Moral Legitimacy Cannot Be Built on the Unauthorized Use of Another Person’s Pain

One Naming the Harm

There is a species of public man who tries to euhemerize himself while still alive. He does it with a slow-motion origin story, a stirring soundtrack, and a moral cause so unimpeachable that the audience is made to feel vulgar for asking questions. He does it with the vocabulary of rescue and with a virtue signal disguised as a mission, one of the cheapest moral shields people hide behind: “for the children”.

Men like Tim Ballard say compelling things like, “God’s children are not for sale.” It is the kind of line designed to sound like scripture and function like armor. But moral certainty is not evidence.

Perhaps black and brown children from poor countries are of a lesser god? For more than a decade, Ballard has taken survivors’ stories, repackaged them, and fundraised off narratives that records and witnesses that clearly demonstrate were not his to tell. He claimed and rebranded “Pedro’s story” as the founding myth of Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.), a narrative that later served as the basis for the 2023 hit film Sound of Freedom, a claim and film both Lynn Packer and I thoroughly debunked with Border Patrol records, arrest records and court documents. Since the release of Jon Lines’ Deposition, we learn even more about why that was untrue, but that is an investigative piece in and of itself for another day.

Questions have also surrounded Ballard’s and Katherine Ballard’s involvement in Haiti. In what former insiders and fundraisers characterize as a highly secret meeting, we’ve since named The Whiteboard Meeting, those witnesses have alleged among other things, an alleged monetized LDS-backed Haitian adoption scheme channeling Haitian orphans to Mormon couples. Which would explain Ballard’s Operation Underground Railroad’s ownership and operational control over Foyer de Sion, a Haitian orphanage once run by Guesno Mardy, a father whose son, Gardy Mardy, disappeared under tragic circumstances. What began as a family’s unspeakable loss the disappearance of Gardy Mardy was repackaged by O.U.R. into a recurring fundraising story, elevating a father’s grief into a branding device in the expanding legend of Tim Ballard.

No, that’s not our assessment or interpretation. That is by Tim Ballard’s own admission, according to former President of Operation Underground Railroad, Jon Lines:

“Hey, whether Gardy is dead or not, people love the story and it opens up people’s wallets and I’m going to continue to use it.”

Lines was one of the longest serving Special Agents in Charge for Homeland Security Investigations(HSI), Department of Homeland Security. He was the supervisor of HSI Special Agents. Tim Ballard never became a Special Agent or a Special Agent for HSI, which is the backbone of DHS. He was a Line Agent who was support staff to one of the Special Agents under Jon Lines. Ballard would ultimately leave DHS to start Operation Underground Railroad.


We need to discuss a term we are from now on going to call, Suffering Appropriation: the seizure of a survivor’s lived agony, endurance, and hard-won life in order to manufacture one’s own virtue, authority, or importance. It is biography committed by burglary. It is the theft of meaning from the one who paid its price in fear, blood, and memory.

And when this theft is staged in public, when a survivor is displayed as proof of righteousness, as emotional evidence for someone else’s moral theater, we see its twin: Human Trophyism.

A person becomes an exhibit. Their pain becomes a credential. Their presence becomes propaganda. Their name and story is for profit.

Suffering Appropriation and Human Trophyism is something I plan to discuss in a future article.

When the Myth Meets the Record

In February 2019, a digital Valentine’s Day card promoted by Operation Underground Railroad appeared on their Facebook page. It was also marketed under the title “Celebrate the Gift of Love,” under O.U.R. merchandise section. The card was presented to the public as the design of a survivor called “Liliana,” with proceeds tied to the organization’s mission.

On O.U.R.’s own Facebook page, the organization promoted an electronic Valentine’s Day card with a glossy narrative: “This card was designed by one of our survivors, Liliana. She was trafficked from Central America to New York at 14 years of age, and was found and rescued several years later. Today she is safe living with a loving family, studying to receive her GED, and enjoys cooking, drawing, and dancing. If you’re still looking for a last minute gift, give a gift that pays it forward. This electronic Valentine’s Day card is just $4.99 and can be sent to your loved ones.”, and the post directed readers to purchase the $4.99 e-card on their website’s merchandise page, to Liliana’s Valentine’s Day card titled, “Celebrate the Gift of Love,” and prompted them to donate more money, starting with $100.00. Her card was one of many trinkets, gimmicks and merchandise of alleged trafficked children that Tim Ballard had either rescued, or attached himself to on O.U.R.’s merchandise page, like “Pedro’s Necklace” and various Gardy merch. The pitch is not subtle. It turns an unnamed survivor into a retail proof point, buy the story, and the story will buy you virtue.

