The Horrible True Story that Inspired Sound of Freedom Is Probably Our Fault, Part 1

How a Hard Truth that Implicates Americans Became an Easy Movie for Our Entertainment

Photo by TopSphere Media on Unsplash

I’m going to tell you a story. But I don’t think you’re going to like it. 

A few days ago I wrote that the reality of child sex trafficking, and how children become victims of it, is a complex, ugly affair that needs to be endlessly trimmed before it can become a good-versus-evil story that suits a Hollywood narrative. American audiences will go see a movie where villains and heroes are clear, victims are scrubbed into inactive angels, and the process of solving a social problem is a short, clear one with an immediate start and finish with no boring steps. It certainly involves no danger of helping someone who Americans might think of as “undeserving.” This is why I am concerned about the recent blockbuster Sound of Freedom – not because I don’t like Christians, not because I don’t like children, not because I even have any particular insight into Operation Underground Railroad (I’ve read the same articles as the rest of you), but because I just don’t think child trafficking lends itself to an easy narrative. 

The movie Sound of Freedom is about the nonprofit organization Operation Underground Railroad, founded by Tim Ballard. This organization is famous for its aggressive, and filmed, sting operations, in which OUR agents pose as johns seeking opportunities to sexually assault minors for pay. When the transaction occurs, OUR agents, sometimes in cooperation with local police, arrest the pimps and take the children away to – well, somewhere else. It’s not always clear what happens next. OUR has a long, long history of recasting actual stories into digestible media. They have an active film production wing, have produced documentaries, filmed a reality TV series, and of course, backed the movie Sound of Freedom. 

I thought I’d make this point in an easy blog post – that Sound of Freedom, and perhaps OUR, renarrates the real stories of child trafficking into popcorn fare with easy solutions and clear goodies versus baddies. The case seemed easy to argue. I’d compare a real case that Operation Underground Railroad worked on with the  version of the story that made it to the silver screen. Towards the end, I picked “the big one” – the long search for one missing child (“Rocio,” in the movie) that dominates the majority of Sound of Freedom’s run time. And I thought I’d compare her story in the movie with the one that inspired it. I anticipated that the true story would be uglier and messier than the the marketable, general-audience version in the film. 

The story I found when I started digging was a thousand times uglier than I expected. 

Not in a lurid “Tim Ballard is super evil” way – I actually don’t criticize him really at all in this article (that will come later). That’s not really my object here. (EDITOR’S NOTE on Sept 23, 2023: Follow up available here). If you’re looking for conspiracies, I don’t have any. No, this is ugly more in a grinding, late-stage capitalism, all-of-us and all-our-religion is implicated-in-all-pain kind of way. 

Taking shots at Sound of Freedom is easy enough. The movie has been met with a fair amount of skepticism because of the checkered history of its subject matter in public discourse, the complicated figure of Tim Ballard at the center of the story, and the frequently-unsavory actor who plays him. The United States is in the midst of a full-on sex trafficking panic; through the efforts of online conspiracies like Q Anon, sex trafficking has been recast as a thing that happens in every American suburb to middle-class white children, at the hands of Democrats, for the purposes of bleeding out children so Hillary Clinton can become immortal. All this is reminiscent of earlier antifeminist panics like the Satanic Panic (which identified working women as the primary failures who allowed daycare workers to prey on America’s children) and extreme antisemitic conspiracies that slandered Jewish people as devourers of children (note the prominence of George Soros in Q Anon conspiracies).

Still: I want to be clear about this up front. I actually don’t think the text of Sound of Freedom itself furthers Q Anon myths, nor does it contribute to some of the more obnoxious myths we see stateside. This is not my concern with this movie. For instance, Sound of Freedom doesn’t portray middle-class children and women kidnapped from IKEAs as victims of trafficking. (In this respect, it’s significantly better than Taken). It also doesn’t portray Hollywood elites and famous politicians as the primary culprits, and it does not feature child-eating, blood-drinking, or adrenochrome myths. Many of the film’s fans may be committed to these myths and read them into the story, but I don’t think the text of the film furthers this agenda. In actual fact, for whatever its previous misdeeds are, OUR has been at pains to clarify that a lot of what appears in the movie is fiction. It seems that from their perspective, the movie is meant more to inspire the idea of awareness and investment in the plight of children. It’s not really meant to present it as such. 

