, she interviewed with Kevin Kozak, OUR’s recently-hired director of international operations over a video call. A veteran of Homeland Security Investigations, the division of ICE for which Ballard worked prior to founding OUR, he reported to Ballard while overseeing him in his capacity as ops team leader, an unusual reporting structure that quickly proved problematic for OUR. 

Alison’s interview with Kozak—who by reputation was unimpressed with OUR’s recruitment specifically and the way it carried out international operations generally—was exhausting. He ran through each item on her résumé skeptically, demanding she explain every item in it and provide a reference for every job she’d ever had. “I hated it,” she says, “but also appreciated it—this feels like he’s actually vetting.” The following day, she sent him professional references for every single job she’d held.

At the end of the interview, he told her that if they moved forward, they were looking at her going through a month-long undercover training course. (A former OUR employee says that at one time, there was discussion of having every operator undergo this training, not just Alison.)

This is great, Alison thought. This is legitimate.

“Tim says he wants to take you to Mexico in 10 days,” Alison remembers Kozak saying. “I want you to know, that ain’t happening.” She would have to go through the training before he would even consider sending her, he said. This frustrated her, as the competitive side of her wanted to go, but she was also encouraged that she’d been told no.

After the interview, Ballard asked her how it went. She told him that she wasn’t entirely sure, that it had been grueling, and that she wasn’t going to be able to go to Mexico.

“Well, I’m his boss,” Alison remembers Ballard saying. “So he doesn’t get to say whether or not you get to go to Mexico or not. I sort of let him pretend like he gets to make those decisions, but he doesn’t.”

Her heart dropped. She brought up the month-long training, but Ballard said, “You don’t need all that.”

“And then I was more and more uncomfortable,” she says. “It’s like, Okay, I’m not sure that Tim’s girls are anything more than a pretty face.”

As it worked out, Alison was sent home, with Ballard conceding that she wouldn’t join him on the Mexico trip. About a week later, though, she was told that Kozak had been fired, and that a major part of the reason why was that he’d prevented her from going to Mexico. She would, she was told, be a major part of an operation in the Caribbean, but they’d had to get rid of Kozak before they could bring her on. (Kozak declined to comment, citing a non-disclosure agreement he’d signed with OUR.) 

About two months later, Damon, the OUR CEO, called Alison. They were doing the Caribbean operation, he said, and she was going to be his girlfriend. This didn’t sit well with her; she suspected that Damon had never been on an operation, something she was quickly able to confirm by calling Cooper,

“I was going to say I’m not going to do this,” she says. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on with Brad. He also doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. And we’re supposed to make out in public or something like that? What are we doing?”

The issue was settled soon enough, when Cooper told her that she would in fact be acting as his girlfriend. Soon, they would be off to the British Virgin Islands.

Because the operation took place during the height of the pandemic, members of Ballard’s team, on their arrival in the British Virgin Islands, were required to quarantine. They did so on a luxurious private island to which they were welcomed by its owner, Britnie Turner, an entrepreneur, real estate mogul, and philanthropist with an anti-trafficking organization of her own, Aerial Recovery, which at this time was coming into the orbit of OUR, the biggest and most established group of its kind. 

(Turner, her partner Jeremy Locke, and Aerial Recovery did not reply to detailed requests for comment. They have not been accused of wrongdoing in the lawsuits filed against Ballard and OUR.)

According to her online biography, Turner “has had a passion for ending sex trafficking since she was 12 years old,” which led to her co-founding Aerial Recovery, along with her now-husband, a veteran named Jeremy Locke. The organization claims to have rescued thousands from disasters and trafficking “by employing the most qualified, trained, and elite military veterans to deploy as Humanitarian Operators.” OUR paid the group just under $200,000 in 2021, according to a 2022 tax filing, and is known to have worked in Ukraine with at least one organization led by Ballard, who recently exposed the identity of one of its operatives there by posting a since-deleted video of her defending the couples ruse. (The operative, whom VICE News was able to identify minutes after the video was posted, has not responded to repeated requests for comment.) 

Alison had never before seen anything like she saw on this island, which featured what she calls “10-star” accommodations resembling the sort of lavish billionaire’s compound seen in films like Glass Onion. The group approached the island by boat and was greeted by staff in golf carts, who ferried everyone to their own luxury huts. She was served gourmet vegan meals and waited on hand and foot by a private staff. (“They were all dressed in black.,” Alison says. “They all had long blonde hair. It was very fucking creepy.”) The island had its own ranch, festooned with rescued zebras that Alison, after all the vegan cooking, found herself eyeing hungrily.

This was, Alison learned, the style to which Ballard had become accustomed. In his view, it was imperative, while carrying out undercover operations, to be taken for a wealthy sex tourist, and so, she was given to understand, he spent thousands upon thousands of donor dollars on private transportation, upscale hotel rooms, boats, and the like. (Alison, meanwhile, earned $200 per day, an amount that didn’t even cover the income lost from participating in the mission. Her operator contract, she noted, was not actually with OUR, but with Deacon, a Nevada LLC and OUR subsidiary.)

OUR apparently did not have to pay for its time on the private island, rates for which are listed, as of publication, as beginning at $25,000 per night. As Alison understood it, Turner and Locke donated it, as part of Aerial Recovery Group partnering with OUR on the undercover operation. 

Alison was joined on the island by Ballard and a young Mormon woman who will be referred to here as Kailyn, who was playing Ballard’s wife as part of the couples ruse; they had come straight from Mexico, where they had been carrying out an undercover operation with Cooper, who joined them later. Also joining them was a therapist, who accompanied Ballard; Alison was given to understand that as the weight of being a prophet of God, running OUR, and being famous was weighing heavily on him, Ballard was working on his mental health, a choice she appreciated and respected.

(Kailyn, who requested that VICE News refer to her by a pseudonym out of concern for her safety, corroborated the details of Alison’s account, but otherwise declined to comment. The therapist did not respond to requests for comment.)  

During their first week on the island, Ballard sequestered himself, often alone and sometimes with the therapist, receiving what he called “downloads from God” or engaging in intensive therapy sessions. When he emerged from prayer, he was vague about the details, but continually told the team he was receiving important missives from above. “Powerful information today, guys,” he’d say, in Alison’s memory. (Ballard has publicly discussed receiving “spiritual downloads.”) 