When VICE News and I reported on Tim Ballard bootlegging the the “Story of Liliana”, I wrote an article and compared it to the disgusting practice and phenomenon of “Stolen Valor”, which is lying about, embellishing, or falsely claiming military accolades, awards (like the Medal of Honor or Purple Heart), or service records. It is a federal crime is you do it for personal gain. Most Americans are disgusted by such a disgraceful act. But stealing one’s trauma and pain? Using them as a personal trophy?

Then I finally received Jon Line’s Deposition (linked under sources, we are working on getting them transcribed), and it paints a truly disgusting picture, far worse than what I’ve seen from Ballard in his typical hijacking of survivor tales and appropriating them as his own. I got physically ill.

There is only one other instance I got physically ill from a case, and that was a Montana DCFS case I’m looking into for a dear friend.

I’ve seen hundreds of crime scene photos in cases I’ve reviewed and investigated on my own. Lifting prints from a cadaver for school. Seeing violence, death and destruction first hand, and its aftermath half my life has not made me ill.

Perhaps it’s exploiting the exploited. Stealing one’s trauma and using it to manipulate and play on the public’s collective emotion… to guilt trip them and make yourself the hero or even martyr in some instances. Similar to a predator targeting a rape victim when they are vulnerable and confused, because they believe their defenses are low or they are emotionally a wreck, confused and possibly “in need.” Using her trauma for your pleasure and benefit. To create a phony image from another’s trauma and suffering. It’s disgusting.

I used to tell a group of friends that, “there are far worse crimes than murder”. When you take a victim of human trafficking, one who once that thought she fell in love at 14 years-old, she came from poverty and didn’t have much going on in Tenancingo, Mexico. A 17 year-old young man, who for three years made promises of a better life for them both. Grooming her for a hell she never knew existed. She was deceived not by quick financial returns, he worked on her heart and broadened her dreams. She runaway with him and they made the long journey together, all the way to NYC.

“He promised me a beautiful future, but it was all a lie”, Delia told Rolling Stone back in 2022.

She testified in court against her traffickers, recounting violence so sustained and systematic that even reading the record feels like trespass. For someone like me who grew up around violence, who learned early that harm could be casual and sudden; her story was still hard to stomach.

Violence is the oldest language we have.

Long before law, before scripture, before courts and constitutions, human beings understood force. Violence. Pain. Retribution. Revenge. Before we knew what they meant, we knew what violence meant and its applications and results. We knew violence before we knew how to speak. A toddler strikes when frustrated. A man swings when humiliated. A gunshot in the night says what words cannot; fear me, obey me, stay away. Across history and geography, violence has been a crude but unmistakable form of communication, born of anger, pain, pride, desperation. It is ugly, but it is human. It has heat. It has impulse. It has the signature of emotion.

I knew men, some below the age of majority who have been killed for doing far less than what was done to her.

I grew up where violence was not theoretical. It was part of the landscape, like broken glass in the gutter or sirens threading through the night. It was how people sent messages when they believed no other language would be heard. Brutal, often senseless, sometimes theatrical… but still, in its warped way, expressive. A blow meant rage. A beating meant revenge. A killing meant dominance or warning.

Even in places ruled by fear, there were lines people pretended not to cross. Not out of nobility, but out of recognition, everyone had mothers, sisters, daughters. Even women of the night, even those ravaged and eaten alive by addiction were not to be just slain or defiled. Violence carried consequences. If left unanswered it was a warning. It answered itself.

But what Delia endured was not violence in that sense.

What happened to her was colder than anger. Colder than revenge. Colder than any crime of passion.

She was not attacked in bursts of rage. She was processed.

Used.

Reduced to a body whose only assigned function was to generate money.

By her account, she was raped by dozens of men a day, not as an act of fury or even personal cruelty, but as routine commerce. A system. A schedule. An economy built on the erasure of a human being.

In the same Rolling Stone interview, Delia described it with a clarity that leaves no room for metaphor:

“It didn’t matter if I was scared that I might get a sexual disease. It didn’t matter if I was panicked that a client would kill me. It didn’t matter if I was starving or exhausted. It didn’t matter that my vagina was swollen and sore because I was in pain from so many men penetrating me. All he wanted was for me to make them money.”

If her trafficker, Francisco Melendez-Perez, suspected she might be pregnant, she said he beat her repeatedly in an effort to force a miscarriage. Court records show she later required multiple reconstructive surgeries after her jaw was broken and left to heal improperly without medical care.