We can talk about that agenda at another time. For now, what I want to do is talk about the story of Sound of Freedom, and the real story that inspired it. The fact that the real story was denuded to make it cinematic will be obvious enough, once we get into it. But much more than that, the story was retold in a way that I suspect even Ballard might not realize the scale of quotidian evil that lay beneath the truth. 

So enough throat-clearing. Let’s get into it, shall we?

Chapter 1: The Movie 

Here’s the version that’s suitable for a moviegoing audience. The story of Sound of Freedom is that a former beauty queen named Gisselle approaches a poor family in Honduras with a deal: if father Roberto allows children Miguel and Rocio to sign modeling contracts with her agency, the family will have a new path to wealth, glamour, fame, and fortune. However, the children disappear from the first photoshoot, and are sold as sex slaves. 

Meanwhile in the US, Tim and Chris work for the Department of Homeland Security, and in the course of interrogating a sexual predator are able to locate a child that an associate of their prisoner has purchased. The boy is – you guessed it – Miguel. Tim successfully returns Miguel to his father, but Rocio is still unaccounted for. With the assistance of a Colombian contact (and having resigned from the DHS and now operating independently), Tim organizes a sting operation on Gisselle’s club, arrests the perpetrators, and frees all the children. 

Unfortunately, Rocio is not among the children, because she has been sold to a rebel paramilitary outfit deep in the jungle. Tim kills the head of the outfit and saves Rocio, and the family is reunited and returns to Honduras. 

An epilogue notes that Tim then created an organization called Operation Underground Railroad and has successfully lobbied the US Congress to collaborate with other countries to investigate and prosecute sex trafficking. 

Is it true? Well, sort of.

Parts of this story are based on actual events, namely “Operation Triple Take,” a three-part sting operation in which OUR worked with Homeland Security to rescue trafficking survivors at three locations. However, “is it true” becomes an incredibly complicated question once we get to the story of Rocio. In the movie, Rocio is kidnapped from a false modeling agency, then sold to rebels in the jungles of Colombia. Rocio’s story is inspired by a true one, it seems. But it’s been changed beyond the realm of reasonable recognition. 

Angel Studio’s information about the characters of Rocio and Miguel is incredibly difficult to follow. On one hand, the studio write-up says that Rocio is “the real life sister of Miguel.” On the other hand, Miguel’s signature action in the movie – giving Ballard his necklace – occurred while Ballard was serving as a special agent. At the same time, the studio also says that the hunt for Rocio was based on the hunt for a different child, a Haitian boy named Gardy. So it seems that while Miguel and Rocio are based on real siblings, they were children who Ballard encountered during his time with HSI, not OUR, and the story of Rocio in the movie is actually the story of a different child, whose name is Gardy. (EDITOR’S NOTE ON JULY 24, 2003: For the real Miguel, see Part 3).

And Gardy’s story is, except for the length of the search and the association with Ballard’s resignation from DHS, almost impossible to detect in the film. 

In the next three sections, I’m going to tell a new story that wasn’t in the movie, using the names of three people you didn’t see in the movie. Their names are Gardy, Yvrose, and Laura. Part of this story is material you can find on Operation Underground Railroad’s website — or at least it was on Friday. The rest of it is work I did myself. I will be at pains throughout this not to accuse anyone of anything. My goal is just to tell as much of the story as I can with the sources that are available to me.

Chapter 2: Gardy 

I would love to be able to provide links for this, but I wrote most of this section on July 14, 2023. By July 15, 2023, OUP had deleted most of their references to Gardy on their webpage. I am not sure why. 