All of this left time for Kailyn, Alison, and the therapist to lounge by the pool getting to know one another. Kailyn, it became clear, had no relevant background or experience that would have qualified her for undercover work aside from that she had as a hairdresser, in which role she assisted Ballard in dyeing his hair. It became equally clear that she absolutely believed that her relationship with Ballard was ordained by God, and that the two were on a divine mission that no else one would understand.

One day, Kailyn was struggling with her laptop, complaining that she was having problems uploading large files. What she was trying to do, Alison learned, was send them to OUR’s Utah headquarters. On Ballard’s instructions, she had recorded a meeting with purported cartel operatives in Mexico on her phone, which was in her purse. She had then traveled to the British Virgin Islands—going through customs and border control, getting on and off planes, and interacting with military and government officials—with this evidence, which supposedly compromised a cartel-linked trafficker whom a Mexican official had asked Ballard to investigate. This was what she was trying to upload.

“I was so freaked out,” says Alison. “I was like, this is majorly fucked up.” 

During this time, Alison expected that at some point, she would be trained. She had repeatedly been told not to worry when asking questions about how they would carry out their mission, and that there would be plenty of time for training in quarantine. She had in mind that she would learn about the exotic technology OUR used to identify and surveil traffickers, as well as about its policies and procedures. It slowly dawned on her, though, that she wasn’t being trained on tech and policies because there were none. She remembers asking Cooper, for instance, what sort of tech they would be using on missions, and being told, somewhat confusingly, that sometimes they used an app, but that she could use whatever app she wanted. “I was like, What?” she says. “You mean to tell me you guys are using your phones and you’re just downloading an app?”

There was also a business element to the quarantine period, as Alison remembers it: Turner, Locke, and Ballard were in the midst of solidifying the relationship between OUR and Aerial. Turner was (and is) a multimillionaire, and was often busy in Alison’s observation. “She upscales businesses and she’s a motivational speaker,” Alison says. “She’d talk and play videos and patch into these seminars about being a global businessperson.” She remembers discussions of setting up a command post on the island, where OUR donors could watch operations being carried out in real time. Her impression, she said, was that Ballard’s eyes “were full of dollar signs” when he looked at Turner. 

Technology wasn’t the only thing no one would tell her about. Over the past year, she had been told, Locke had been surveilling the area and gathering information on trafficking operations with which to brief OUR. This briefing, a 70-page target report, was to be the basis of their work. (It was cut down to an express version, at Ballard’s request, Alison says.) During their first week on the island, Alison asked if she could review this document; Cooper told her he wasn’t sure that she was allowed to see it. Eventually, she was told that Ballard believed reading the report was a waste of time. God, he said, would tell them who their targets were. 

What Locke did eventually produce for the team’s review was not the sophisticated assessment Alison expected. The presentation contained no specific information about human trafficking or traffickers, or indeed any evidence that would lead anyone to suppose there was any to be operated against. The document was essentially a list of strip clubs and tourist bars, with imagery sourced from Google Maps. Support information was on the order of a list of the numbers and addresses for local police.

In group settings, Ballard occasionally spoke about his thoughts and feelings and how difficult everything was for him; he ruminated on people “who said bad things about him,” Alison says, seeming fixated on it. These difficulties were alleviated somewhat when Katherine, his wife, arrived as a surprise. 

Alison’s assessment of Katherine is blunt: “Being with her is like being with a Stepford wife. I mean, there’s just nothing there.” Whatever the operational benefits of her being there were, it was quite a place for a married couple to spend time together. (Ballard seemingly avoided Kailyn as much as possible while Katherine was there.) In another context, it would’ve been idyllic. They sailed boats, paddleboarded, rode jet skis, and followed a carefully regimented schedule. On the day of Katherine’s departure, for example, with the exception of one hour of personal time, everything was laid out, from a 7:15 a.m. workout to a 7:00 p.m. dinner under the stars, followed by a bonfire, with guests expected to adhere to the itinerary quite strictly. 

One thing was made very clear to Alison: She and Cooper, Ballard said, needed to really start getting to know one another. They needed to get close. They needed to spend time together, and to get used to touching each other. They needed to start practicing. 

The centrality of the couples ruse was such that Alison had to sign a “couples ruse contract,” she says, a paper document in which she promised not to touch the genitalia or kiss the lips of Cooper, the person she was meant to be pretending to be partners with. The idea of promising not to have sex struck her as not particularly professional. In the intelligence community, she says, “You do any fucking thing you need to do, because the other person is a professional.” The contract, she said, “was ridiculous. The whole thing was ridiculous.” Nonetheless, she signed it.

If all of this was inherently uncomfortable for Alison, it was all the more so given Ballard’s constant pressure. Walking by them, he would wink, or ask Alison to sit on Cooper’s lap, or say, “Why aren’t you guys touching each other?” She remembers a “shitty, nasty grin” spreading across his face when he walked past the two reclining on a couch.

The point, she came to believe, was not just to egg the two on into having sex with each other, but to catch them doing it—to seal Cooper’s loyalty and perhaps to give Ballard something to hold over his head. She believes this in part because Ballard repeatedly sneaked up on them, seemingly attempting to catch them in the act. For a couple of nights, for instance, the entire party stayed on a catamaran. Alison and Cooper were, per the doctrine of the couples ruse, staying together in a small bedroom cabin. Three or four times each night, Ballard would burst into the room unannounced, on the pretext of having something to tell them, as late as one o’clock in the morning. They were always fully clothed, Alison added, “but that was just all weird, and inappropriate, and creepy.” 

After the required number of days in isolation, the undercover mission, or “fishing trip,” was set to go. Dubbed “Operation Marcel,” it took place over several days in early June on islands near the one Turner owned—planning documents show it as taking place from June 4-6, while Alison recalls it taking place over four days—and had, according to the briefing put together by Locke, no clear or discernible purpose. 

According to the document, “high level BVI law enforcement and Government Officials” had expressed concerns about trafficking; to whom is not made clear. Local officials had not, the document stressed in bold type, approved any sort of operation, which meant Ballard’s ops team was not working, even in the most informal sense, under color of law. (The document urged extra caution because of the proximity of the operation to the so-called “Caribbean command center”—Turner’s private island.) What the ops team was looking into wasn’t exactly clear. “Humint and internet intelligence gathering” had yielded “no direct specific neighborhoods, hotels, people, phone numbers, email addresses or online accounts associated with human trafficking.” The best lead the team had, according to the document, came from an online escort guide for business travelers. “There is not any indication of human trafficking,” the document stressed.

