Tim Ballard's Most Powerful Friends Are All Denouncing Him

Late last Friday, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes released a lengthy video touting his achievements in office while revealing that, contrary to what had until the day before been widely expected in the Beehive State, he would not seek another term. (He was scooped on his own announcement by the Salt Lake Tribune.) It was yet another surreal development in the implosion of the career of anti-trafficking celebrity Tim Ballard, founder of the group Operation Underground Railroad, who is being sued by a group of women accusing him of sexual misconduct—and another indicator of just how wide the blast radius may turn out to be.

Reyes, who has served 10 years in office, is not merely a longstanding and extremely close ally of Ballard’s who went on a mission with OUR and was a producer of Sound of Freedom, a heavily fictionalized film about him. He is also a defendant in a lawsuit claiming he used his office to shield and protect Ballard. This made it all the more astonishing that in his statement, Reyes apologized to women who say Ballard harassed and assaulted them—claims Ballard denies—and announced that his office would be mounting an investigation into Ballard and entities with which he is or has been involved.

Ballard’s fall from grace has been swift; as recently as September, he was considered a viable candidate for a Senate seat in Utah, and Reyes all but announced that he would support him. (Multiple sources told VICE News that Ballard planned to start his run on October 10.) Days after that, VICE News was able to confirm that Ballard had quietly left OUR over the summer following a sexual misconduct investigation, news that was first reported by Utah journalist Lynn Packer. Multiple women who volunteered with OUR and went on missions with Ballard accused him of grooming and manipulating them to participate in sex acts with him; five of those women have gone on to sue him. So have a married couple, now identified as Celeste and Michael Borys, who say his misconduct strained their marriage, and a Marine veteran who went on missions with the group and says Ballard pressured her to have sex with one of his friends. Ballard has claimed that he was merely participating in what he calls the “couples ruse,” an arrangement in which women would pose as his wife or girlfriend on missions in order to prevent him from having to have sex with trafficking victims.

As the allegations against Ballard continued to mount, public attention, particularly in Utah, turned almost immediately to Reyes, who has touted his connections with Ballard and OUR for years. Reyes even went so far as to travel with the group, saying he made a secret trip in 2014 with OUR to rescue trafficked children in Colombia. (The credulous Deseret News story about the mission from the following year refers to the children as “sex slaves,” a lurid and offensive term that would no longer be used to describe abused children. It also features Reyes boasting about having to restrain himself from killing alleged traffickers and saying blustery things like, "I wanted to get down where I could make a difference, look evil in the eye and stare it down.”)

Reyes also acted as a producer on Sound of Freedom, the box-office hit that thrust Ballard into the mainstream spotlight even as, unbeknownst to the public, his downfall had already begun. (Reyes previously listed his role as a producer on the film ahead of his day job on his LinkedIn profile.)

Per one of the lawsuits brought against Ballard by a team led by Utah attorney Suzette Rasmussen, Reyes was also at work helping to write a planned sequel for the film, this one titled Cry of Freedom and featuring a Utah attorney general/former MMA fighter named David Reyes. (In reality, Reyes does not appear to have any background in MMA or any other professional sport.)

Reyes’ relationship with Ballard is alleged to have gone beyond supposed rescue missions or Hollywood dreams. One of the suits also accused Reyes of intimidating witnesses participating in an investigation into Ballard and OUR conducted by Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings. (That investigation was closed in May with no charges filed.) Reyes’ office released a statement calling the witness tampering allegations “false” and “defamatory.”

Even before his decision not to run again, the trouble all of this caused for his political career was undeniable. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, whom multiple sources have told VICE News is not particularly fond of Reyes, mused publicly that appointing an attorney general, instead of electing one, might be “a better model.” A bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers voted in November to audit Reyes and his office, making clear that their concerns were not limited to Reyes’ dealings with OUR alone.

In his announcement, Reyes said that he had met with women accusing Ballard of misconduct. “After hearing their stories in person,” he said, “I believe them." He announced, too, that his office would open a criminal probe into a number of groups affiliated with Ballard, including the SPEAR Fund, a new purported anti-trafficking group where Ballard has previously said he is a senior adviser. (SPEAR, an offshoot of a think tank called Liberty and Light, has issued a number of statements on Ballard’s behalf. Neither a PR agency that has worked with SPEAR nor Liberty and Light immediately responded to a request for comment from VICE News. All references to Ballard were mysteriously scrubbed from the SPEAR Fund’s website last month, and it is unclear if he still works with them.) Reyes also said he had recused himself from the probe.

Reyes is far from alone in distancing himself from Ballard. For its part, after a long period in which it said as little as possible about its former founder, OUR quietly posted a statement on its website last week saying it is “deeply sorry for any harm or distress that Tim Ballard’s actions may have caused to anyone associated with O.U.R.” The statement added that the organization is undergoing dual legal and operations audits and is “in the process of refreshing the Board of Directors.” (While this goes unmentioned in the statement, much of the board has previously consisted of Ballard’s family members or close friends.) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, after years publishing Ballard’s pseudo-historical works, issued a statement to VICE News in September denouncing his “morally unacceptable” activities, and is believed to have subsequently excommunicated him, something neither Ballard nor the church have publicly confirmed or denied. His former patron Glenn Beck has also distanced himself, saying publicly that he felt “duped” by Ballard. The Beck-founded conservative news website The Blaze also ran a story on the misconduct allegations against Ballard, and a piece aggregating and building on VICE News’ extensive reporting on Janet Russon, a psychic whose visions dictated some of OUR’s missions while Ballard was there.

While former Ballard allies are busy making public disavowals of their previous relationships with him, Ballard has recently said very little about the allegations himself. Instead, he’s begun hosting a second season of his podcast, the first of which kicked off with an interview with Donald Trump (and on which Reyes himself has previously been a guest).

This season features his wife Katherine and seemingly emanates from an alternate universe in which he’s still an active participant in the fight against human trafficking and is not being serially sued. (Katherine, too, has been named in one of the suits; Celeste and Michael Borys have accused her of conspiring with her husband to promote the so-called “couples ruse.”)

To date, Ballard has made no public comment on Reyes announcing that he will not run for reelection. A PR spokesperson supposedly working on his behalf has not responded to dozens of requests for comment from VICE News over the past several months, and a lawyer representing him did not acknowledge any questions after her firm confirmed that Ballard is a client.