‘Sound of Freedom’ is a box office hit whose star embraces QAnon
A casual moviegoer might not get why anyone is upset about “Sound of Freedom,” a surprise hit inspired by the real-life exploits of Tim Ballard, a former Department of Homeland Security agent who stages sting operations to catch child sex traffickers.
It’s a fairly standard American action thriller — gritty, violent and hopeful — in which Ballard (Jim Caviezel) fights to save abducted children in the Colombian jungle. The partially crowdfunded film opened this week to a solid review in “Variety,” and vied with the latest Indiana Jones sequel for the top box-office spot on July 4.
But “Sound of Freedom” has been accused by some critics of warping the truth about child exploitation and catering to QAnon conspiracy theorists — something its distributor, Angel Studios, denies. The Guardian’s critic called it a “QAnon-adjacent thriller seducing America.” And the film’s star, Caviezel, has openly embraced the extreme movement, suggesting at media events that a shadowy international cabal is kidnapping children to consume their organs.
Is ‘Sound of Freedom’ a true story?
This section contains spoilers for the movie.
“Sound of Freedom” is based on the life of Ballard, who left the Department of Homeland Security about 10 years ago and founded a group that works with local police to catch child sex traffickers in other countries — often by staging elaborate sting operations that it captures on video.
In the film, a brother and sister are lured to an innocuous-sounding photo shoot in Honduras, only to be snatched by abductors and imprisoned in the Colombian jungle. Caviezel’s version of Ballard spends much of the movie sneaking through criminal hideouts to find the children, risking his life and finally beating up the traffickers.
The real Ballard hasn’t claimed to do anything quite like that, but the film ends with a montage of clips from sting operations his group, Operation Underground Railroad, actually conducted in the country. “By the time Tim left Colombia, he and the team had rescued over 120 victims and arrested more than a dozen traffickers,” reads text on the screen.
“I think people are going to be inspired when they watch the story based on Tim’s story,” said Jared Geesey, senior vice president of global distribution for Angel Studios.
Many others have praised Ballard’s work. President Trump appointed him to a State Department advisory council on human trafficking in 2019, which he sat on until it disbanded the next year. Major news organizations covered the 2014 Colombian bust that inspired “Sound of Freedom,” and Ballard testified about the operation before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee.
But Operation Underground Railroad has also been accused by some experts of distorting the complex nature of the sex trafficking business, of doing little to help victims despite its dramatic sting videos and even of putting children in danger to make them.
Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, found no evidence for Ballard’s claim that 10,000 children are smuggled into the United States for sex annually — a line that apparently made its way into Trump’s State of the Union address in 2019. In Utah, the Davis County Attorney’s Office spent two and a half years investigating Operation Underground Railroad for alleged communications fraud, witness tampering and retaliation, according to the Deseret News. The investigations ended with no charges in May.
A Vice News investigation in 2020 found no clear falsehoods in Operation Underground Railroad’s rescue claims, but “a pattern of image-burnishing and mythology-building, a series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading.”
“The entire premise of its operations: that local law enforcement will take over when the dirty work has been done is dangerously naive,” the prominent human trafficking scholar Anne Gallagher wrote for HuffPost in 2015. “Why are police in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Colombia not arresting child sex traffickers if they are so easy to find? The simplest explanation is law enforcement complicity in such crimes.”
Operation Underground Railroad, which did not respond to a request for comment, says on its website that it works with other organizations to ensure victims get long-term support after its stings. But Foreign Policy reported that a large group of Dominican girls the group rescued in 2014 were on their own again a week later.