Ballard had a clear solution: He and Kailyn would gather intelligence by going to spas, strip clubs, and bars, while Alison and Cooper monitored them from outside in a car, using an off-the-shelf app called ATAK to track their location. (A third team, provided by Aerial Recovery, followed in a boat.) “For like six, seven hours, Tim would be in these strip clubs with Kailyn,” Alison said. As part of their cover as sex tourists, Ballard and Kailyn would perform the role of a couple; Ballard would from time to time ask patrons and employees where he could find a wilder scene. (One document shows Ballard asking bewildered workers at an upscale spa for “other types of massages, maybe some that are off the menu.”) These were, as far as Alison knew, “random bars and strip clubs,” not shown by any particular intelligence-gathering to be linked to trafficking, making the line between performed and actual sex tourism something less than clear and distinct. All of these activities were memorialized in a document called the “DAILY SITREP,” which came complete with faux government markings. 

The team’s best lead came one afternoon when Ballard and Kailyn went to a bar they had been informed was where to go to find “a good place to party.” The proprietor told them that he knew a guy who had girls from all over the islands. As Ballard and Kailyn were about to leave, the proprietor told them to wait; five minutes later, a man named Henry—VICE News is referring to him by a pseudonym—pulled up in a Mercedes. He told them he could get whatever they wanted. What Ballard and Kailyn wanted, they said, was an orgy; Henry offered, according to the document, “Venezuelian and Diminican [sic] Republic girls as young as 22.”

This didn’t strike Alison as especially good reason to think that he was a trafficker, as opposed to a pimp, and even an “operator comment” apparently written by Ballard was lukewarm at best. (“The fact that Henry is able to provide women during the middle of the day indicates that he has decent control over their schedules, which can be a big indicator of trafficking,” read the document.) Nonetheless, Ballard engaged the man for a party, apparently hoping to bust him for trafficking. He assigned Alison and Cooper to rent a house and then “trash it,” she said, “to make it look like a party house.” In practice this meant messing up the bed, putting some beer in the fridge, spitting toothpaste in the sink, and strewing Doritos around. 

Hours before they were set to meet with Henry, Ballard informed Alison that according to a spiritual download he had received, she was meant to be the primary on the operation. That meant that she would interact with Henry, ask him to set up parties with women, and maintain a relationship with him via an OUR-provided burner phone even after she returned to the United States. This was concerning to Alison, because it meant that rather than finding women who had already been trafficked, she could potentially be “creating a market” for trafficking victims. 

Numerous experts, as well as people who have worked for or with OUR, have previously raised concerns to VICE News about the possibility that its operations could create demand for trafficking. (OUR has insisted that they do not.) A person who is not trafficking underage girls might, the concern goes, do so when an undercover operator for an anti-trafficking group asks for young girls, enticing them with large amounts of cash.

In preparation for the meeting with Henry, Ballard instructed Alison to look “butch but pretty,” as she recalls, and to present herself as a gay businesswoman setting up a sex tourism business in the Caribbean. The idea that Alison was supposed to be both a gay businesswoman and also in a relationship with a man with whom she’d been seen with all over the islands was not, she thought, particularly narratively coherent.

On the day of the party, Henry appeared with a woman who said she was 19, and appeared to Alison to be of age. (Nonetheless, she acknowledges, the woman could have been older or younger than she appeared.) Ballard said he wasn’t feeling well and so wouldn’t have sex with the girl, but would still pay for the time. He wanted to talk business, he said. Alison told the man about her plan to set up a sex tourism business, adding that they were “looking for a lot of variety,” but refused to specifically say they were looking for underage girls. This was June; they agreed they would return in September for a party. In the meantime, Alison was expected to maintain contact with the man from the U.S. using the burner phone—something she wasn’t, and isn’t, sure would be legal, so far as the purpose of the conversations was to encourage him to traffic women and girls.

“We’ve got no permission from the U.S. government to do this,” she says. “I’m on U.S. soil acting as an undercover agent.” 

To make things stranger, Ballard also began texting her on the burner phone. “How are you?? Ready for Mexico,” he wrote in a message reviewed by VICE News, adding an emoji of a face with hearts for eyes. 

There were two problems. One was that she wasn’t going to Mexico; the other is that she had reason to believe, from familiarity with messages he’d sent to Kailyn, that this was a prelude to explicit sexual messages, which she preempted by writing “?????? This is Alison…I was not asked to come to Mexico!”

Ballard apologized. “Sorry!” he wrote. “I thought this was Lisa’s phone. Trying to ‘dirty’ it up for cover.” (“Lisa” was Kailyn’s undercover alias; “‘dirty’ it up” was a reference to Ballard’s practice of sending explicit sexual messages to female operators with whom he was carrying out the couples ruse, which he claimed was necessary to protect them in case traffickers demanded to read their text messages to see if they were in fact intimate.)

The burner phone she was using, it turned out, was one that Kailyn already used for a previous operation in Mexico; no one had even bothered to change the sim card. What concerned Alison was the way this suggested a worryingly poor level of operational security—not only couldn’t OUR keep track of which operative kept which phone, she’d been provided with a potentially compromised one. 

“These things are digitally trackable,” Alison says. “If the cartels were on to them and watching, they would know precisely where this fucking phone was if they wanted to.” 

This wasn’t the only way in which the use of this phone potentially compromised Alison. At Ballard’s request, she kept up an ongoing conversation with Henry, the suspected trafficker, after her return to the U.S. As part of that, he sent a video to the phone, meant to be a taste of what kind of party he could throw, depicting naked women dancing. All appeared to be adults. Alison responded politely, but then, she says, “It hits me like a ton of bricks.” The video, she realized, could easily have depicted child sexual exploitation, something that would have been positively illegal for her to have or view. It was also perfectly possible that he would send her something like that in the future. 

“I know damn well at this point that we don’t have any permission,” she said. “I know absolutely that if I’m sent child sexual abuse material I’m in big fucking trouble.” 

Alison called Jeremy Locke, who was then OUR’s regional director for the Caribbean. “What’s the standard operating procedure if I’m sent child sexual abuse material if I’m on U.S. soil?” she asked him. 

Locke’s response, Alison says, was to tell her to call OUR right away “and then turn the phone off and send it in.” 

Alison turned the phone off and put it away. She then “expressed some unwillingness” to keep doing this to OUR, she says; when an OUR representative sent her an envelope asking her to return the phone in it, she did not. 

