Trafficking Survivors and Advocates Are Being Harassed by ‘Sound of Freedom’ Fans

A few weeks ago, Kat Wehunt held a training for new volunteers at the Formation Project, a nonprofit that provides specialized services for people in Charleston, South Carolina, who have experienced human trafficking or commercial sexual exploitation. Each new group of volunteers need training so that Wehunt can get them up to speed on best practices, and it’s usually a fairly routine process.  

This time, though, something different happened: Wehunt found herself in the midst of an unusual argument with a potential volunteer. 

The training typically starts with a discussion of the industry’s “myths and misconceptions and what trafficking actually looks like in our neighborhood in Charleston,” said Wehunt, who founded the nonprofit in 2019 and serves as its executive director. But some of the latest crop of potential volunteers had recently signed up after seeing Sound of Freedom, the surprise blockbuster film based on the purported work of Tim Ballard, the founder of the anti-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad. 

One potential volunteer simply didn’t buy Wehunt’s matter-of-fact descriptions of how sex trafficking often occurs, and the two started to argue, according to Wehunt, with the volunteer insisting that people were frequently trafficked after being kidnapped, which, in reality, is an exceedingly rare occurrence, according to the available global data.

“Those things I’m sure do happen,” Wehunt told Motherboard. “But it’s not representative of the majority, especially in our neighborhoods.” 

As a survivor of familial sex trafficking herself, Wehunt would know. But like other trafficking survivors who now work in anti-trafficking spaces, she’s seeing a direct impact on her work as a result of Sound of Freedom, which – in lurid detail –  depicts children who are kidnapped by strangers and sold into commercial sexual exploitation. (The film ends with the Ballard character canoeing into the jungle alone to rescue a little girl, fighting her trafficker in hand-to-hand combat and ultimately killing him. As Vice News has outlined in a series of stories, Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad, or OUR, have frequently misrepresented their work; former “operators” who accompanied OUR on international missions describe some of them as bumbling and amateurish.)

The film has awakened the passions of a broad swath of the right-wing and conspiratorial world. Religious influencers, QAnon fans, and a huge group of people who defy easy categorization have all thrown their support behind the movie. And while fans of the film have insisted that it’s “raising awareness” of a global problem, experts in trafficking, including people who have experienced it themselves, are finding that it’s contributing to serious and harmful misinformation about what trafficking looks like and what survivors need to recover. Since its release, survivors who have criticized the film have been frequently accused of being “pedophiles” or “groomers” – the kinds of people by whom they themselves were once victimized. (Sean Wolfington, a producer for the film who contacted Motherboard to object to our coverage of the film, did not respond to two requests for comment for this story.)  

“If I share anything publicly that’s opposing the film I get a lot of name-calling, a lot of lashing back,” Jose Lewis Alfaro, a sex and labor trafficking survivor who now works as a consultant and lived experience expert on trafficking issues, said. “It’s just really interesting to me how people are more than willing to hear a wealthy rich man’s superhero story, and aren’t willing to trust and listen to those who have actually lived through it.”

“It’s not awareness. This movie is full of assumptions,” said Suamhirs Piraino-Guzman, the chair at the United Nations’ fund for victims of human trafficking and contemporary forms of slavery, “and a dangerous portrayal of what trafficking is.” 

Piraino-Guzman, himself a survivor of childhood sex trafficking, has been critical of OUR’s work in the past, and the film, he said, furthers the same issues he’s called out before. 

“To me this movie is a vanity project,” he said. “It’s all about Tim Ballard and this fake persona that he’s created for himself.”

But, he added, there’s nothing new about the kind of narrative the film promotes. In recent decades, the mainstream societal conversation about trafficking seems to have gotten stuck, according to Piraino-Guzman.

“We have been here in this very spot in the anti-trafficking movement for over 20 years,” he told Motherboard. “We’ve been fighting for 20 years for the appropriate ways to talk about trafficking, the ways we should be centering survivors, in order for us to be moving forward in a way that’s evidence based, not assumptions based.” 

Alfaro, the trafficking survivor and consultant, has spoken frequently about how he was trafficked by a man who took him in after his family kicked him out as a teenager for being gay.  “He came across the right person at the right time and that was me,” he said. (Alfaro’s abuser is now serving 30 years in prison for trafficking at least four teenage boys through a “massage” business he ran out of his home.) 

