THIS IS PROPAGANDA

(some of) the lies in Sound of Freedom

16 min readJun 13, 2024

PART ONE — THE MOVIE

Sound of Freedom is a mediocre action-thriller from 2023 that stars Jim Caviezel as DHS agent Tim Ballard, a God-fearing man on a mission to save children from the clutches of evil sex traffickers. As an action movie — it’s terrible. The pacing is painfully slow, the plot is full of holes, and Caviezel delivers each line like he’s still playing Jesus of Nazareth (a role that may have given him brain damage from being hit by lightning!). As a piece of propaganda, however, it’s very effective.

“Never trust a pedophile” sneers Caviezel after he entices a pedophile — who’s already in police custody — into kidnapping a real human child. The filmmakers think this is a big mic drop moment, but they completely ignore the fact that the movie’s hero has just participated in a child’s kidnapping. Caviezel’s character goes on to spearhead a series of increasingly elaborate ‘opperations’ wherein he poses as a wealthy predator looking to purchase trafficked children. Sound of Freedom recklessly assumes that these children will not be harmed as they are brought to Caviezel, and that Caviezel’s messianic presence alone is enough to soothe a traumatized kid. The camera often zooms slowly in on his face, his eyes brimming with tears, his mouth set in a thin, determined line. When he’s forced to choose between his job and his mission (saving children), his stoic wife tells him to “go get those kids” as the music swells.

In another scene, Caviezel growls “God’s children are no longer for sale” (the film’s tagline), but this does not stop him from buying multiple children in order to ‘save’ them. In an attempt to shock the audience, the camera oftens assumes the point of view of the predator. Ominous music plays over images of children while the characters lament about the sick, perverted things the predators are surely doing. By the end, we’ve learned nothing of the systems that allow trafficking to flourish, and we see nothing of the aftercare that makes up the vast majority of anti-trafficking efforts. The credit sequence includes footage of actual police raids, supposedly carried out by the real Tim Ballard, which reinforces the message that events in the film are truthful.

PART TWO — THE MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Director Alejandro Monteverde completed Sound of Freedom in 2018, but the film bounced between distributors for years until Angel Studios stepped in. The very successful Utah-based distribution and production studio mostly focuses on religious-adjacent media — stories that “amplify light”, according to their website. They used their own ‘Angel Fund’ crowdfunding platform to raise $5M from over 6000 individual investors in order to distribute the film across an international market. Since releasing the movie, Angle Studios has bragged that these investors recieved a 120% return on their investment.

Angel Studios sold Sound of Freedom to the public as an “important film”, pushing a massive ‘pay it forward’ campaign (as they do for all their projects) where audiences can donate additional movie tickets. They claim to have gifted over 30.6M tickets, which means (at 15$ a ticket) they received almost $460M from donated tickets alone. When the film finished its theater run, the box office reported $248M in gross revenue, though it’s unclear how many of those gifted tickets were redeemed and thus contributed to that revenu.

The intense marketing campaign specifically targeted a more conspiracy-minded audience. Though the film was written before the umbrella conspiracy known as Qanon gained mainstream notoriety, Sound of Freedom’s “God’s children are not for sale” tagline fit nicely into the conspiratorial ‘save the children’ rallying cry that many Qanon followers adopted during the summer of 2020. Caviezel himself embraced the connection, giving a rousing speech at a 2021 Qanon conference (in which he re-enacted Mel Gibson’s famous Braveheart monologue) after screening a trailer for the film. By the time the official trailer dropped in 2023, Caviezel was a beloved Qanon celebrity, and the trailer even included a personal message from Caviezel himself:

Sound of Freedom is one of those films that can legitimately change this world. So we want to ignite a fire in audiences and open their eyes to the dark reality of millions of children that need our help. Let’s make this film an historic event and a start to the end of child trafficking. Theaters across this country are already selling out. Pre-order your tickets today and you can send the message that God’s children are no longer for sale.