“I don’t want them to wipe this phone,” she says. “If I send it back, they’re just going to wipe the phone and give it to some other dipshit operator, like me.” 

Soon after she got home from the Caribbean, Alison called Matt Osborne, telling him they needed to talk. In her memory, she told him that Ballard was “crazy as hell and dangerous,” and that she didn’t believe due diligence was being conducted before operations, “putting operators at tremendous risk.” She related some of what had happened in the Caribbean, such as the downloads from God taking the place of actual planning and her concerns over evidence handling. 

“You could tell he knew everything I was saying already,” Alison said. He told her, in Alison’s memory, that Ballard would fire people who were critical of him, and that the best they could do was try to keep him from doing too much harm to himself or others. 

A couple of weeks later, Ballard called her, furious. “Did you betray me?” he asked. She learned there had been a leadership meeting to express concerns to Ballard, and that he had responded, again, by threatening to fire people. 

Alison told him that she had “absolutely” expressed concerns about his leadership style, that she thought he needed help, and offered to connect him with resources to help with “stress,” as she put it tactfully. (Ballard declined.)

“I thought that was it,” Alison said, assuming she’d be immediately fired. Instead, a few weeks later, she got an invitation to the training where she would, in the end, be severely injured. In the hospital, she also learned she was positive for COVID, which she says she got at the training. Given the state of the COVID crisis, and the fact that the surgery was technically “elective,” she had to delay getting surgery for her facial injuries for eight full weeks. The medical bills in Utah totaled $26,000, because it was out of network. OUR quietly paid those bills in full, suggesting, to Alison, that they felt responsible for her injuries.  

As Alison’s face healed—“beautifully,” she says, with a hint of wry pride—she began reflecting on her time with OUR, the disastrous trail of good intentions and bad decisions that led her to end up face down on a dirty mat in a gym in Utah. Unbelievably, she tried one more time to stay involved with OUR, mulling over an invitation to go to Thailand to check out their operations there, still wondering if they’d be better—more professional, more meaningful—than what she’d witnessed under Ballard.

In February of 2022, she flew to Thailand. What she found, she said, was “better”—no apparent sexual impropriety, a relationship with the Thai government—but once there, she learned, she says, that OUR wanted a full-time staffer there, for the same $200 a day pay rate. “It wasn’t a living wage,” she says. Once she returned home, her relationship with the group faded along with her lingering bruises. In the hospital and over the long weeks and months of recovery that followed, Ballard never once called or visited her. 

The post A Private Island, Downloads From God, and the ‘Couples Ruse’: Inside the Dangerous World of Tim Ballard’s Operation Underground Railroad appeared first on VICE.

The documents make clear that in recent years, according to its own employees, the organization did very little in the way of the much-publicized paramilitary “rescue” missions abroad, supposedly carried out by former members of U.S. special forces and meant to directly liberate women and children from sexual slavery, on which it made its name and reputation. Insiders who spoke to investigators said they viewed these as essentially a marketing tactic—one that bore spectacular fruit, as the group raised tens of millions of dollars annually and amassed assets of at least $80 million, according to federal tax filings.

“Everyone internally knows that they don’t rescue anyone anymore,” read an investigator’s notes from an interview with a former development director, in which he paraphrases her words, “but the public thinks that OUR is actively rescuing children. ‘And that’s just not true.’”

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(As VICE News has previously reported, Ballard left OUR this summer following an internal investigation into sexual misconduct claims made against him. OUR previously told VICE News it has “retained an independent law firm to conduct a comprehensive investigation of all relevant allegations.” Ballard has denied the allegations and said in an Instagram video that he needed to use what he called a “couples ruse” to fool traffickers.) 

The records also show an FBI special agent explaining to a former development director that she’d unknowingly been misleading donors by telling them, as she was instructed to, that 80% of money raised went directly to OUR’s mission. That would not, in fact, have been possible, he said, because 33% of the money OUR raised went directly into an investment account. The 80% figure reflected what went to rescues after investments were made and after overhead expenses were paid, he told her, making the true figure something more like 40%.

Among the documents are a 2020 letter from OUR’s director of domestic operations to higher-ups, in which he criticized the effectiveness of the organization’s work and wrote, “If the mission is to raise money I think we are doing a great job, but that isn’t what I think our mission is.” According to a transcript of a subsequent staff call discussing the email, Ballard’s sister Emily Evans, then the organization’s senior director of PR and marketing, responded to criticism of her brother’s work by saying, “Tim is OUR and OUR is Tim.” On the same call, Brad Damon, OUR’s COO, likened him to Martin Luther King Jr. 

Another subject of intense concern to investigators and witnesses was the misuse of donor funds, including millions of dollars raised from and by celebrities like media personality Glenn Beck and self-help guru Tony Robbins that was, witnesses said, used for other purposes than that for which it was earmarked—something that could potentially imperil its status as a 501(c)3 nonprofit. The records, for instance, state that money from the $18 million raised during Robbins’ 60th birthday celebration did not go to OUR but to The Nazarene Fund, a related but distinct group of which Ballard was also CEO. The former development director told investigators she found this diversion of funds “horrific.”

VICE News obtained the documents—which both KSL, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City, and the Salt Lake Tribune independently acquired and reported on—through a public-records request. They derive from an investigation carried out by the FBI and the county attorney in Davis County, Utah. That investigation closed earlier this year without charges being brought. 

A spokesperson for Tim Ballard did not respond to multiple requests for comment. An OUR spokesperson sent the following statement, which we’ve reproduced in full: 

Operation Underground Railroad is conducting on average multiple missions a week in operations. Any representation, past or present, that O.U.R. does not participate in rescue missions is false. O.U.R.’s ongoing work represents a combination of boots on the ground, intelligence gathering, and contributing resources to law enforcement. 

The percentage of mission spend as it relates to overall expenses annually is referred to as a “program expense ratio”. O.U.R.’s program expenses, as a percentage of overall spend, place O.U.R. among the best operated charities, based on standards set by various charity watchdog groups. O.U.R. invests all revenues or donations in excess of its annual expenses in investments consistent with sound charitable business practices. O.U.R.’s statements relative to its use of funds have been and continue to be in accordance with industry standards and best practices.

O.U.R. is engaged in the fight against human trafficking and sexual exploitation. O.U.R. investigators work to identify as many victims of human trafficking as possible, all while working closely with local law enforcement.

