Brought by the same law firms representing multiple women accusing Ballard of sexual assault in previous complaints (allegations Ballard disputes), this latest suit claims that Ballard and various companies connected to him defamed plaintiff Kely Johana Suárez Moya, a Colombian woman, as a child trafficker and sexual predator. The 369-page document argues that Suárez was wrongly arrested during a sting operation run by Ballard in her home country, which then became the “founding myth” of his organization Operation Underground Railroad — leading to salacious headlines about her and, eventually, her vilification in Sound of Freedom.
Detalles de la demanda
Named in the suite alongside Ballard, his wife Katherine Ballard, and OUR (which forced Ballard out last year after a sexual misconduct investigation) are Angel Studios, Sound of Freedom Movie LLC, and VAS Portal, the company through which Angel crowdfunds investment and ticket sales for their films with potentially deceptive promotions. Harmon Brothers Marketing, an agency run by the same Utah brothers who lead Angel, which typically handles advertising for the studio’s projects, is named as well. So are the SPEAR Fund — another anti-trafficking organization that used to tout Ballard as a top advisor but has since removed him from the “team” page of their website — plus Alejandro Monteverde, director and co-writer of Sound of Freedom, and Janet Russon, a Utah woman who allegedly provided Ballard intel for his operations via her “psychic” abilities. Ballard, Angel, the Harmons, SPEAR, Monteverde and Russon did not reply to requests for comment.
La historia de Suárez
Suárez’s suit describes how she was raised in poverty by a single mother in a “humble” Colombian town and, as a young woman trying to earn some money, made a fateful decision that landed her in prison for a year and a half. According to this account, Ballard, a former U.S. intelligence agent, traveled to Colombia in 2014, shortly after founding OUR with the desire to portray himself in a documentary or TV series as a heroic savior of trafficked children. There, he made contacts with individuals he asked to procure adolescents for a pedophile sex party on an island offshore of the city of Cartagena. This was to be a sting known as “Operation Triple Take,” in which OUR volunteers posed as the pedophiles paying for sexual access to trafficked minors.
Operación Triple Take
Suárez, according to the complaint, had no part in this plot until she accepted an acquaintance’s invitation to attend the party and receive pay for sex work. The document alleges that one planning session for the event was attended by a young woman named Natalie Taborda Atencio, or “Naty,” who promised Ballard she could bring several children from local high schools to the island, and an 18-year-old named Samuel David Olave Martinez, whom Suárez knew from a modeling school they both attended. Martinez allegedly told Ballard he would be able to recruit kids from that school for the party. He was also informed, the filing claims, that one of OUR’s ruse pedophiles was a wealthy North American hoping to have anal sex with an underage Black girl — and proposed to Suárez, who was then 20 years old but looked younger, that she come to the island to have sex with him for money. Other adolescents were enticed to join the event with a social media invite circulated on Facebook, the suit further claims.