The backlash he’s received for criticizing the film is an extension of what he’s already experienced, Alfaro said; men and LGBTQ trafficking survivors often face skepticism when speaking about the abuse they endured, and a particularly brutal variety of victim-blaming and homophobia. 

“People have told me ‘You weren't trafficked, you wanted it, you probably liked it because you’re gay,’” he said. “Horrible things like that. I’m seeing the same thing happening speaking out about his film. People are telling me, ‘you’re a trafficker, you're a predator.’ These are all QAnon conspiracy theories, and people are saying that to people who don’t agree with the film. It’s like, do you even know what I’ve experienced in my lifetime?”  

Other survivors say they’ve faced the same kind of harassment, with heavy emotional consequences.

“When fans of the QAnon movie called me a pedophile because I dared to criticize how the film did not hire any survivors to help write the script or consult, I spent an hour crying,” said Sabra Boyd, a journalist, consultant, and child labor and sex trafficking survivor. (Some critics have accused the film of sounding QAnon-esque talking points, an accusation both the producers and Ballard have objected to. Caviezel, who plays Ballard, has frequently promoted conspiracy theories linked to QAnon.) 

“I can't comprehend saying that, especially not to a child trafficking survivor. I don't understand why fans of the movie would rather listen to Tim Ballard than actual trafficking survivors,” Boyd said. “But the problem is that solutions to human trafficking and child trafficking are not exciting like an action movie.” 

Alfaro worries about the effects of calling trafficking survivors “pedophiles,” beyond just the emotional impact it has on them individually. 

“You’re making them feel like they don’t even want to talk about this issue anymore,” he said. “There’s a lot of harm that happens with that and ultimately we have nothing to blame but these overly sensational depictions.” 

Dr. Beth Bowman is the founder of the Restoring Ivy Collective, which, like many other survivor-led organizations, offers practical services for survivors, including support groups and referrals for housing and case management. 

Bowman bluntly said that many people in the anti-trafficking world are “pissed” about the film.

“It’s a sensationalized story that you only get trafficked if you’re taken by bad men in a white van,” Bowman said. Like other survivors, she was disturbed by the racialized undertones of the film, in which every villain is Latino and the hero is a lone white man. “It’s this awful ‘white versus the world’ narrative that just isn’t true. Most of the time people aren’t kidnapped. There’s poverty and abuse involved, for instance, an uncle is the trafficker. They aren’t typically that far from their families.” People who buy into the narratives promoted by the film and by some anti-trafficking groups, Bowman said, seem to have a vested interest in believing trafficking happens elsewhere, in exoticized far-away situations, and never at home. “They believe there’s a moral or ethnic or socioeconomic or national shield around them and their kids.” 

“I’m going to be honest,” said Rafael Bautista, another labor trafficking expert who’s also a survivor. “I will not watch the movie out of respect for survivors and the movement. It’s harmful and it takes us back many years of work.” He’s struggled to get people to care about labor trafficking, even when it involves children, he said, pointing specifically to the thousands of migrant children whose whereabouts are unknown after they entered the United States as unaccompanied minors, and who may be victims of labor exploitation. He worries that because they’re looking for scenarios of international kidnapping and literal bondage depicted in films like Sound of Freedom and Taken, people may miss more common signs of trafficking at home – in nail salons, agricultural settings, or among domestic workers.

“If we don’t fix our home,” he said, “it’s impossible to fix somewhere else.”  

“The harassment, said Chris Ash, has affected survivors’ mental health” Ash is the survivor Leadership Program Manager at The National Survivor Network, meaning their work involves interacting with trafficking survivors who now work in anti-trafficking spaces.  

“We see people who step back, who stop speaking out,” Ash said. “We lose their voice, their insights. It makes it harder for them to do their work. We also see people who keep speaking out anyway but have legitimate threats to their safety, fears around doxxing and harassment.” 

The creators of Sound of Freedom have not hidden their desire to use their audience’s concern to boost their ticket sales. At the end of the movie, Jim Caviezel, who plays Tim Ballard, appears in a special PSA to urge people to buy more tickets to the film. Some people working in the anti-trafficking space have tried to figure out how to speak to people who might have seen the film in hopes of nudging them in a more productive direction. 