Dave Lopez is a former Navy SEAL who first become involved with OUR in 2013, when, after being introduced to the organization by a former fellow SEAL, he participated in a mission in Colombia called Operation Triple Take, a sting operation aimed at child sex traffickers in which OUR worked with Colombian law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. (This operation was later presented in highly fictionalized form in Sound of Freedom, the surprise box-office hit from this year focused on Ballard’s supposed exploits.)

Around 2016, Ballard offered Lopez a larger role in the organization, essentially as Ballard’s number two in operations. ( This is according to notes taken by Davis County investigator Bryan Purdy from an interview of Lopez that he and FBI special agent Kevin Luke carried out in October 2020.)

In this role, Lopez remained an independent contractor, paid by three different organizations for doing two different jobs. As director of operations for The Nazarene Fund—a sister organization to OUR focused on religious minorities in the Middle East, which was founded by Glenn Beck and of which Ballard was then the CEO—he was paid through a company called White Mountain Research. As OUR’s director of operations in Haiti, a country on which the organization had a particular focus—Lopez is featured prominently in Operation Toussaint, a 2018 documentary about the group’s exploits in Haiti—he was sometimes paid by OUR but more often by Deacon, a for-profit subsidiary.

In Lopez’s telling, his work in Haiti involved working with and advising domestic law enforcement; gathering intelligence from local non-governmental organizations; and collaborating with law enforcement to carry out operations against traffickers, in consultation with Haiti’s attorney general and other local officials.

He soon began to realize, though, he told the investigators, that the way OUR worked had changed since his initial involvement with the group in its early days. Under the leadership of then-new operations director Jon Lines, insiders including current OUR president and COO Matt Osborne told him, the group was working in 18 different countries but wasn’t “doing actual operations” and was instead simply funding domestic law enforcement in those countries.

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This claim is consistent with previous VICE News reporting, which found a clear pattern, both domestically and abroad: OUR would donate money or equipment to law enforcement agencies and then take credit for their work, implying it could not have been done without them or was carried out with their direct involvement. In some cases, the amount of money donated was minimal; several domestic law enforcement agencies told VICE News in 2020 that they’d opted to stop working with OUR, as the size of the donations wasn’t worth the strings that came attached, or the negative attention OUR had begun to attract. 

According to the investigators’ notes, Lopez had no problem with OUR’s shift in emphasis in theory, but objected that it simply didn’t align with what the public—and donors—were being told. 

“[T]he problem he had with it,” the notes read, “was that what they were marketing was ‘Navy seals going in, jump teams going in, and actually doing hands on operations and actually getting kids out of their situations.’” The reality, he said, was different—OUR would donate to law-enforcement agencies and then take credit in public for the children rescued and traffickers arrested by those agencies.

“Dave said he started to see a massive dishonesty,” the notes read, “and he brought it up with Tim. Stating, ‘Tim if people find out that we’re not doing you know operations the same way this could be very damaging and he responded with something to the effect of well how would they find out.’”

“Because when an OUR placard comes out and its ‘5 kids rescued 6 traffickers arrested,’ they don’t say which law enforcement agency actually did that. What people assume when they see that is something like what happened in the documentary is what happened. Something operational happened and that’s what everyone that is funding them thinks. That’s what Tony Robbins thinks, that’s what Glen Beck thinks but that isn’t what they’ve been doing.”

After Lopez left OUR, he told investigators, had a contentious relationship with the group. The reason he reached out to those investigators, he said, was that in late August 2020, he had received a “very interesting and threatening phone call from Jon Lines.”  

(Lines was the group’s chief of operations and Ballard’s former boss at Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE. According to Ballard, he was “the best” and a figure as central to OUR’s founding as Ballard’s wife—“the only two people,” Ballard has written, who thought founding the organization was a good idea when it first began. He told VICE News that his time with OUR is covered by an NDA and that he was unable to discuss it past saying, “I left OUR a few years ago due to personal reasons, not termination. My departure was a result of fundamental differences in mission interpretation, approaches, and methods.” But, he added, he “categorically denies” leaving Lopez a threatening voicemail.) 

Around the time he left OUR, Lopez said, he received a cease and desist letter “because they said he was giving out confidential information about their operations,” considering it defamatory of him to tell people that he had left OUR because the group wasn’t doing hands-on operations. (This letter was provided to investigators, but wasn’t among the records released to VICE News.)

Lopez said that in 2019, OUR’s largest expense was payments to White Mountain Research, a group of former members of the military who did private contracting work and said they had worked extensively in the Middle East to save Christians from persecution in ISIS-controlled territory; Lopez was previously one of White Mountain’s operators. (According to tax filings, OUR paid the group just more than $2.4 million in 2019.) After Ballard came in as CEO of the Nazarene Fund, Lopez said, White Mountain did the same work it had previously done, with the same funding from Beck; the difference was that the money was now flowing through OUR, with OUR taking a cut. “Dave said everyone at White Mountain never wanted O.U.R. to take over,” the investigators’ notes read, “because now they just saw Tim come in and take the credit for what they were already doing to make it look like he was the one doing it.”

Lopez also described how OUR set up at least one by then highly unusual operation aimed at impressing a major donor and giving him a false impression.

“Tony Robbins was brought to one of the last big rescues that O.U.R. did where they rented out a yacht in Haiti,” the investigators’ notes read. “They brought Tony Robbins down to show him how they ran that operation and Dave said, ‘That’s why Tony became a believer in what they were doing.’ However, Dave said that wasn’t how O.U.R. was operating anymore. Even at that time it wasn’t the standard mission.”

“I know these people,” Lopez said, according to the investigator’s notes. “I know Glenn and Tony and all these guys that are giving all this money thinking that something is happening, that’s really not happening. Plain and simple and it just kinda eats me up that there is this facade out there.”

In August 2021, at the FBI’s office in Provo, Purdy and Luke spoke to the former OUR development director. (We are not using her name, at her request, and will instead refer to her as “Jones,” a pseudonym.) In her interview, she expressed concerns about misleading donors about both how their money was spent and about the qualifications of some OUR staffers to do the work they claimed to do.

According to Purdy’s notes from the interview, “Jones stated that while working there she saw what was referred to within the ranks or OUR as there being two OUR’s. There was OUR and then OUR 2.0. OUR 2.0 was Tim’s version and all the messes and dysfunctions that he created and OUR went around trying to clean up Tim’s mess.”

