Six women suing Tim Ballard for sexual assault in state court filed a new lawsuit in federal court this week alleging Ballard, the founder of the anti-trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad, engaged in sex trafficking.
The suit makes many of the same allegations and arguments as those previously raised in the state lawsuits and adds the claim that Ballard violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act by coercing and manipulating the women into situations where Ballard could sexually exploit them.
“This lawsuit exposes the truth behind the facade of Tim Ballard and OUR,” attorneys Suzette Rasmussen and Alan Mortensen said in a statement. “Instead of rescuing women and children from trafficking, these defendants used their positions of trust to exploit and abuse and traffic women.”
OUR and several other Ballard associates, including an alleged financier of OUR operations, are also named as defendants in the lawsuit.
“After a nearly unbroken string of defeats in every state court that has heard their cases, the plaintiffs are engaging in desperate forum shopping with the same tired allegations which one judge after another has called inconsistent and unsupported by facts,” Ballard’s attorney, Mark Eisenhut, said in a statement.
An OUR spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Ballard founded Operation Underground Railroad in 2013 with the aim to combat child sex trafficking. Last summer, just before the release of the movie “Sound of Freedom,” which was loosely based on his work and made a quarter billion dollars at the box office, Ballard was ousted from the organization after an internal investigation into alleged misconduct.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit — Celeste Borys, Mary Hall, Sashaleigha Hightower, Krista Kacey, Kira Lynch and Bree Righter — are also plaintiffs in other civil suits in state court. Their attorneys have filed a total of eight lawsuits against Ballard on their behalf and others in the past year.
A lawsuit Righter filed, alleging negligence on the part of Ballard and OUR led to a serious injury during a training event, has been dismissed because she had signed a waiver before being injured, and another lawsuit alleging that Ballard and his associates tried to intimidate a critic, Suzanne Whitehead, into silence, was also dismissed. Both are being appealed.
Kelly Suarez, who sued Ballard for defamation over how a character in “Sound of Freedom” based on her was depicted in the film, was subsequently found guilty of pimping a minor in Colombia.
“Two suits against Tim Ballard have already been dismissed and a third is headlined by a woman convicted of pimping minor children. This new suit is unlikely to be any more successful,” Eisenhut said.
The women in the other lawsuits, as well as the new federal lawsuit, allege that Ballard groomed them, manipulated them and sexually exploited them, with acts ranging from assault to rape.
Ballard has countersued the women accusing them of defamation and accusing Borys, his former executive assistant, of illegally accessing his computer and using the information as part of the lawsuits. In his suit, he alleges that the assault allegations were concocted to thwart his anti-trafficking efforts.
“Unfortunately, it appears there are wealthy and powerful people connected to this dark and evil underworld who do not want to be exposed,” his lawsuit states.
The most recent federal lawsuit includes an audio recording where Ballard and an associate, Ken Krogue, recount a meeting with M. Russell Ballard, a former acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who died last November. Tim Ballard, in the recording, says that M. Russell Ballard told him Tim Ballard would be “a household name” in 10 years, and Krogue adds that if it didn’t happen “we’d all be slaves.”
The lawyers for the women allege that Tim Ballard used such stories as he “grooms his victim to gain her admiration and trust by positioning himself as a spiritual savior and heroic figure in the fight against trafficking.”