UPDATE: Links to his story can be found here, here, here. I am working on getting broken links from the wayback machine.

On Dec 6, 2009, two-year-old (or three-year-old, I have seen him called both on OUR websites) Gardy was reported kidnapped while walking home from church in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. According to Gardy’s father Guesno (a Mormon bishop), suspicion fell on a family friend and fellow Mormon ward member named Carlos, who witnesses later said they saw putting him on his motorcycle and driving away. Gardy was initially held for ransom, but when Guesno paid the portion of the ransom he could gather, Gardy was not returned. Police questioned Carlos¹ and ultimately let him go. 

On Jan 12, 2010, a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, destroying essential infrastructure in Port-au-Prince and killing 160,000 people. The earthquake effectively ended the Haitian police’s investigation into Gardy’s disappearance. 

By chance, Guesno was interviewed by an American news outlet while assisting in the Port-au-Prince relief efforts, and recounted how he was looking for his stolen child. This is how Tim Ballard found out about him. Gardy was also, it turned out, an American citizen, since he was the only one of Guesno’s children born in the United States. Nonetheless, according to Tim Ballard, the case was the jurisdiction of the Haitian police,² so in order to work the case himself, Ballard resigned HSI and started OUR. By this time, it was 2013. 

On the ground in Haiti, OUR began to investigate Carlos’s godmother, a woman named Yvrose. Yvrose ran an orphanage, attended the Mormon church where Guesno served as bishop, and (according to Guesno) expressed what seemed to Guesno to be unusual interest in the case – asking how the family would raise the money for the ransom, etc. Yvrose was also listed as Carlos’s emergency contact when he was arrested – not Carlos’s wife. The police questioned her, and according to Guesno, Yvrose stopped attending Guesno’s church shortly after. 

In 2014, with the urging of the Haitian police, Ballard went to Yvrose’s orphanage and attempted to buy children. According to Ballard, Yvrose explained that the kids could be taken out of the country for $10k each through a service she would arrange by creating false passports for them. Most of them had no documentation, and were abandoned or orphaned after the earthquake. The Haitian police organized a sting operation and arrested Yvrose and her associates. However, Gardy was not among the children in the orphanage. Of the 28 children who were taken from the facility, eight went to the orphanage where Guesno worked. Ballard adopted two. 

Gardy was never recovered.   

I want to be cautious here that Gardy has, for obvious reasons, never told his story. I cannot speak for Gardy, and if anyone has a right to at this point, it’s his parents. Guesno seems, by all accounts, incredibly grateful for Ballard’s efforts to find his son, especially in light of how little was done by police in the wake of the earthquake. I have no interest in speaking contrary to Guesno on this matter. I have no right to. I cannot imagine the pain these circumstances have put him through. I wish him nothing but healing and reunification with his son. 

However: the person who caught my interest in this story is Yvrose, who ran the orphanage. Who is Yrvose? 

Chapter 3: Yvrose

Yvrose enters the story because Carlos used her name as his emergency contact in prison. She also carried a veneer of suspicion when Guesno reportedly thought she seemed overly invested in the process of him paying the ransom. It seems that what Ballard concluded was that Carlos had collaborated with Yvrose’s orphanage, Refuge des Orphelins, and that when the ransom bid was not successful, he left Gardy with Yvrose. Yvrose was later arrested for offering to sell Ballard two children he could take to the U.S. in a method she’d seen be successful for $10k each.

I can’t find any records of what happened with Yvrose’s trial. I can find hints, but no details. In 2014, Tim Ballard said he was not able to adopt two kids from Refuge des Orphelins yet because the trial and sentencing was not complete. The children were adopted in 2018, which suggests that the trial was completed one way or another. As of 2020, based on social media, Yvrose does not seem to be in prison. 