Jones said that the most fundamental problem she faced after being recruited to join OUR was the organization’s opacity, which she believed could imperil its status as a 501(c)(3) non-profit because of mismatches between what donors believed their money was being used for and what it was in fact used for.

“OUR hated reporting, they did not, it irritated them, the accountability piece,” she said, according to Purdy’s notes. “”We just told this donor that they were funding this rescue, and then Tim just went off and offered that same rescue to a different donor, and they all want their name on it. You can’t do that twice.” 

Another problem, she said, was Ballard’s misrepresentation of the qualifications of OUR staff and of the standards of the rescue work they did do.

“Jones said Matt Osborne is touted as a CIA operative when in fact Matt only sat at a desk as an analyst,” according to Purdy’s notes. “She said that Tim tells people that he worked at the CIA briefly and was so good that the Department of Homeland Security ‘cherry picked’ him to work for them. Jones said this is very misleading to the public and misleading to the donors. Jones continued to ask around the office about Tim’s CIA experience and was finally told by his sister Emily, that he only worked for the CIA for months.” 

Jones, the notes add, was also concerned about Ballard bringing friends or people he wanted to impress on missions. Per the notes, she said, “Tim would frequently take a bunch of ‘buddies’ or people that he wanted to bring on the rescue missions without clearing them with the OUR Team. She mentioned one op was canceled because one of Tim’s friends took a camera and recorded and compromised the op. She said many of the people who went on ops were not vetted or prepared to be in the environments they encountered. She mentions Tim brought one young BYU college student who worked with video production and he ended up getting himself in trouble in the strip clubs while they were working the ops.”

Misrepresentation of numbers, Jones told investigators, was “a really big issue.” She said that Matt Osborne had begun telling her “years ago” that the organization was not doing rescues abroad anymore. 

“We both know that we hardly rescue abroad anymore,” Jones paraphrased Osborne as saying, per investigators. “Everyone internally knows that they don’t rescue anyone anymore, but the public thinks that OUR is actively rescuing children. ‘And that’s just not true.’”

Jones also added that “OUR is simply a passthrough organization, not really doing the rescues, not really doing the aftercare, just funding it all but does not tell the donors that,” according to the files. “Jones said she tried to tell Tim and the OUR staff to just tell the donors the truth but they didn’t like that. They wanted to promote that OUR was doing the rescues and all the work.”

Like other former employees, Jones, too, told investigators that she was concerned about donor funds that had been earmarked for a specific purpose being inappropriately diverted.  

“Not only would I say unequivocally to OUR but it would come up in donor meetings,” Jones said, “that they did not want their money to go to ‘The Nazarene Fund.'” (The Nazarene Fund is the Glenn Beck-founded organization that claims to rescue persecuted religious minorities in the Middle East and became a sister organization to OUR. Ballard acted as its CEO until this summer; he left that role shortly after leaving OUR. TNF has told VICE News, “There were no concerns or suspicion of wrongdoing by Tim Ballard regarding his work at The Nazarene Fund.” ) 

“Is that misleading to the typical donor based on your experience?” asked Luke, the FBI special agent. “Absolutely,” said Jones. “Donors would say to me listen, not that I think you know persecuted minority Christians in the middle east aren’t important, but as an individual, or a business professional, I don’t want any of my gifts traced to the middle east. I don’t want them to. And so, it was an internal discussion a handful of times to make sure that what OUR does is kept incredibly separate from Nazarene fund. That Tim could be a CEO of both but they could be kept separate from each other.

“Jones said it was incredibly alarming that funds from Tony Robbins birthday donations went straight to the Nazarene Fund… ‘it’s horrific.’”

Luke asked Jones how much of the money that came in went directly to rescue missions and caring for survivors.

“They said 80%… of ALL donations,” she said, according to the files. “80 Cents on the dollar, sometimes 81 cents…goes directly to our mission,” with the remaining 20% going to overhead and administrative costs.

“SA Luke,” according to the files, “explained to Jones that the 80% was actually 80% of the cost spent toward the mission after the overhead cost and after the 33 percent right off the top which was moved into an investment fund.”

“This is why they would never show us,” said Jones. “I’m telling you this is why they would never show us.”

“SA Luke,” according to the files, “Explained that 80 cents of the remaining 50 cents goes to the rescues and asked what she heard from OUR was that 80 of every dollar received went to the rescues.”

“Every donated dollar, to the penny. And I heard that specifically,” she said, “over and over and over again, because it was my job to speak to it.”

“So if I told you that the first 33% of every dollar that came in went into a private investment account,” said Luke, “you would say what?”

“I would have told every donor the truth,” said Jones.

“Jones said that when she was working there, if she had found out that information, ‘I would have told everybody and left. I would have told everyone and left. Nobody knows, knew that when I was there if that is true and that also explains nobody would hire anybody,” adding, according to Purdy’s notes, that “it never made sense to her and others as to why they wouldn’t hire more staff when they had millions of dollars coming in.”

“If this is true,” she said, “there are countless lies I was told.” 

In August 2020, according to the records, there was turmoil stirring within the organization.

In a 2020 letter suggesting edits to a documentary OUR was producing, and which is contained in the files, Lines expressed grave concerns over exaggeration and misrepresentation of the group’s work. At one point, he noted that falsely depicting the group as “trained killers” for marketing purposes had caused its insurance premiums to skyrocket. He also raised serious concerns over what he called the “objectification” and “victimization” of minor trafficking victims.

A newer senior employee had concerns, too. Domestic coordinator Carlos Rodriguez, who’d only recently joined the organization, had quickly become frustrated with what he saw as the organization’s amateurism and misrepresentations.  Rodriguez is a former sergeant with the Washington State Patrol, who served on the governor’s detail and Missing and Exploited Children Task Force; he appears to have worked for OUR for just three months. (In response to a request for comment from VICE News, Rodriguez said, “I don’t have anything to do with that organization any longer due to fundamental differences.”)

His frustration would soon reach a breaking point. In that short time, he wrote a pointed email to leadership about misrepresentations made by Ballard and others, which led to a tense staff call. 

Rodriguez was a Lines hire, and through back channels the two were discussing what appear, from the documents, to have been shared frustrations.