This message was repeated during a now-privated live stream with Caviezel, Angel Studios co-founder Jeff Harmon and director Alejandro Monteverde. As alerts flashed across the screen for every purchased seat, they encourage people to redeem donated tickets — “assuming you can find a seat, that’s our bigget difficulty right now is getting enough seats!” laughed Harmon. The conversation continuously conflated the act of watching the film with actual activism. “Two million tickets for two million children that are being trafficked,” mumbled Caviezel, “I think it’s a brilliant plan that you guys did, to get people to the theaters.” Throughout the hour-long stream, they berate the mainstream media and plug the Angel Studios merch shop, specifically the t-shirts with ‘God’s children are not for sale’ printed over an American flag.

In reality, theaters were not actually selling out, since donated tickets are not equivalent to redeemed tickets. Screenings hosted a normal amount of attendees for a late summer pseudo-religious action film, but the disparity between the marketing promises and reality sparked more conspiratorial speculation. Any issue that arose at a movie theater, like a busted AC unit, was immediately labeled as something sinister, and film goers often took to social media to share their theories. This trend sparked a second wave of interest in the film that propelled box office sales far beyond opening weekend.

PART THREE — THE REAL TIM BALLARD

The real Tim Ballard founded Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.) in 2013, a non-profit anti-trafficking organization that had, until 2023, successfully curried favour among high ranking LDS members and prominent Utah politicians, including Attourney General Sean Reyes. Ballard, a man of faith, has claimed multiple times, in interviews and on his own podcast, that the undercover stings depicted in Sound of Freedom are based on real opperations. And while the film may accurately portray how Ballard sees himself, both he and O.U.R. have long been a thorn in the side of anti-trafficking activists.

Way back in 2015, Anne Gallagher (an international lawyer for human rights) documented all of the ways that O.U.R.’s operations created harm. According to Gallagher, their common practice of ‘going undercover’ and requesting to be serviced by underage victims at massage parlors and sex clubs often met the definition of entrapment, since they would not establish in advance whether any workers were actually underage, and could actually create a market for traffickers. Ballard often filmed or live-streamed his raids, which are a violation of any victim’s privacy. He almost exclusively carried out his ‘ops’ in very poor neighborhoods with the help of local law enforcement, who often pose a danger to trafficking victims. Overall, as Gallagher explained, “the targeting of low-level offenders (recruiters and pimps) also reveals an alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled.”

Despite these known criticisms, Ballard became a celebrity within religious right wing circles. His close friendship with Sean Reyes likely shielded him from scrutiny, and he became a frequent guest on right wing pundit Glenn Beck’s show. Ballard even served as CEO of Beck’s own Nazarene Fund until 2023, another anti-trafficking non-profit (with its own host of credibility issues) that focuses on helping “Christians and persecuted minorities who are facing displacement, torture and death” in the Middle East. In 2017 he advised Ivanka Trump about trafficking issues and in 2019 he advised Donald Trump directly on how a border wall would prevent trafficking. “It’s like trying to catch flies with chopsticks,” he said in a disturbingly vague analogy. “If we had a big, you know, fly swatter, which would hit the wall, that would be a lot better. It stops it.” When Utah senator Mitt Romney announced in 2023 he wouldn’t be seeking re-election, Ballard set his sights on a run for the senate.

Several journalists have exhaustively written about the many fallacies presented by both Tim Ballard and O.U.R. Lynn Packer is a Utah based journalist who has been reporting about O.U.R. and its connections to local and state government officials for years. Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman for VICE have been doing the same, while news outlets local to Utah, like the Salt Lake Tribune, have covered Ballard’s rise to fame as well as his fall from grace. In September 2023, FOX 13 in Salt Lake City published the records from a now closed 2020 FBI investigation that is full of interviews with Ballard’s former colleagues and collaborators. Based on those records and the exhausted work of the reporters listed above, a pattern of harmful propaganda, recklessness, and abuse emerges. Here are only a few examples:

