It’s Time to Ask Tough Questions about Who Operation Underground Railroad has Called “Traffickers”
The problem of honesty and the retributive impuluse
1. Crimes and Liars
It’s now been three weeks since Utah journalist Lynn Packer broke the news that Tim Ballard, founder of anti-trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad and highly-mythologized subject of blockbuster Sound of Freedom, was forced to resign his position over allegations of sexual misconduct. Since then, Ballard and at least some of his for-profits and nonprofits have been served with two lawsuits: former operatives claim Ballard manipulated women into sexual relationships through his invention of the bizarre anti-trafficking tactic of the “couples’ ruse,” blew through donor money on wild living, and occasionally had coworkers fund his lavish lifestyle on their credit cards.
Since then, further details and reports have only further suggested what many have suspected to be true for awhile: this just might be an organization that has a problem with the truth. This wouldn’t be appropriate in any organization that accepts donor money while purporting to be a moral example to the public. However, this would be particularly alarming in the case of OUR, since OUR so often works alongside law enforcement.
I’ve followed a lot of religious abuse allegations in my life, but a huge part of why this story has had my attention is because I’ve never followed a case where a major player in the story had the power to put other people in prison. And by “prison,” I specifically mean the worst prisons in the world, without any deference to the human rights that one would at least theoretically be entitled to in the United States.
OUR is probably best known (and among fans, best liked) for its work in the global south, raiding and rescuing from places where kids are reportedly kept and trafficked. This is a public-private partnership in which OUR works with local enforcement to make arrests and provide prosecutable evidence. OUR does not do vigilante work. Publicly available evidence, and conversations/interviews with former operatives, suggest that OUR develops close relationships with law enforcement outfits and obtains a tremendous amount of latitude in selecting targets and directing police attention. They collect evidence, they choose targets, and they turn information over to police.
This would be fine, if the information OUR has produced about who is trafficking children is justly obtained and truthfully represented to law enforcement.
I have hesitated to write this article for one reason: to suggest that someone who has been accused of harming a child may not deserve punishment is not a popular stance. I understand that. No one wants someone who has harmed a child to be free to reoffend. But in light of the information that’s come out, we have to ask criminal charges have come down on OUR’s say-so, and whether they were justly made. There’s no weightier decision than the question of who deserves freedom or captivity, condemnation or acquittal. The stakes truly could not be higher. If these decisions were made on the testimony of someone who has been alleged to be a tequila drinking, politically ascendent man whose sexual exploits were so grotesque they needed their own syncretistic religious lore to make sense of, then we need to entertain the possibility that these decisions were not made with the gravity they deserved.1
And even so, evidence that someone was prosecuted rightly does not inherently mean they were prosecuted justly. Criminals – even severe criminals – have a right to due process. In publicly available footage, it seems that while OUR may journey overseas, ideals about constitutional rights before the law may remain squarely back in the United States. Footage from OUR itself shows operators directing police during interrogations. It also shows OUR participating in an interrogation in which two female suspects do not have an attorney present. Many of the nations where OUR has operated have horrifying human rights records concerning people accused of a crime. My point is not that crimes against children in these cases cannot be prosecuted until these structural issues are dealt with – far from it. But I am saying that in these cases, a well-funded NGO might have an outsized ability to move a needle towards guilt or innocence than they would otherwise have. So the conduct of people in those NGOs is extremely important.
In these cases, a well-funded NGO might have an outsized ability to move a needle towards guilt or innocence than they would otherwise have. So the conduct of people in those NGOs is extremely important.
I want to make this point by looking at a case I’ve already discussed on this blog before – namely, OUR’s 2014 sting on a Haitian orphanage. In this case, a woman named Yvrose Dalegrand was suspected of kidnapping and trafficking the son of her bishop, along with her godson and his brother. This story is foundational to the plot of the movie Sound of Freedom. In my first two articles on this subject, I argued that the story behind the movie Sound of Freedom didn’t seem to be a story about child sex trafficking – it seemed to be a story of orphanage exploitation and illicit adoption. But the more I read, the more I came to wonder if even then I’d been too uncritical in accepting OUR media’s word.