If you read or watch OUR material about her, the story you’ll hear is that Yvrose ran a “fake orphanage” in Port-au-Prince. She ran an orphanage that existed only to “keep kids alive” until they could be sold as sex slaves. As a result, the orphanage was completely disgusting and broken down, and the kids lived in squalor. 

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. 

Now, my goal with the information I have is not to clear Yvrose’s name of wrongdoing. I simply do not have enough information one way or another. My interest is in this very specific language that Ballard uses – a “fake orphanage,” that exists not to place orphans with  loving families but to sell them for nefarious, perverted ends. When I started to dig into the story of Refuge des Orphelins, the story that emerged looked much more complex. What evidence do we have that Yvrose’s orphanage was meaningfully different than any other orphanage in Port-au-Prince, much less that it was “fake?”

What evidence is there that Yvrose saw herself as running a “fake orphanage” that served as only a front for a sex trafficking ring? And if she was not running a “fake orphanage,” what was she doing? 

The first piece of complicating data is Ballard’s statement about the conditions of Refuge des Orphelins. In Ballard’s own footage of Refuge des Orphelins (which is available in a music video format about OUR and features repeated close-ups of Haitian children’s faces — information I present as not requiring comment), the facility doesn’t look significantly worse than it does in Yvrose’s own photos of the orphanage, which she’d published online and even tagged collaborating churches in. The worst photos from the facility were taken after Yvrose was already in custody, and it’s not clear who cared for the children while she was gone. I’ve talked to volunteers with the orphanage and I have never heard anyone allege that Yvrose was neglectful or abusive to kids — on the whole people seemed to admire her. If Yvrose was running a “fake orphanage” that she took little care of while waiting to sell kids, why did she share photos of this orphanage with others? Did Yvrose think the orphanage was disgusting? If so, why present it as such?

The second is that Yvrose had her orphanage and attached school registered in some capacities with the state. Ballard described Refuge des Orphelins as “off the books” and “illegal” but you can actually find Yvrose’s accreditations for both the orphanage and the school Ecole Mixte Mon Univers filed with Haiti’s Ministère de l’Education Nationale et de la Formation Professionnelle. The last recorded inspection of the school that I was able to find was in 2012. 

The third is that Yvrose’s facility apparently collaborated with a number of well regarded international NGOs. Refuge des Orphelins participated in the successful return of a child separated from her mother after the 2010 earthquake. When a police officer found 10-year-old Lovely Samedi in a state of shock after the disaster, he took her to Refuge des Orphelins, where she was housed for six months. An International Rescue Committee case worker named Etienne Guerline made a practice of visiting the facility regularly and writing down the names of new arrivals in case they had surviving family members. Because of Etienne’s tireless work (and frequent check-ins at Yvrose’s orphanage through ICR!), Lovely was reunited with her mother. Yvrose also had registered with the World Food Programme and received regular food deliveries from them.

To be clear, none of this means Yvrose didn’t offer to arrange the sale of at least two kids. It just means that – if this is a fake orphanage, what makes an orphanage a real one? What traits would make this orphanage a real one? If you didn’t recognize this registered orphanage that collaborated with IRC, local police, and regulatory boards in Haiti as a “fake orphanage,” you’d be in good company.

Particularly, you’d be in good company with the dozens of American Christian voluntourists and short-term missionaries who kept Refuge des Orphelins operating.

If you look at Yvrose’s footage of her school and orphanage, one thing that quickly becomes clear is that there are white people bearing gifts in a significant number of photos. Specifically, these are white volunteers from the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK bringing food, medical supplies, school supplies, money, and direct services. I found records of at least two dozen churches in the United States alone that regularly sent short term missionaries and tourists to Yvrose’s orphanage. 

Some photos suggest secular organizations and voluntourists came to bring supplies and attention to the kids as well. An American organization from Seattle provided Refuge des Orphelins with routine dental care and in 2012 was working on securing the facility with running water. 