“What does helping look like to you?” asks Blair Hopkins, the executive director of SWOP Behind Bars, which advocates for sex workers and trafficking survivors who are currently incarcerated or working on re-entry after getting out. “I would for sure tell someone the answer is not to buy more tickets to movies.” 

“If they’re fired up and want to help,” Hopkins added, “the first thing I'd tell them is listen to sex workers. They know what exploitation in their trade looks like and how to prevent it. There are experts in those ranks.” 

Other survivors urge viewers of the film to stop talking about “rescue,” a term that can be disempowering and infantilizing for trafficking survivors who, more often than not, have to get themselves out of difficult situations. 

“We don’t ‘rescue’ each other or ourselves,” said Ashante Taylorcox, the founder and executive director of You Are More Than, a survivor-led organization which focuses on marginalized survivors, including people of color and queer people. “We figure out our next steps beyond the commercial sex industry.” 

Taylorcox focuses on the long-term. “We support them to build economic wealth,” she said, for example, by providing support when survivors are working on life goals like going back to school, offering free counseling services, and having a wellness fund to help them access mental healthcare resources; Taylorcox’s organization also invests in survivor-led small businesses. The first step, Taylorcox said, is often crisis management. “But oftentimes people will stop at the ‘rescue’ and think that’s enough.” 

Some of the survivors are working to find alternate ways to educate the public. Sabra Boyd, the journalist and trafficking survivor, said the realities of the trafficking world do not fit seamlessly into a box office narrative, which have made it difficult to receive the same publicity handed out to Ballard and Sound of Freedom. 

“I am working with other trafficking survivors around the world to compile and vote on a list of survivor-vetted and approved movies and documentaries about human trafficking that are accurate and survivor-centered depictions,” she said. “It has been a very difficult challenge because most survivors don't have money or Hollywood connections to produce films.” 

Thus far, Sound of Freedom has grossed over $155 million at the box office. The amount of money the film – and OUR – has made is almost unreal to the survivors doing anti-trafficking work, who often struggle to fundraise for things as small as the cost of a bus ticket for a client. 

“All I can say is that legitimate organizations are really struggling,” Chris Ash said. If the money went to smaller organizations, they add, “it wouldn’t fund Rambo operations, it would fund the kind of support that survivors need.” It’s a running joke, Ash said, that survivor leaders use the mobile payment service Cashapp to send each other the same $20 “back and forth for lunch money because we’re struggling.” The support that Sound of Freedom fans have decided to put elsewhere, Ash said, “could really make a big impact.” 

Boyd added that much of the work needed to improve circumstances for people at risk of trafficking might prove “too boring to make into an action movie for QAnon fans,” including, she said, “providing housing, improving immigration policies, universal basic income to decrease poverty, access to healthcare and education, mutual aid, foster care reform, reparations, restitution, systemic racism, poverty, financial abuse and identity theft, legal aid, the ways our carceral and legal systems ignore the needs of victims, addressing the number of law enforcement officers who are traffickers or abusers.”

Other survivors and people working in the anti-trafficking space also have concrete tips for people who have seen the film and want to “help,” they tell Motherboard.  

“We have very real and tangible needs,” said Kat Wehunt, the founder of the Formation Project. Every Tuesday, they hold a dinner for survivors, and they’ve had trouble with transportation and childcare for the people who attend. They’ve also frequently needed people to do things like go through their clothing closet, do administrative work, and sort donations. The work is “a little less sexy” than many think, Wehunt said, but the benefit is that it can keep truly dedicated people involved and weed out those who are not. “It keeps the right people in this work,” she said. “Not everyone is meant to be in this space. The people that are doing it for the right reasons, it’ll keep them around longer.” 

“First of all, recognize that while this may be new to you, it’s not new at all,” said Chris Ash of the National Survivor Network. Connect, they say, “to the people who are already in the fight. Find people who are already doing this. Learn from them. They know what it actually looks like. If you want to help fight trafficking, find out what they need. It may not be sexy. They may need you to come in and do some filing, because nobody can get to it. They may want you to do something not glamorous. Not everybody has the skill set to be on the front lines.” 

Update, August 17:

Ten days after publication, Sean Wolfington, a producer for Sound of Freedom, sent Motherboard the following statement, which has been reproduced in full: