The Kneecapping of Tim Ballard

Irregularities, LDS style

Disclaimer: this story is a departure from IRA’s rule of three independent sources for each point, but the allegations made by sources were explosive enough to compel IRA to forego that requirement. If true, the sources’ claims constitute an alternative narrative that would link the recent campaign against Tim Ballard to Republican establishment figures like Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell. We leave it to the readers to make up their own minds.

The appearance of an article on Vice News containing a statement excoriating Tim Ballard for his “morally unacceptable” activities has touched off a major rift within the LDS. Glenn Beck and others came to Ballard’s defense after the Vice article was published, arguing that the LDS had effectively excommunicated Ballard with a public statement. Ballard has never been before a High Council over any of the charges laid against him, which include:

-sexually harassing female employees of Operation Underground Railroad, as well as female contractors and volunteers.

-sending one of the women a picture of himself in his underwear, along with questions about how far she was willing to go to fool sex traffickers.

-using M. Russell Ballard’s name to raise funds for Operation Underground Railroad.

There are allegedly at least seven women involved, but none of the women have issued a statement to Vice or journalist Lynn Packer confirming or denying the allegations. This is said to be due to their fear of retaliation, yet Vice News claims to have spoken to a female volunteer who experienced conduct consistent with Ballard’s alleged grooming of female OUR employees. The female volunteer in question is not named, and has made no allegations on the record.

Investigations in Ritual Abuse has not found evidence of any lawsuits or civil settlements between Ballard, OUR, or any ex-employees. OUR claimed to have retained counsel to investigate the allegations, but will neither confirm nor deny the veracity of the allegations or release any information on the report by the law firm in question. In fact, the law firm hired by OUR remains unidentified.

O.U.R. retained an independent law firm to conduct a comprehensive investigation of all relevant allegations, and O.U.R. continues to assess and improve the governance of the organization and protocols for its operations.

To preserve the integrity of its investigation and to protect the privacy of all persons involved, O.U.R. will not make any further public comment at this time.  

The reality of the situation is that readers are being asked to take Vice News’ word for it that seven or more women accused Tim Ballard of sexual misconduct. There is no independent documentation of the claims, in the form of court filings, judgements, or any other paperwork.

However, there is no good or reasonable explanation for Tim Ballard to take any woman posing as his wife along on a sex trafficking sting or raid. The goal of any sting operation is to obtain information, apprehensions, and convictions with minimal complication or risk. There is no tactical reason for a man posing as a sex trafficker to bring his wife along for the ride. In any in person interview or in person interaction I have engaged in over 22 years, I never had more than one other person with me. Simplicity has always been key. The more people who are involved in a scenario, the more complicated that scenario becomes.

From a risk management standpoint, even if Tim Ballard did nothing improper, the mere presence of a female on those raids or operations is a risk for him as well as OUR.¹ In 22 years of investigative research into pedophiles, I have never been in a room alone with a female victim. I prefer to conduct my interviews with others present, or in more recent times, over Zoom. As an employee of various companies, I always assiduously avoided being alone in an enclosed space with a female coworker at work. Perhaps Tim Ballard is naive, and perhaps OUR did not have a seasoned HR professional to implement best practices to head off risk.

Given the stories that have emerged chronicling OUR’s raids, it would appear that risk management was not a priority. Ballard allegedly took donors on raids after a minimal training crash course. There are any number of reasons not to do this, including but not limited to the following:

• OUR would be responsible for what donors do on the raids, and if one of those donors used excessive force on a perpetrator or engaged in inappropriate conduct with a victim, OUR could be legally responsible.

• If a trafficker injured or killed donors who were taken on raids by OUR, OUR would also be liable for damages in a personal injury or wrongful death lawsuit.

• If a victim was injured or killed by a donor, OUR’s liability would be tremendous.

There are those who would argue that OUR’s raids were staged, due to the fact that an actual raid would carry the potential for enormous liability due to the factors listed above. Investigations in Ritual Abuse possesses no evidence that OUR staged fake raids to give donors an adventure. The evidence that does exist points to a loosely run organization without protocols and controls in place to identify obvious risk management issues.

The allegations that Tim Ballard traded on the name of M. Russell Ballard in order to raise funds are absurd on their face. Tim Ballard did not have to trade on his relationship with M. Russell Ballard, because M. Russell Ballard took trips to and made appearances at Tim Ballard’s functions of his own volition. IRA has spoken to a witness who was in the room when M. Russell Ballard told Tim Ballard that he would be a household name in 2016, and that witness was tasked with making Tim Ballard a household name by M. Russell Ballard.