The reality is, it looks to me that a few hundred American Christians who may have seen Sound of Freedom last week have actually spent time at the home of one of the movie’s villains and even been photographed with her. Granted, the story has been changed beyond easy recognition, but the reality is - at least for some of you, the trafficker you rooted against last month was the same lady you bought coloring books for in 2013. 

What is my point with all this? I think it is hard to agree with Ballard that Yvrose was simply running a “fake orphanage” but really working as a trafficker. I don’t think Yvrose was running a fake orphanage. I think Yvrose was just running an orphanage.

And that actually might be the problem.

Because between 2010 and 2013 in Haiti – the orphan business was booming.

Ch 4: Orphan Tourism

We talk about trafficking as a phenomenon that is done by the Wholly Other, a monster with savage appetites who wishes to own, enslave, and exploit a child as their personal property. The reality is, orphan tourism, short-term missions, and voluntourism made orphans a hot commodity in the developing world – not to assault, but to cuddle and play with and photograph. 

There’s a reasonably good chance you know someone who has done this. You may even have Facebook photos of yourself doing this.

Orphan tourism is a term used for the phenomenon of Westerners wanting experiences with orphans while abroad. Orphans are often seen as the neediest of the needy by western groups, and westerners want have an experience of doing something for and with orphans (like bringing them supplies, washing their hair, playing with them – or being photographed with them). Westerners are willing to pay for this experience in the form of donations – either of supplies or cash. Because Westerners want to come to the majority world and interact with orphans and orphanages, and because they bring money to orphanages when they do, this creates a significant incentive for entrepreneurs to construct orphanages and depend on visitors for supplies, dollars, and donations. 

This may sound like a win-win to you – orphans need homes, adults need jobs, therefore adults build orphanages and house orphans and stay employed. But that’s not how this works. An entrepreneur who wants to get in the “orphan business” doesn’t actually need abandoned, homeless kids to get in on the action. Orphanage owners employ individuals called “child finders” who persuade impoverished people to surrender their children to the orphanage, under the promise that at the orphanage the children will be better provided for. Then they use the children to attract tourists and donors.

The number of orphanages in Haiti doubled between 2010-2013. However, eighty percent of children in orphanages have at least one living parent.

In other words, there was more than one way to make Gardy into a revenue stream if he actually made it to an orphanage. Like all kids, he could be sold to Americans looking to have an experience of taking care of him in an orphanage setting.

The fact that Westerners want to be involved with orphanages ignores the extent to which institutionalization of children is a destructive phenomenon. Children in orphanages are more likely to be trafficked than children in families. They are more likely to have conflict with the law, be abused, and have mental health issues. Ballard mentioned seeing a teacher with a whip at Yvrose’s orphanage (I have never seen a photo of this and Yvrose’s associates I have spoken to strenuously deny it, but Ballard mentions it in some footage; Ballard says in his book Slave Stealers that the man with the whip fled into the night and was conveniently never seen again), but whipping children is well documented in Haitian orphanages.³

Gardy would have been no outlier as a Haitian child with living parents in an orphanage. This is itself a kind of trafficking — removing children from their homes for the sake of profiting off their backs. And well-meaning Americans participated in this trafficking in droves.

This is why I think the distinction between a “true orphanage” and a “fake orphanage” that Ballard insists on is so problematic. Ballard sees the children he broke out of a “fake orphanage,” and then being installed in a “real orphanage,” as having been rescued. But the reality is that all orphanages in Haiti are subject to these charges. All orphanages in Haiti are privately run, and nearly all are dependent on Western donors. One hundred million dollars of private money, primarily from American non-profits and churches, goes into the Haitian orphanage business. Most of these children could, with proper support, go home.

Now, the obvious objection here is that what made Yvrose’s orphanage worse than others is that she sold kids. This is a fair point, but still not as clear as you might think. We’ll talk about the sale of the children in Part 2. For now I want to argue two primary points:

1. Yvrose’s orphanage does not seem to have been worse or less legitimate than other orphanages in Port-au-Prince. I haven’t found anyone besides Ballard who alleges this.