For instance, I noted in a later article that OUR media describes the orphanage in question – Yvrose’s Refuge des Orphelins – as filthy and disgusting while Yvrose’s office and apartment were palatial. But this doesn’t fit with OUR’s own footage of the sting, or reports I heard from people who were familiar with the facility. If you listen closely in podcasts and the TV show, it seems that another version story becomes that before the sting Yvrose’s orphanage was well maintained, but after the sting it was disgusting. This is taken in OUR media as evidence of Yvrose’s duplicity – the orphanage is only maintained when Yvrose is expecting guests. But this doesn’t make any sense. Yvrose had no control of the condition of the orphanage after she was arrested. From people I’ve talked to, reports about Yvrose’s facility are mixed – some say that it was well maintained whether she was expecting guests or not, others say it was in bad shape. But whether this is from criminal neglect or waning financial support is, from my perspective, anyone’s guess.
This is when I started to notice a problem. If I was trying to write about this story using material OUR produced, how did I know they were telling the truth? And how could I deal with evidence that they might not have been honest?
Yvrose, the woman at the center of this case, was allegedly filmed agreeing to arrange an off-the-books adoption during a sting on her orphanage – as I’ve discussed. If this is what happened, it was wrong and illegal. Adoptive parents need to be vetted – even if they seem nice, even if you trust and like them, even if you think you can do more good with the money than an adoption agency could. And yet, there’s a bigger question at hand here.
Ultimately, the reason why this sting happened isn’t because of the condition of Refuge des Orphelins. It wasn’t even because OUR operatives suspected Yvrose could be persuaded to arrange an illegal adoption. The reason why Yvrose and her orphanage were targeted was much more baroque. It was because OUR suspected her of being involved in the kidnapping of a Mormon bishop’s son, a three-year-old named Gardy Mardy who was kidnapped from a church parking lot in 2009. OUR had selected Yvrose as a target because they suspected her involvement in this kidnapping. Only later did they uncover evidence she was doing off-the-book adoptions. Ultimately, this entire operation revolves around the claim that Yvrose, along with her godson and his brother, kidnapped and trafficked a toddler named Gardy.
So did they?
And if they didn’t, why were they arrested?
In the next two sections, I want to look at two of the people OUR has accused of kidnapping and trafficking one particular child — three-year-old Gardy Mardy.
2. Suspect #1: Carlos Bristol
There are two pre-OUR news sources I’ve been able to find about Gardy Mardy'’s kidnapping: this NSFW Haitian news article and this similar story from Deseret News. All these two accounts really confirm is this: two people on a bike took three-year-old Gardy Mardy from his church parking lot, where his father Guesno Mardy served as bishop. After this, the FBI was involved in his recovery, because Gardy was born in the US and was a US citizen. Beyond this, there’s also a later podcast where you can hear Guesno Mardy, Gardy’s father, speak in his own words. All other material that is publicly available about this story is heavily filtered through OUR’s public narration, down to the claim that Gardy Mardy was trafficked at all. My sources on on this side are the blog posts, books, movies, TV shows, and podcasts that OUR has produced telling Gardy’s story and particularly the story of what happened once they became involved in 2014 – about four years after Gardy was kidnapped.
A young returned Mormon missionary named Carlos Bristol became a suspect early after the initial kidnapping and was arrested for the disappearance. The evidence that Carlos Bristol took Gardy hangs on two claims: reported eyewitnesses that he was one of the men on the bike, and the fact that at some later point Guesno Mardy believed that the text demanding a ransom came from Carlos’s cell phone.
An eyewitness report and a phone number seem like pretty good pieces of evidence. However, there are complicating details. One is that eyewitness reports say that two people kidnapped Gardy on a bike, not one. Surely one of them would be able to identify the second. Carlos eventually named an associate, but this was under torture and could have been unreliable. Likewise, our evidence of what Carlos said under torture comes from Guesno Mardy, whose objectivity (his son was missing!) should definitely be called into question. Did Carlos actually name an associate, or did he name someone else who could have done it? If Carlos had Gardy or knew who had him, why didn’t he confess? He was already in jail – did no one try to cut a deal with him?
It wasn’t until 2018 that Carlos’s brother Wilson was arrested for the crime – this time with OUR operatives saying that Wilson was actually the one who actually took Gardy — not Carlos. If Carlos and his brother were the two men on the bike, why was it nearly ten years before someone sought the second man? Was the associate Carlos named actually his brother? If so, why was it so long before anyone actually arrested him? Why wander around the Haitian border looking for a labor camp when you supposedly know the first and last name of the actual person who took Gardy? Who accused Wilson of being the kidnapper instead of his brother?