Meg Conley wrote about her experience with Ballard in 2014. Despite promising to keep her safe on a mission, for which he recruited her, Ballard put her in the direct line of fire with law enforcement. She writes: “He put me in harm’s way so that I could write a story about him.” Ballard responded to this on his podcast in August 2023. “Meg, I’d love to have you come on the show” he scoffed. “Would you be willing to talk to [the kids we saved] and tell them that they weren’t really rescued?”
Also in 2014, using ‘intel’ from self-proclaimed psychic and O.U.R. employee Janet Russon, Ballard tried to rescue Gardy Mardy, a boy missing since 2009. Ballard, Russon, the boy’s father, and a camera crew all traveled to a remote Haitian village based on her guidance. A source who was on the trip told Vice that Ballard was “making decisions like a reality TV producer… We never saw Gardy or any other kid.” This story is still being used in O.U.R. fundraising campaigns, and they still brag about how Gardy’s story inspired the film.
Ballard would sell ‘experience vacations’ to wealthy donors, like motivational speaker Tony Robbins, so they could participate in supposed raids, though they had no training or expertise (page 21 of the FBI investigation).
Ballard often promised multiple wealthy donors exclusive credit for the same mission, and then misrepresented how those funds were being distributed (page 45).
O.U.R. would often take credit for the anti-trafficking work of local law enforcement after simply donating money or equipment (page 22).
Ballard has personally exaggerated his own qualifications, representing the few months he worked for the CIA as extensive experience, in order to sell a more dramatic story to wealthy donors (page 46).
Ballard attributed his decision to found O.U.R. to the advice of LDS Elder Russell Ballard (no relation), referring to him as a close personal friend. By September 2023, the church publically rebuked Ballard and removed any mention of his work from their website, telling the Salt Lake Tribune that “President Ballard never authorized his name, or the name of the church, to be used for Tim’s personal or financial interests.”
Ballard took credit for rescuing a trafficking victim dubbed Liliana, a real person who escaped her traffickers on her own and testified against them, securing their conviction. Ballard exaggerated every aspect of her story in multiple statements (making her younger and doubling the violence she endured) which helped O.U.R. raise a record breaking $21M in donations in 2019, despite him having no actual involvement with her.
Ballard and Angel Studios are currently being sued for defamation by Kely Moya. Both Ballard and O.U.R. have referred to her as ‘The Queen of Cartagena’, and portrayed her in the film as a devious temptress who brings children to Ballard’s ‘sex party’. In real life, Moya was an adult who, according to her lawsuit, was “promised to be paid to attend [Ballard’s party] and potentially have sex… She needed money and looked young for her age.” Though she was arrested and then let go after being mistaken for someone else, Angel Studios still used her photo and real name in posters to promote Sound of Freedom. Moya says this caused her own community to believe that she was a child trafficker, which led to her being “spit on and receiving death threats”.

PART FOUR — THE VICTIMS

The Couple’s Ruse is both Tim Ballard’s favourite undercover strategy and the reason he was removed from O.U.R.’s organization a few weeks before Sound of Freedom hit theaters. Though this ‘strategy’ is noticeably absent from the film, it is prominent in the many stories that Ballard uses to promote himself. The Couple’s Ruse incorrectly supposes that a male undercover agent with a female companion will somehow be less suspicious to traffickers (which is laughably untrue, according to experts). Ballard would recruit devout Mormon women from Mormon organizations like BYU, women who reveared O.U.R and deeply believed in its mission. Ballard and his team would take these women to strip clubs or massage parlours in different countries and expect them to display physical affection towards him and his team, while he requested younger and younger sex workers. None of these women were trained in undercover work, and their safety was completely dependent on Ballard.

In October, five women who participated in this ruse sued Ballard for sexual abuse. This followed the news that O.U.R. had forced Ballard to resign due to complaints of sexual misconduct, harassment and grooming. His former assistant Celeste Borys and her husband have also sued Ballard for similar claims, even filing a police report for sexual assault. In November a seventh woman known as “Alison” sued Ballard, claiming that her eye socket was broken at a group training session in Ballard’s gym. After working with Ballard for months and seeing how reckless he and his team were with phone data and digital evidence, she told a high ranking O.U.R. employee that Ballard was “crazy as hell and dangerous”. She was then told 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.”

