Mormon psychic involved with the very successful 'Sound of Freedom' film? Read on ...

Operation Underground Railroad, the Utah-based organization that inspired the hit indie movie “Sound of Freedom,” has no shortage of problems right now.

There’s a news organization (Vice.com) that is constantly running exposés on it; the unexpected resignation of its telegenic CEO, Tim Ballard, in June due to allegations of sexual misconduct; a criminal investigation (since closed with no charges filed) by the Davis County attorney’s office; and a dust-up with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Also, a Utah Fox News outlet — which was totally fed up with Ballard’s antics — ran this story about the called-off criminal investigation. Shortly thereafter, the attorney’s office released a bunch of documents. At that point, newsrooms pounced.

The latest piece of news sounds like a tabloid title. “Operation Underground Railroad Child Rescue Missions Were Based on Psychic Intelligence,” was the Vice headline last week.

Before quoting from that piece, I want to note that the media pile-on over “Sound of Freedom” exaggerated claims about Ballard’s heroic role in stopping child sex trafficking does mystify me. This isn’t the first movie out there to take major liberties with the original story, while bringing “reality” to the screen. Look at what “The Sound of Music” did to the real Von Trapp family.

A key piece of the Vice story:

It was a tense day in February 2016 for Tim Ballard and operatives working for Operation Underground Railroad, the anti-human trafficking group he founded. They were on what would prove to be a bumbling and ineffective mission to save a trafficked child Ballard believed was being held in a village on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
This wasn’t just any mission, however. The child they were searching for was Gardy Mardy, a missing Haitian boy whose abduction Ballard has portrayed as “the case that led us to found OUR.” Joining him and his team of elite operatives was Janet Russon — a psychic medium from Utah whose supposed visions were guiding the mission.

Vice News has had OUR in its crosshairs for some time, including a large investigative piece that ran in 2021 followed by several more articles. The gist of the 2021 piece alleged sloppy training done by OUR for its operatives; that OUR chose its workers more on the basis of how much they donated to the organization and that some of its methods were making the sex-trafficking industry worse.

A few weeks ago, while scanning a few articles in a print copy of Foreign Policy, my go-to magazine for all things outside U.S. borders, I chanced upon a piece about human trafficking.

I began to read about how a group of Americans in Acapulco posing as sex tourists are really part of something called Operation Underground Railroad (OUR). The piece traces how they’ve invited some pimps and their girls over for an afternoon of fun when suddenly the local police rush in and arrest all the bad guys.

It’s gripping narrative and fun to read. Then the author spins us some background, how “strange bedfellows -- feminists who opposed sex work, politicians from both political parties, and right-wing Christians -- allied behind the cause of defeating modern-day slavery.” A few paragraphs later, it introduces Tim Ballard, the founder of OUR and how he got into the sex trafficking busting business. Then:

Ballard’s Mormon faith also heavily influences his work. “The other option was to face my maker one day and tell him why I didn’t do it,” he says of his decision to start combating crimes against children. Ballard insists that religious belief isn’t a requirement to join OUR but notes that the staff members often pray together. If someone isn’t “comfortable praying,” he says, “they’re not going to be comfortable working with us.” (In a February interview with LDS Living magazine, Ballard was more candid about his faith: He said he launched OUR after being instructed by God to “find the lost children.”)

Responding to the call for a moral crusade, a handful of private organizations have adopted what is now widely known as a raid-and-rescue strategy: identify where people are being sold for sex, send in police to haul them out, and arrest traffickers.

Today, OUR has a full-time staff of 12 people and a stable of trained volunteers, most of them Mormon. They include former military and intelligence officers, nurses and Army medics, cops and martial arts instructors. From small offices in Salt Lake City, Dallas, and Anaheim, California, OUR has coordinated more than a dozen raids in Latin America and the Caribbean. It claims to have saved at least 250 trafficking victims, including 123 -- 55 of whom were children -- in three stings coordinated across Colombia last October.

Screech of brakes. What did the article say? Mormons?