Another confusing detail: Carlos Bristol was well-known to the Mardy family and had worked in their orphanage. And yet, somehow it took some time for father Guesno Mardy to realize the ransom call he received came from Carlos’s phone. How did that happen? Did Carlos Bristol actually call his own bishop from his own phone to demand a ransom? If not, whose number did Guesno see, and how did he trace it to Carlos?
Finally, there’s the question of who got the ransom. According to his statement in the podcast, when Guesno Mardy paid the ransom, he reported that no one from the police stayed on hand to see who picked the ransom up. Therefore, no one knows exactly who collected the ransom. Why did no one watch to see who took the ransom? Did any of this happen when Carlos Bristol was in custody? If so, Carlos Bristol clearly didn’t get it himself. Who did?
From there, there are no theories of the case that do not seem to depend on OUR’s spiritual guide/psychic informer Janet Russon — and of course the fact that OUR needed this story to be about child trafficking to justify their involvement with it. Ballard’s theory of the case is that after the kidnappers collected the ransom, they sold Gardy into trafficking. This theory kicked off a long and fruitless search for Gardy in “labor camps” around the Haitian border — Gardy has never been found. But as far as publicly available data is concerned, there simply doesn’t seem to be evidence that Gardy was trafficked at all. And the evidence of what even happened to Gardy, beyond two people taking him on a bike, is confusing and unclear.
It’s easy to wonder if later confusing details were massaged to make the initial theory – Carlos Bristol did it – fit, even if this rearranging of data was done unconsciously. Did police attention focus on Carlos first, and only then did Guesno think he was called from Carlos’s phone? Or was Carlos suspicious for other reasons? Tim Ballard has said that Carlos was embezzling money from Guesno (this is in the book Slave Stealers), but it’s odd that when Guesno tells the story himself he doesn’t mention the fact that Carlos supposedly had a motive. Did the search for Carlos’s associates, which apparently continued for ten years, come from the belief that Gardy was trafficked? Was there ever any evidence that Carlos’s brother Wilson was a trafficker and gangster that didn’t come from OUR’s psychic? If so, we just don’t know.
It’s also not clear whether Carlos was ever actually convicted. In the TV show The Abolitionists, OUR operatives seek out Carlos in Les Cayes in 2014 (not Port-au-Prince in 2009, where the crime actually occurred). Carlos was arrested before the January 2010 earthquake, but was out after it. OUR describes Carlos as imprisoned in early 2014 when they seek him in Les Cayes, but he doesn’t seem to be in jail. Instead, they talk to him at a location they describe as “near the courthouse.” Footage shows they’re clearly downtown.
By contrast the penitentiary in Les Cayes, pictured below is outside the city.
In the 2014 footage, Carlos does not seem as though he has been in jail recently. Carlos has clean, pressed clothes and well-maintained facial hair in footage of OUR operatives interrogating him – hardly the appearance of someone who was recently in this prison. So what’s going on here? Was Carlos re-arrested for the purposes of making The Abolitionists? Whose idea was that?
And then in the next pan across the desk OUR operatives are interrogating a completely different man. He’s got black pants and no beard and he doesn’t look like Carlos.
Wait, who is that guy?!
What the hell is going on?
My point is, if the evidence OUR has put forward – that Carlos is a child trafficker – is the best evidence that exists, then there’s a lot of unanswered questions that make this claim look iffy on its face. The initial investigation, as OUR has publicly presented it, tells a complex story where evidence that could have exonerated or convicted Carlos Bristol (namely, the identity of the person picking up the ransom) was simply not sought. The evidence of the phone call (initially mysterious, later believed to be Carlos’s) suggests that Guesno may have come be to persuaded his former friend took his son – not that the evidence was immediately there that he did it.
And if this evidence was enough to start OUR down the trail of arresting and rearresting others, that’s concerning.
3. Yvrose
And this brings me back to Yvrose Dalegrand, the manager of Martissant orphanage Refuge des Orphelins — who I’ve discussed at length in other articles.