All of the claims in all of these lawsuits are similar to the claims made to the FBI in their now public case files. Despite what Ballard bragged to wealthy donors, his ‘opperations’ served mostly as an excuse for him and his friends to visit seedy strip clubs and massage parlours, while asking the sex workers for younger women. Before these trips, Ballard would repeat to his female partners that the missions were dangerous, that their targets were ‘beyond evil’, that the ‘cartel’ would have ‘eyes everywhere’. He would constantly ‘test’ these women by asking them for massages, or to shower together, even when they were in Utah or alone in hotel rooms. He insisted that should they show any hesitation to his sexual advances, their lives and the lives of the children they were meant to rescue would be at risk.

On missions, these women (according to their lawsuits) had to heavily rely on Ballard to get them out of the undercover situation, as well as out of the country. Many of them had never left the US before, and they were never briefed on exit strategies or how the mission was supposed to unfold. Some women tried to establish codes or safewords in advance, but Ballard often ignored these once the ‘mission’ was underway. When Ballard insisted on lap dances, or massages, or showers, or other more explicit types of sexual contact from these women, they were often too afraid to defend themselves, for fear that they were under surveillance by ‘the bad guys’. At the end of these missions, the women hoped that despite their own trauma, they had helped children get to a safer place.

In the 10 years that Ballard ran O.U.R., the organization was never able to establish a specific number of children that they had ‘saved’, as is revealed in the declassified FBI files (page 50). They were never able to specify how much donor money was going directly to victims (page 52). And they flatly refused to engage in any sort of aftercare (page 45, 47), despite what they continue to say on their website. “They defrauded all of us. They defrauded multimillion-dollar donors,” said Bree Righter in a press conference, one of the initial five women to sue Ballard and O.U.R. “They’re not rescuing children. They’re making a morality play for money.” Meg Conley echoed a similar sentiment in her 2021 essay. “I’d imagined myself the same way [Ballard] did… I tried to find meaning in my own life on the backs of exploited kids.”

PART FIVE — REALITY

Ballard has denied all of these claims in a statement issued via The Spear Fund, his latest anti-trafficking initiative, as well as during a bizarre speech in front of a Boston monument. Though his actions are uniquely despicable, an entire community of people allowed him to operate in these ways, including Attorney General Sean Reyes, who is currently being sued for fraud and intimidating witnesses.

Director Monteverde hasn’t spoken publicly about the controversy since August 2023, when he told the LA Times that audiences are just watching “an actor playing Tim Ballard”, not the real person, and that the film is “not a documentary”. As of early June 2024, he had inked a 5 picture deal with Angel Studios, who promised to distribute his work for the next decade. Though some say Angel Studios has a “hydra” like corporate structure that may be an SEC violation, they continue to release content at the time of this writing.

Organizations like O.U.R are not unique. They sell an ultra-sensationalized image of trafficking rooted in white saviorism, when in reality most trafficking occurs in the agricultural and domestic labour industries within US borders. This problem is exasperated by extremely restrictive immigration laws that prevent vulnerable people from applying for residency, leaving them at the mercy of whomever employs them. Sex trafficking specifically rarely involves a stranger snatching a child off the street. More often, it’s the fault of someone who coerces an already vulnerable person into sex work. Multiple experts explained to Rolling Stone back in July 2023 why false narratives about trafficking cause real world harm. “It creates harm when certain policies aren’t passed because we think trafficking looks one way and it’s another way,” says anti-trafficking lawyer Erin Albright. “It creates harm when victims don’t recognize themselves in these narratives.”

Sound of Freedom presents Ballard as a god-like hero who fights evil incarnate, an image he very much intended to leverage in his 2025 senate run. In the stories that he tells, no one ‘saved’ by him ever has any agency, because that would minimize Ballard’s own heroism. To both the film and Ballard, only the most innocent, cherubic-looking victims matter, but the moment they grow up, or express themselves, they no longer serve his purpose. Ballard relishes in the disgusting details of his ‘rescues’, because the more awful the crime, the more heroic the rescue. He uses his false heroism to distract from his lies.

Ballard has endangered the lives of every child he tried to save and every woman he recruited for his ‘missions’. In service of his own messianic complex, he used his power to manipulate many, many women into unwanted sexual contact. He left them traumatized and uncertain of their place in the world.

Both Ballard and Sound of Freedom offer a hollow kind of morality. To them, the only thing you need to save the world is a cop with a gun.

It’s all just propaganda.

BC — June 2024