Investigators obtained an email Lines sent Rodriguez on August 14, 2020, consisting of the text “I sent this back in April” over a forwarded email from earlier that year. It suggested edits for a documentary, then in production, about Operation Triple Take, the operation in Colombia in which Lopez had participated and which was presented in highly fictionalized form in Sound of Freedom. The email had been sent to Ballard and to Emily Evans, his sister and OUR’s senior director of PR and marketing. 

Lines’ critique can be read here. Much of it is concerned with asking for the identities of law enforcement officers, undercover operatives (“Just don’t want him killed and dismembered”), and minor children to be concealed, as well as identifying specific areas where the film reveals the group’s methods.

Lines also, though, asked for some things to be suppressed because they were, simply put, embarrassing. In his email, he asked for references to a $5,000 payoff to a “dirtbag” in exchange for an introduction to be struck, noting that group is a “non profit that receive[s] sacred funds from many private people to include little old ladies and struggling families.” Another suggested cut was Glenn Beck talking about a tool Ballard used and showed him. “I’m assuming that was ICOPS,” Lines wrote, “the software that was designed to expose live interaction of online predators via P2P communication. Any use of that tool outside of a LEA’s official role is restricted and assertions that Tim had showed some potential donors resulted in harsh condemnation by ICAC.”

(ICAC stands for Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force; these are operated by law enforcement agencies at the state, local and federal level. It’s not clear if Lines was referring to one such group or to the national network of thousands of them.)

One of the more interesting passages concerns Paul Hutchinson, the Utah philanthropist and anti-trafficking activist who helped found OUR and was subsequently the first funder and executive producer of Sound of Freedom. Elsewhere in the documents are investigative notes on an episode in which Hutchinson was filmed groping the naked breasts of a trafficking victim he and his associates believed to be 16 years old. (Hutchinson told VICE News that he had an affidavit from Mexican police asserting that the girl was in fact at least 18, but declined to provide it.)

Lines expressed concerns about questionable comments made by Hutchinson to a child, which were captured on tape. “5:01-5:18 needs to be cut out,” Lines wrote. “That is Paul and such a comment to 12 year old girl, Betsy, from one of my operators would be unacceptable. Our legitimate operators are trained how to speak to children to mitigate further victimization and avoid further objectification. It’s not only creepy to hear, but since he is an OUR equity in the film, please cut that out. Other savvy NGO’s or child protection professionals would object to one of ‘us’ telling a 12 year old baby that she is ‘beautiful,’ or ‘muy linda.'”

(“All my undercover work was done with integrity and honor,” Hutchinson previously told VICE News, while commenting on the groping incident.) 

Another Lines comment went to the fundamental and complete divergence between what the organization actually was and how it marketed itself.

“21:05-21:50- please edit out Dave Lopez shooting and all footage of Navy Seals in training with firearms,” Lines wrote. “That cannot be part of our messaging. We do not carry or shoot weapons. We can’t even train our partners in firearms. Lloyd’s of London contacted us immediately upon seeing the scenes in Toussaint where Dave was teaching firearms tactics. They wanted to immediately significantly increase our insurance premiums. Sending the message that we are trained killers is not a message we should be sending to our supporters or insurance carriers.”

This was, of course, the message OUR had been sending all along: that they were a highly trained paramilitary group, with the heroics and firepower to back it up. 

A month after Lines forwarded this email to Rodriguez, around the same time as Lopez’s first conversation with investigators, Rodriguez, OUR’s domestic coordinator, sent an email to OUR leaders including Ballard, Lines, Ballard’s sister Emily Evans, and Ballard’s sister-in-law Tevya Ware. The email was aimed at starting what he called a “difficult conversation.”

“If I am wrong about this then just tell me,” he wrote, “but if I don’t speak up then I feel I am doing a disservice to the organization.” 

Rodriguez’s letter, which can be read in full here, detailed his own concerns about how the organization represented itself publicly. 

Two of those had to do with social media posts. In one, he objected to the fact that OUR had promoted Sound of Freedom, which had at that point been filmed but for which producers had not found a distributor. Rodriguez wrote that he’d previously raised concerns about maintaining a distinction between the non-profit and the movie, which seemed to have been ignored. 

Rodriguez’ other, more serious concern was over survivor privacy; specifically, a Facebook video in which OUR told the story of a boy named “Andrew.” 

“Why are we showing his face even if blurred and talking about a boy that is still receiving services,” Rodriguez wrote. “We discussed this as well about how that is a form of exploitation and that boy isn’t able to consent. I don’t agree with it. It may bring in dollars, but at what cost.” (A video of the same survivor is still online and was viewed this week by VICE News; in what seems to be a nod towards anonymity, the child’s eyes are blurred out.) 

Rodriguez was also concerned about an interview that Ballard—a frequent guest on various podcasts—had done with a show called The Real Deal of Parenting. Ballard had talked about coming home from operations; but as far as Rodriguez knew, he wrote, Ballard never went on them. Ballard had referred to OUR working on and solving problems. 

“WE don’t do the actual work,” Rodriguez wrote. 

Ballard had also let the interviewer say that OUR made arrests without correcting her; as a nonprofit, and not a law enforcement agency, that would of course be impossible. And Rodriguez wrote that Ballard had used the term “child pornography,” which is contrary to best practices maintained by those who work with survivors. Rodriguez explained that the term should only be used in the context of outlining why terms like “child abuse material” or “child sexual abuse material” should be used instead. 

Ballard also stated on the podcast that OUR wasn’t political, before immediately following up with a variety of partisan political points. They included what Rodriguez, who had worked on the issue for many years, described as the false claim that the Trump administration had done more to fight trafficking than any previous administration. Finally, Rodriguez was put off by the promotion of the documentary Operation Toussaint, which, he said, would be alarming to the law enforcement officers with whom OUR needed to work because it showed poor planning and “cowboy tactics”and because it was “more about Tim than the mission,” in his opinion.

“That interview adds to the sensationalism and this makes me feel we aren’t going to make the necessary changes to be successful in accomplishing the mission of protecting kids and holding those accountable that wish/cause them harm,” he wrote. “If the mission is to raise money I think we are doing a great job, but that isn’t what I think our mission is.”

Citing his eight years of experience in the anti-trafficking field, Rodriguez closed with a prescient warning about how OUR’s marketing tactics could harm the organization’s credibility. “When we put out information that isn’t spot on, sensationalized, wrong, or outdated,” he wrote, “we won’t be trusted.” (Indeed, as sources told VICE News three years ago, law enforcement agencies did come to view OUR as untrustworthy and severed ties with it.) 