2.  Yvrose’s orphanage, like other orphanages in Haiti, worked because of Western money – not provided by fiends and villains, but by people trying to make a difference in Haiti for moral and religious reasons who kept the orphan industrial complex active. This is the institution in which Ballard’s narrative suggests Gardy was actually trafficked, if Ballard is actually correct.

I watched dozens of heart-wrenching, painful Youtube videos and TikToks about child trafficking in Haiti and the use of orphanages, but I was particular struck by one sentiment that I saw over and over, particularly in association with the movie Sound of Freedom. I’ll summarize the sentiment as this: The lines between good and evil are never so clear as when we’re talking about child trafficking. There are clear evil people who traffic children, and clear heroes who defeat them.

And my response to this is:

If you have been on a mission trip that visits orphanages, or you have supported a mission trip that does, there is a reasonably good chance that in your case, the lines are not as clear as you might think.

I am not innocent here. You are not innocent here. Most of my readers are not innocent here. There is a kind of trafficking that many of us have participated in — not to harm children intentionally, but to use them for our own emotional ends, to feel as though we have made a positive difference in the majority world when we did not. And this may have been the trafficking method that took and imprisoned Gardy.

You will never watch a movie about this, because no one wants to watch it. But many of us are responsible, and all of us have to change it.

Ch 5: Setting Up Part 2, and “But Laura”

But Laura, you might be saying right now. Even if we engaged in care that was not helpful, surely Gardy’s situation is completely different. Yvrose was selling children, without documentation. Surely this was intended only for evil ends. No one would buy a child without knowing he was an orphan, unless he meant him ill.

To this I have to say: I believe that you didn’t intend to hurt kids. But once again, this line is not as clear as you might think.

Because the reality is — the unfilmable reality is — our churches might have bought some kids too.

We’ll look at that in the next section.

Excursus: Three Stories, One Movie

I defy anyone to put as much time as I have put in comparing different write ups of the events of the movie and the events that actually happened and trying to line them up. My sources were these articles for comparing the movie and real life. They are fairly convoluted.

The best sense I can make of it is that Rocio is a real person who really has a brother named Miguel. However, it seems like Ballard met them before he started OUR. It's not clear where he met them. (EDITOR’S NOTE JULY 24, 2023: Miguel appears to be based on one of Earl Buchanan’s victims. This case occurred in 2006, seven years before the founding of OUR. In the court documents, it is not clear whether “Miguel” ever met Ballard, and it is also not clear if his sister was sexually abused. Neither of them, however, were trafficked or kidnapped).

But if Ballard met them before OUR, then they didn't have anything to do with “Gisselle,” , who is based on Kelly Suarez and was arrested in Operation Triple Take in 2014. The real Kelly Suarez was arrested in 2014, but her guilt remains unclear; as near as I can tell, she’s not in prison. The last record I've been able to find of her is her release in 2016. So these are already two different stories.

The third story we add to the mix is Gardy, which the jungle rescue sequence for Rocio is based on.

Operation Triple Take, which is depicted in the movie happened in Colombia in 2014. This was NOT the same operation that included the jungle search for Gardy. The search for Gardy after the Port-au-Prince sting was on the boarder of the DR and Haiti, NOT Colombia. It happened after Operation Triple Take. It resulted in no rescues. The hunt for Gardy in a rural area involved no interactions with drug lords or rebels. The operation simply failed after several days of finding no leads and after a stand-off with a local community that thought that the Americans were trying to steal natural resources. In an fuller article about this raid, it was revealed that the reason this mission failed was because the intelligence came from a psychic.

1. With later assistance from Lynn Packer, I found out that Carlos was actually questioned under torture by the Haitian national police.

2. The FBI actually did investigate the kidnapping, as did agents from the UN. No evidence from them has been made public.

3. I interviewed a former Haitian orphanage director about these charges and he clarified that hitting kids with belts is a common form of corporal punishment in Haiti even outside orphanages.