This is the reality behind the word trafficking.

Not a metaphor. Not a political talking point. Not a slogan. A human being treated as disposable inventory in an economy of flesh.

Moral legitimacy cannot be built on the unauthorized use of another person’s pain.

But the cause is never too holy for questions. Only the salesman is.

Picture the set: a hearing room in Washington, D.C., where the air is conditioned, the cameras are lit, and suffering arrives in neat paragraphs. Tim Ballard sat where reputations are manufactured. In written testimony to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, he argued that “closing open border crossings” and driving people toward ports of entry would help law enforcement “look into the eyes of traffickers and victims” and “hopefully rescue them.” It was a policy pitch with a halo, the border wall as benevolence.

Ballard’s project never lived solely in committee rooms. He cultivated access and adulation in conservative power circles. In 2017, Deseret News reported that Ballard gave a presentation in Washington to Ivanka Trump and senators at a meeting arranged by Orrin Hatch. The White House itself framed human trafficking as a border-security argument, repeatedly threading the subject into demands for a wall. In that atmosphere, Ballard’s self-description as an anti-trafficking authority became a kind of credential, a passport into rooms where stories turn into policy.

The miracle of modern mythmaking is that it can be sold in advance of evidence. Ballard’s version of himself did not require years of verified outcomes; it required a narrative. That narrative, later amplified by the blockbuster film Sound of Freedom, placed Ballard at the center of a world-saving crusade.

Yet even before the film, there were cracks in the origin story. Lynn Packer and I’s reporting at American Crime Journal has argued that the foundational “Pedro” narrative, often linked to the 2006 arrest of Earl Venton Buchanan, was grossly exaggerated or fabricated in ways that misled donors and the public. In that account, the mythology is not an innocent embroidery; it is an asset class, a form of stolen valor that turns a real criminal case into a personal legend.

The point of raising the origin story is not to litigate a script. It is to show how the machine works; once a man learns that an anecdote can purchase authority, he begins to treat truth as a nuisance. If the story needs a child, he will find a child. If it needs a survivor, he will recruit a survivor. If it needs a witness behind him at a hearing, he will produce a witness.

Then reporting arrived, first as a drip, then as a flood. VICE News reported that Ballard’s departure from Operation Underground Railroad followed an internal investigation into sexual misconduct, with O.U.R. confirming he resigned and was “permanently separated.” Other outlets reported on lawsuits and accusations that Ballard used a so-called “couples ruse” in undercover contexts, an arrangement accusers say became a channel for grooming, coercion, and abuse. Ballard has denied wrongdoing.

This story is not a referendum on a movie, or a partisan argument about a wall. It is about what happens when a man builds a myth by borrowing other people’s pain, especially the pain of women and girls who will never be invited to testify as “experts,” because the only expertise they are allowed is survival.

It centers on Delia.

Rolling Stone profiled Delia in 2022, in the context of her court testimony against an international trafficking organization. It is the kind of reporting that reminds you what the word “case” actually means; prosecutors, victim advocates, filings, deadlines, fear. Survivors are not mascots; they are witnesses. Their stability is not an aesthetic preference, it can decide whether justice happens, whether immigration relief holds, whether a witness lives quietly or is hunted back into the shadows by the people who profited from her.

Delia is also the woman O.U.R. marketed as “Liliana.”

Lines is a former federal agent who became O.U.R.’s president. His deposition appears as Exhibit J in federal litigation. In it, Lines describes Delia as a trafficking victim based in New York and recounts a Washington trip that turns the entire “rescue” narrative on its head.

Lines testified that Delia accompanied Cherstyn Stockwell in D.C., and that there was a “situation” in which Ballard “went over and commandeered her and took her from New York, Delia, where she was.” He says he received calls from victim advocacy, Homeland Security, attorneys, and “everybody” warning that they could be in trouble “for victim tampering, for witness tampering … out of New York … without getting anybody’s permission.”

Read the accusation slowly. Not “we coordinated with counsel.” Not “we ensured safety.” Not “we got consent.” Instead commandeered; taken; lawyers and agencies calling; witness tampering hanging in the air like a charge sheet.

When asked directly if Ballard did this, Lines answered, “Oh, yes. He took Cherstyn Stockwell there and took her in the cover of dark, just brought her over without any kind of forewarning.” And then, Lines’ detail that lands like a slap, Stockwell appears and says, in substance, “Look at this trafficking victim we’ve got.”

The phrasing is revealing. “We’ve got.” Not “she’s safe.” Not “she asked.” Possession, display, conquest. A human being reduced to a trophy.