Shortly after Rodriguez sent the email, Tim Ballard held a video meeting for administrative staff to discuss it; investigators obtained the audio of that meeting and Purdy, the Davis County investigator, took detailed notes on it, which can be read here.

“I’m going to be very bold,” Ballard said, according to the notes. “You were bold, I think you appreciate bold.”

Ballard spent much of the meeting disputing or dismissing specific points Rodriguez had made. (While Rodriguez had, for instance, written that he thought Ballard was lying when he described coming home from operations, Ballard said that he had been on many, and had even been on one within the last year. More than that, though, he asserted, “‘I came home from an operation’ could mean I came home from the office back to reality, to my house. From my office to my house.”)

The point he seemed most concerned with, though, was philosophical, and had to do with the nature of OUR’s work.

“Here’s the thing,” Ballard said. “Let me just tell you about, maybe you haven’t been here very long, so. How we fight this. It’s not this saving kids vs raising money. They’re not mutually exclusive, they’re co-dependent on each other. Right? And it’s not just raising money. The stories we tell, documentaries, movies, it’s not just raising money, it’s much more than that.”

Ballard continued to expand on the broader mission of OUR, comparing himself to Harriet Beecher Stowe, before returning to specific points. The organization was not going to maintain a distinction between it and Sound of Freedom—a movie so successful that a sequel was in the works, he said, despite the fact that it wouldn’t be released for another three years—because it was Ballard’s story and the OUR story. It was also not going to stop using the images of child trafficking survivors, he said, because “this has been discussed and decided that this is how ‘we’ (OUR) do it.”

“When the White House wants to know about human trafficking,” he said, “they literally call me. When the Senate wants to hear a testimony, they literally call me to testify about it. That doesn’t just happen because you don’t know what you’re doing.” He then brought up Operation Toussaint, the documentary. Rodriguez said that a firearms training shown in it was poor; that having given hundreds of briefings to SWAT teams, he felt he had authority to say that a briefing shown in it was “shitty”; and that when he talked to law enforcement, he was told, because of the way the group marketed itself, “You guys look like cowboys.”

“Carlos said he goes to conferences,” read the investigator’s notes, “and meet with other agencies and his integrity is questioned because of his affiliation with OUR.” 

“What I think is,” Rodriguez said, “is sometimes the messaging that some of this stuff is portrayed, sometimes makes it where people are thinking its more about the man than the mission.”

At this point, Brad Damon, the COO, began to speak, lauding Ballard for being a leader and for being invited to talk to powerful people all over the world about trafficking.

“As far as him (Tim) try to be about Tim, or a cowboy or whatever the language is, I know for a fact, and I can speak very specifically to this space… in terms of monetizing your name, your existence, your company, your business, that sort of thing, because I’ve done that. And I have friends that are in very high places and I’e watched that take place in their career. Tim could be monetizing about 9 or 10 different channels right now that would put him in a seven-figure platform on every single one of them. Yet he’s making jack squat on those. He pushes all that to OUR. Ok, all of it. And just like Martin Luther King when he stood up, yeah, he had a message. Yeah, it was his face on there so what’s he going to do, because a couple people say it’s all about Martin Luther. Does that mean he shuts down and shuts himself down in a closet, no.”

(As VICE News has reported, Ballard in fact did seem to be planning to monetize his notoriety.)

“Let me tell you what OUR’s philosophy is. This is, telling stories saves lives. Telling stories moves the needle and Tim has an interesting story that people connect to,” said Ballard. “That’s what it’s about.”

After nearly an hour of what the investigator’s notes show as mainly Ballard and Damon castigating Rodriguez, Lines stepped in to defend him, lauding his purity, humility, and dedication to the anti-trafficking cause.

“That’s why I brought somebody in to keep me in check to make sure that we are consistent with our mission and our objective in the operations,” said Lines. “To make sure we embrace law enforcement that we endear ourselves to them and we are responsive to their concerns. Carlos has been barraged lately be people that just come out with him and said, we have a problem with Operation Underground Railroad and I’ll tell you way. I think that is his (Carlos’s) concern is he feels like we are hindered in our potential to actually do what we need to do as operations and engage those very people Tim. I hope you agree with me that without law enforcement, we can’t do anything.”

Soon after, Emily Evans, Ballard’s sister, spoke up to defend him.

“If you don’t like Tim, do not work here,” she said. “Because Tim is OUR and OUR is Tim.”

Not long after that, the meeting ended. Before long, Lines and Rodriguez parted ways with OUR.

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“Tim Ballard is no longer the CEO of the Nazarene Fund,” said the statement. “The Nazarene Fund continues to be focused on our mission to Rescue, Rebuild and Restore.  There are so many people around the world who are in need of our unique services and we are grateful for the support we receive to help us accomplish our mission.” 

The Nazarene Fund did not answer follow-up questions about the circumstances or timing of Ballard’s departure, or his current relationship to the organization. A representative for Ballard did not immediately respond to a request for comment; he also did not immediately respond to a message sent through the contact form on his personal website.

Ballard’s no longer being CEO of the Nazarene Fund—which, as Motherboard has previously reported, appears to have at times exaggerated its role in exfiltrating the Afghan girls’ national soccer team from the country, according to people who were directly involved—ties in with a larger pattern of abrupt and surprising change for him. Last week, Operation Underground Railroad, the anti-trafficking organization where he was the founder and most recognizable face, confirmed to Motherboard that Ballard had “stepped away” from the group. OUR declined to answer follow-up questions about the timing and reason for Ballard’s departure, and a representative for Ballard has not responded to multiple requests for comment. 

Do you work for one of the organizations Tim Ballard is no longer CEO of and have information you think the public should be aware of? Contact the reporters at anna.merlan@vice.com or tim.marchman@vice.com, or reach us on Signal from a non-work device at 267-713-9832 for extra security.

A source conveyed to Motherboard this week that a letter is circulating in Utah’s philanthropic community, which claims that Ballard left OUR following an internal investigation. The letter further states that an employee filed an HR complaint after returning from a mission with Ballard, which sparked the investigation and his subsequent departure.

This is at least the second time Ballard has departed as CEO from the Nazarene Fund. In 2021, as Motherboard previously reported, Ballard was deposed as CEO by the group’s board, which consisted of Ballard, Glenn Beck, and David Barton, who has been described as a “fake historian” who’s “received little formal historical training” and is dedicated to promoting the idea that America was founded on Christian ideals.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

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