M. Russell Ballard was deeply enmeshed in Tim Ballard’s ventures, not because Tim Ballard traded on M. Russell Ballard’s name and reputation, but because M. Russell Ballard decided to entangle himself in Tim Ballard’s businesses like Liberty 89. As it presently stands, M. Russell Ballard is allegedly suffering from dementia. He is not running the affairs of the Quorum of the Twelve, and he is not issuing statements on behalf of the Twelve, either.

To understand what actually took place with regard to recent events involving Tim Ballard and the LDS, IRA spoke to individuals with direct knowledge. The picture that emerged was a devastating indictment of the LDS’s continued involvement with Gordon Bowen, alleged LDS Church of Satan Punisher and dentsumcgarrybowen advertising executive.

Four of the current members of the Quorum of the Twelve currently associate with and visit with Gordon Bowen at his current residence in Salt Lake City. Elders Stevenson, Andersen, and Christofferson meet with Bowen regularly, but the focus of their meetings is the $20 million unreleased film Bowen produced. Apparently, the LDS is still attempting to salvage that film.

Elder Gerrit W. Gong meets with Bowen frequently to play pickleball, or to discuss Bowen’s garden. Gong’s connections to the CS through his mother Jean Char Gong, “sister by affection” to Carma Rose, Belle Felice, and Nola de Jong, have been detailed in a prior article.

Despite the fact that Gordon Bowen is a previously excommunicated Latter Day Saint, a known patron of gay male escort services, and an alleged child molester who informed his ex-wife Barbara Timothy of his wishes to nurse their daughter “through his penis,” four apostles of the LDS continue to associate with Bowen.

These facts make the allegations that Gordon Bowen drafted the statement issued against Tim Ballard from the LDS’s media office far more plausible. As M. Russell Ballard struggles with dementia, his office is effectively being run and directed by others. This offers a plausible explanation for how Gordon Bowen and his backers were able to issue a statement through Doug Anderson, the Director of Media Relations for the LDS, to Vice News. M. Russell Ballard has repeatedly referred to Gordon Bowen as his prodigal son over the years. Apostle Ballard’s affection for Gordon Bowen resulted in the disastrous $20 million unreleased-and some have alleged unsalvageable-LDS film on Jesus Christ.

It appears to have resulted in Gordon Bowen utilizing his relationship with Ballard and his office to issue a broadside communique against Tim Ballard at the behest of Bowen’s other longtime patron, U.S. Senator Mitt Romney.

MAGA vs. Establishment

Williard Mitt Romney, the boy who would be king, had a problem. The rise of the Tea Party in 2010 had destroyed incumbent Senator Bob Bennett’s re-election, which was dependent on the delegates who dominated the convention process for the GOP. The rules were simple: get 60% of the delegates at the convention, and become the Republican nominee. Bennett faced two usurpers in Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater, and he was the old guard facing a Tea Party wave of delegates fed up with the status quo.

Bennett placed third, and neither Lee nor Bridgewater cleared 60%, which meant that the two men would campaign in a primary runoff. The long career of Senator Bob Bennett was over, smashed by a convention full of delegates whose allegiance to the nascent Tea Party movement outweighed any deference to a longtime incumbent.

For the GOP establishment, Bennett’s defeat was a shock. Their answer was to form Count My Vote, an organization that pushed to eliminate the convention altogether. When the convention had produced results the establishment liked, such as the repeated re-election of incumbents like Bob Bennett, the establishment had no issue with the convention process. 2010 did not produced the desired result, and so the GOP establishment pivoted to argue that the convention process discouraged voter participation.

Becoming a delegate meant attending meetings in person, and a straight up or down primary would encourage voters to participate in the primary process. The reality that voter participation in primary elections averaged a mere 27% would appear to refute the establishment’s argument, but Count My Vote managed to succeed in obtaining a compromise: candidates could now gather signatures to appear on the primary ballot, and even if a candidate gathered 60% of the delegates at the convention, he would not be the nominee without first facing off against candidates who obtained enough signatures to appear on the ballot.

The establishment was striking back.

In 2018, Mitt Romney knew he was unlikely to gain 60% of the delegates needed to wrap up the nomination at the convention, so he also collected signatures. The delegates, still angry about the 2014 compromise, fumed at Romney’s strategy to secure a ballot spot with signatures. Romney, still smarting from the humiliation he had endured at the hands of Donald Trump in 2016, did not much care. He managed to come in first with 46% the votes at the convention, but his place on the ballot was assured due to his signature collection regardless of what happened at the convention. 54% of the convention had voted for someone other than Romney.