The evidence that Yvrose took Gardy hangs on two things: the fact that Carlos reached out to her from jail, and the fact that she did illicit adoptions.
OUR media plays fast and loose with the fact that Yvrose was Carlos’s godmother. Most of the material they release that discusses her – with the exception of the TV show The Abolitionists – suggests that it was suspicious that Carlos contacted some random woman when he was arrested, and that this same random woman defended Carlos after the fact. It looks a lot less random if we recall that Carlos was her godson, they were members of the same LDS ward, and Yvrose was well liked and respected in the community. In fact, if Carlos’s family members were under suspicion for the kidnapping, then it makes more sense that Carlos would have focused his appeals for help on his godmother instead of his implicated family members.
Beyond this, the best evidence that Yvrose was involved in the kidnapping of Gardy was that Yvrose was able to assist in illicit adoptions. Even here, OUR’s story doesn’t add up. OUR says that Yvrose’s facility wasn’t “licensed” to complete adoptions, but that doesn’t make sense. Orphanages in Haiti aren’t licensed or unlicensed for adoptions – children are either eligible for adoption, or they aren’t. The very two children in question that Yvrose offered to the operatives were kids that Ballard himself adopted later, so they clearly were eligible for adoption – the question is just how Yvrose did it.
And this is where we get to the sticky problem of entrapment. I’ve written before that in the TV show and movie The Abolitionists, the audio of Yvrose and the operatives getting to know each other is covered up with a voiceover. It’s not clear who suggested to whom that the adoption be done illegally. It also seems from their introduction that Yvrose has already talked to the operatives on the phone.
There’s any number of things that could have been said in these initial conversations that could have persuaded someone to arrange an illegal adoption without thinking they were handing children over to child traffickers. In an interview, OUR operative Mark Mabry, posing as an adoptive dad, says he was told to “look rich” and he’s accompanied by a woman pretending to be his wife. Is it possible that rich American parents simply looked like a more acceptable option than the orphanage the children were staying in? Yvrose was a ward member of an LDS church – did anyone introduce these parents as fellow Mormons?
In the same interview, operative Mark Mabry says that Yvrose said she had only arranged one other illegal adoption, and that it was years ago. I think the reason Mabry says this is to suggest that this is what she did to Gardy, but this seems incredibly unlikely. It doesn’t make sense that Yvrose is both a hard bitten child trafficking monster who sold her bishop’s son for $10,000, and also that she learned how to do that on the occasion of kidnapping her bishop’s son. What seems far more likely to me is that, if Yvrose really did arrange one illegal adoption many years ago, her confidence in her method might be performative. It also seems more than possible that Yvrose did arrange adoptions but usually did so legally – which is what Yvrose’s lawyer said at the time. If so, this raises the question of why this time Yvrose was willing to arrange things under the table in a hurry. Maybe because she was urged to?
It’s also noticeable that the critical moment – Yvrose explaining how she can arrange an illegal adoption – happens in a voiceover with bad audio and music/yelling kids in the background. I’m not trying to accuse anyone of anything but context seems pretty central in this situation – especially because what Yvrose explains doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense with what happens next. Ballard pushes the idea that Yvrose “sold him the kids” but the reality is that in Yvrose’s scheme, the kids are still tied to Yvrose at this stage. Yvrose says that she can have the documents made with her last name for kids and then travel with them to where they’re going, which means the kids can’t leave the country without Yvrose. What exactly is the crime here? Accepting money to get fake documents – which Yvrose hasn’t done yet? I think it’s obvious to say that leaving kids with two people you don’t know well and accepting cash to arrange their adoption is dangerous and unethical – but why did the arrest happen at this stage?
There are three major questions this raises for me. The first, which we’ll never know, is whether Yvrose would have been persuaded to do this not for a wealthy American couple, their affable, child-spoiling assistant, and their polite young Creole translator, but for a van full of brutes who wanted the first four kids they saw. It seems that great care was taken to persuade Yvrose that the children were going to American parents. But does this mean Yvrose would have sold kids to just anyone? This doesn’t make her actions okay, but it does mean Yvrose might have been convinced to do something she wouldn’t normally do. The second question is like it. What exactly was said to Yvrose to persuade her to do something that, according to testimony she gave to her own accusers, she didn’t normally do?