In the primary election, Romney won with 71% of the vote against Mike Kennedy. He would have his six years, and during that six years he managed to avenge his humiliation at the hands of Donald Trump by voting to convict him in his impeachment trials.

On the other side of the Utah Republican Party, Senator Mike Lee represented MAGA, the movement of Trumpism that had antagonized establishment Republicans just as much as it had antagonized Democrats. In 2023, the tension between MAGA and establishmentarians would burst into public view again.

Tim Ballard’s ambitions for U.S. Senate were the worst kept secret in Utah. Ballard had left OUR and formed the Spear Fund, an organization that would function much like Slave Stealers, the for profit entity that Russell Ballard and Tim Ballard had formulated to oversee OUR and other nonprofits. Vice News specifically alleged that documentation from OUR sources and text messages showed Tim Ballard representing Russell Ballard as a partner in Slave Stealers.

This would put an LDS Apostle in a partnership position with a for profit entity, something the LDS actively discourages as LDS Apostles are full-time church employees. Given the nature of Tim Ballard’s work, M. Russell Ballard’s involvement in Slave Stealers, Liberty 89, and other Ballard projects would put Tim Ballard on a collision course with other apostles and the Church hierarchy.

Ballard’s political aspirations would put him on a collision course with the GOP establishment in Utah. His prior affiliation with both Donald Trump and Senator Mike Lee would give MAGA two U.S. Senators from Utah, and leave the Republican establishment out in the cold. Mitt Romney’s retirement would therefore have grave implications for the establishment Republicans, including the most establishmentarian Republican of all, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose close ties to China through his wife’s family would parallel the ongoing Chinese infiltration of Utah’s establishment.

Something had to be done.

First, Mitch McConnell allegedly greenlit a $2.5 million outlay to fund a hit campaign on Tim Ballard, and he and his underlings hired a firm to begin the process. Second, Gordon Bowen, likely at the behest of his longtime friend and patron Mitt Romney, used his influence and ties to M. Russell Ballard’s office to draft and issue a statement through the Church’s media office condemning Tim Ballard for allegedly trading on Apostle Ballard’s name to raise money. Third, Vice News picked up the ongoing campaign by Lynn Packer against OUR, using Packer’s reporting to form the basis of its own broadsides against Tim Ballard.

It is likely that McConnell, Romney, and Bowen attempted to get a more mainstream media outlet to carry their seeded story about Ballard, but those outlets would have rebuffed their efforts because the alleged victims were not speaking on the record to confirm or deny the allegations of sexual impropriety by Tim Ballard. Additionally, despite an ongoing investigation by Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings, the reality was that Rawlings found no criminal violations. If Rawlings had sufficient evidence of criminal activity by Ballard, he likely would have brought charges against Ballard and others.

Instead, Troy Rawlings was reduced to leaking information that Ballard allegedly conducted a psychic for intel on his raids. If true, Ballard should face a High Council, but the fact that he has not faced a High Council is an indication that Rawlings may not be fully forthcoming.

In the end, the establishment of the GOP managed to delay Tim Ballard’s candidacy for Mitt Romney’s U.S. Senate seat. They may have kneecapped Tim Ballard’s prospects for political office entirely. What they have also done is expose the flashpoints and fault lines between the left wing and Republican establishment Saints and those Saints who have embraced MAGA and its America First ethos. It is no accident that Glenn Beck cast his lot with Tim Ballard.

Conclusion

By doing an end run around the LDS’s rules, protocols, and processes, Bowen, Romney, and Bowen’s allies within the Quorum have managed to raise serious questions about the legitimacy of the allegations against Ballard. IRA does not endorse Tim Ballard or OUR specifically due to concerns over OUR’s administration and its risk management policies. IRA does not condone utilizing the LDS’s media office and online news outlets to defame Tim Ballard in order to pave the way for Mitt Romney and the Republican establishment to obtain Utah’s second Senate seat in 2024. Excommunication by press release is wrong and contrary to

The most relevant question that remains unanswered is why a healthy, well to do incumbent Senator would choose to forego a reelection campaign when he won his seat with 71% of the vote in his last election and would likely win reelection by a similar margin given Utah’s emerging purple tendencies? Why did Mitt Romney decide against running for reelection? What is the story there?

1. In fairness, the stated reason given by one source was that Ballard sought to have a backup in case traffickers tried to push sex workers towards him as a test. His purported wife could intervene and say no. This is a plausible reason for Ballard to employ the ruse of an OUR employee acting as his wife.