The third, and darkest, is whether Yvrose would have fared better with the law across from actual adoptive parents, instead of people who wanted to have her arrested. As I said, it’s odd to me that Yvrose is arrested at this stage of the transaction – the point at which the children are in American hands, but can’t leave the country without her continued involvement. If Yvrose actually had been caught in the middle of an adoption here, it seems that this is the point at which adoptive parents could explain who they are and what they wanted – they were waiting for paperwork to go through. There would still be consequences for everyone involved but it would also be clear that no one involved was trying to take the children’s organs.
But that’s the opposite of what happened. According to what operative Mabry says in the podcast, he was called in to be a witness and said, plainly and clearly to Yvrose’s face, that Yvrose had accepted money from him, given him kids, and walked away. Mabry could do this safely because he was an American operative – there was no danger of him saying that he had just bought two kids and allow the horrifying implications to hang in the air. It seems that the sting is executed at a moment of maximum vulnerability for Yvrose – one in which, based on her own words, nothing illegal has actually happened yet, but the implications are the most dire.
Here’s the thing. I actually don’t know any of the answers to this. I write this in a way that gives the maximum latitude to Yvrose because I simply don’t know what happened, or what kind of person she is. One thing I’ve found again and again the more I write about Haiti is that I don’t know how to think about people in a culture I don’t understand – I start following someone’s story for awhile, and I empathize with them, and then I learn something about them that shocks me. It’s completely possible someone knows something about Yvrose that would make me completely reevaluate what I’ve written about this sting.
But here’s one thing I do know.
There is only one reason why OUR fixated on this orphanage. It is because they believed Yvrose, who managed this orphanage, had Gardy. There is evidence that exists that could have shown whether Gardy was or wasn’t there – evidence that, as far as I know from the people I’ve talked to, OUR never looked for. And OUR says things about this sting that aren’t true.
It’s not true that this was an illicit, off-the-books fake orphanage – Yvrose had government inspectors in her facility in 2011. It’s not true that Yvrose “sold kids as fast as she could get them” – kids stayed in the facility for years. Yvrose’s connection to Carlos wasn’t suspicious – she was his godmother. If OUR wanted to know if Yvrose ever had Gardy, they could have asked the government officials who kept a database of who was in Yvrose’s orphanage after the earthquake, or the American medical missionaries who photographed and kept records of every child in the facility – many of whom I’ve spoken with.
On the Slave Stealers podcast, Mark Mabry explains that the police told Yvrose that she and her daughter would both go to prison for life if she didn’t tell the OUR operatives and police where Gardy was. Yvrose said (and this is on tape) “I swear I do not know.” The OUR operatives take it as a sign of how evil Yvrose is – she’d rather damn her daughter than reveal who she sold Gardy to.
Isn’t there another explanation?
What if Yvrose couldn’t tell the police where Gardy was, because she didn’t know?
You won’t hear that possibility from OUR media, which has all but staked its reputation on the claim that every theory they’ve had about Gardy’s case from the beginning has been true. But I think there’s a strong likelihood that if either of these cases happened in the United States, neither Carlos nor Yvrose would have been found guilty. If this is the best evidence that exists, the link between Carlos and Gardy is not definitive, and the evidence that links Yvrose with Gardy is even worse.
In the case of the illegal adoption, it seems to me that in the US Yvrose possibly could have used the affirmative defense of entrapment if she was in the United States. Entrapment occurs when a law enforcement officer, or a person serving as an agent of a LEO, uses threats or fraud to persuade someone to commit a crime. The evidence then must show that the person who committed the crime would not have committed this crime otherwise. In other words, you have to show that the LEO (or their agent) induced or coerced someone to commit a crime – not that they simply gave them the opportunity.
Were OUR operatives operating on behalf of the police? Yes. Did they use fraud to induce Yvrose to do something illegal – namely, did they misrepresent themselves as a group of do-gooders looking to quickly whisk some kids away to a better life in the US? Yes. Would Yvrose have committed the crime otherwise? It depends whether we believe that Yvrose had done this before. She freely volunteered that she had once, but we don’t know the circumstances. If it was about five years before 2014, it could have been right around the earthquake in which adoptions were chaotic and hastened in a range of circumstances to get kids out of Haiti. Or it could have just been a crime. Or she could be lying. I don’t know.
In a just world Yvrose would have been questioned with an attorney present who could have helped build this case to give her a fair defense before the law. Instead she was interrogated by a group of American volunteers who had convinced themselves that she had kidnapped a toddler, possibly because a psychic told them.
4. Why This Is a Hard Sell
I’m anticipating people being angry at this article for the same reasons people have gotten angry at anyone who accuses OUR in the first place. It’s only been some time after the first allegations against Ballard came out that accusations against OUR weren’t met with shock and horror. The craving to believe the hype – that this man really was a Christlike hero who protected kids – was incredibly strong. So was the need to believe that “actual victims” of child abuse and domestic aren’t created by people who look, worship, and vote like us, but by fully inhuman monsters safely on the other side of the border. So was the appeal of the story that this problem didn’t require the input of women, queer, nonwhite, or immigrant people to solve – just things that lots of American men already know how to do (target shoot, go to strip clubs). And, of course, we as a culture have a (perhaps protesting too much) horror of people who are even accused of harming a kid… as long as the person who did it isn’t someone we otherwise identify with.
So I think by arguing that there’s a chance people OUR accused of child trafficking were treated unfairly, I’m stepping into two traps. One is that until fairly recently, people have not wanted to be confronted with the possibility that Tim Ballard isn’t who his impressive PR mythmaking machine says he is. If the responses I’ve gotten are anything to go on, people in an unstable and uncertain time really couldn’t take the idea that a hero that they’d been told was real and identified so strongly with wasn’t actually who he said he was.
But I think even beyond this, the idea of saying that someone who has been publicly portrayed as a person who hurt children may have been misrepresented is even harder for people to accept. I’m sure that by even implying that someone accused of kidnapping a child deserves fair representation in court, I’ve offended some of you. Hell, OUR’s Slave Stealers podcast was downright enthusiastic about the idea of torturing a confession out of someone suspected of child abuse. I think in our vengeful, angry lizard brains, it’s easy for us to think that once someone has been accused of a crime – as long as that crime is bad enough, it’s okay to strip them of their rights and treat them like an animal.
And of course, it offends the narratives we already have about the charismatic male leader who may make some mistakes but is still a great person (King David, anyone?). If we can believe The Heroic Child Savior about anything, surely we can believe him about his foil character, right? The Worst of the Worst Child Abuser? Without that abuse, who would the hero even be?
It’s certainly possible that people are in jail today who are there because of OUR and ought to be there. But the fact is, this is an organization whose entire MO hangs on working with law enforcement in countries where corruption and human rights abuses are a consistent problem in the justice system. Furthermore, a great deal of evidence suggests that a critical mass of people who work for this organization have been comfortable misleading donors, misrepresenting the services they provide with, hiding money, and enjoying donor-funded hedonistic rampages under the cover of “saving children.” If we can’t believe what they say, why should we believe that the justice systems of the countries where they worked provided reasonable pushback?
Some people will say I am advocating to undo the good work OUR has done. To this I can only say: if they wanted me to believe them about who is and isn’t a trafficker, then they should have acted like the kinds of people we can believe.
If I worked for OUR right now I would be looking at a significant audit of cases in which OUR was central in providing evidence to the prosecution of child traffickers. I would be appropriately concerned about the possibility that previous leaders at OUR identifying people as child traffickers without evidence to back these claims up. I am not at all convinced we can take it on faith that they did what they say they did, that they didn’t use their influence for unjust ends, and that they have truthfully represented their motives and results to the public. The story they have told about this first sting, and why these people fell under their suspicion, simply does not persuade me they found child traffickers and brought them to justice.
As more and more people confess that they now realize that Tim Ballard duped and scammed them, the question of whether OUR has bee duping people all over the world seems more important than ever. There are people in prison, right now, on OUR’s insistence. I would want to be sure that OUR was more honest with the police in Haiti, Nepal, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic than they seem to have been with their friends and supporters in the United States. But that seems like wishful thinking.
Empathy compels me to note that at this point, two full filings of lawsuits have been released against Tim Ballard, which, if true, suggest that at this stage Tim Ballard may well be severely mentally ill, possibly traumatized, and self-medicating with alcohol and other substances. These things do not excuse his misdeeds, but they also do not in themselves make him a bad person. If it’s true, I hope he gets help.