Why does this matter beyond one grotesque moment? Because trafficking cases are not content. They are fragile legal ecosystems. Prosecutors have strategies. Victim-witness coordinators build trust over months or years. Immigration protections, including U-visa relief, can hinge on a survivor’s stability, availability, and credibility in court. Defense attorneys look for any inconsistency, any disruption, any hint of outside influence to undermine a witness.

Lines also places Delia in the orbit of policy theater. He testified that Ballard took Delia to testify “in front of Congress” as part of an argument that a border wall would have “prevented her trafficking”, and described a lunch between hearings involving Ballard, Delia, Teyva Ware, and David Jacobs. Again, this is not merely a trip. It is the conversion of a witness into a credential; the survivor behind the microphone, the camera getting its “proof,” the politician getting a story with a face.

Now consider what Lines testifies happen next, to Delia during that same Washington episode. An account makes the contrast impossible to ignore.

He testified that during that lunch break, a woman nearby had on “tight spandex pants” and bent over at a counter, Lines testified that “David Jacobs and Tim” lowered their heads to get a better look and then began making crude, sexual comments about her body about her appearance, that made Teyva Ware uncomfortable and “very disgusted,” especially because they were made “in front of her and also a trafficking victim” they were supposedly advocating for.

That is the story’s moral core, a trafficking survivor is brought to Washington as a living emblem of sexual exploitation, and the men marketing themselves as her defenders cannot stop themselves from performing the very objectification they claim to fight, while she is sitting there. The saviors, even at their most public and polished, cannot maintain the pretense for the length of a lunch.

Lines’ testimony then addresses the central question that Ballard’s mythology depends on… did he rescue her?

That’s exactly what Lines was asked: “Was she ever a victim that he rescued? Was Delia?” Lines answers: “Absolutely not. None whatsoever,” while saying Ballard made it appear as if she was “a victim of his or a rescuee of his.” This is not a metaphor. It is an on-the-record denial of Ballard’s ownership claim over the story he sold.

If that sworn statement is accurate, then “Liliana” was not a rescue story. It was a branding operation.

And if you are wondering why an organization would risk such recklessness, why it would take a witness under cover of night, why it would gamble with lawyers’ warnings and federal attention… the answer is one word: credibility.

What everyone fails to realize, is that both human trafficking and anti-human trafficking have the same economy, a survivor’s presence becomes a credential. Which in turn leads to more money. Not a person with legal vulnerability, not a witness in a fragile prosecution, but a living exhibit, evidence that the story being told on stage is true.

Ballard built a movement that did not merely “help survivors.” It sold a hero narrative, the indispensable man with the daring missions. Hero narratives are hungry beasts. They require faces. They require witnesses. They require a survivor standing behind the savior in a hearing room so the camera can fall in love.

This is why Jon Lines’ sworn deposition matters. Lines’ federal background and leadership role provided institutional sheen; it also helps explain your reporting claim that Ballard wanted him to lend credibility and access. In the same way, Delia’s presence provided moral authority on demand. When the myth needs more oxygen, it borrows a human being’s lungs.

And Lines’ deposition, read in full, does not depict a single bad night. It depicts a workplace atmosphere where boundaries were negotiated as inconveniences. In the same excerpt, Lines recounts Teyva Ware raising concerns about unwanted hugging and physical contact from an employee, and describes how Ware said she disliked hugging and felt uncomfortable. He portrays a culture in which a woman’s discomfort could be reframed as her failure to be “warm” or “welcoming,” and where women were expected to absorb boundary violations to keep men comfortable.

This is not unrelated. It is the same reflex, women as instruments, women as props, women as mood regulators, women as means. It is the social logic that makes it possible to treat a trafficking witness as a movable asset, because the organization has already trained itself to treat female boundaries as negotiable.

There is also a practical consequence that never appears in the hero’s montage, immigration relief is not a trophy you can wave at a gala. For many trafficking survivors, a U visa is not “paperwork”; it is the thin line between rebuilding a life and being forced back into vulnerability. Lines’ account of agencies and attorneys warning about victim or witness tampering is, at bottom, a warning about that line snapping. A reckless cross-jurisdiction stunt can endanger cooperation, credibility, and protection, “not in theory”, but in the only place that matters- the real world.

It is worth pausing on the audacity of the tableau. Ballard sells border policy as a moral emergency, and he sells himself as the man brave enough to solve it. Then, in Lines’ telling, he helps create the very kind of legal chaos that professionals spend their lives trying to prevent, because the brand demanded a survivor in the frame.

Delia has said she keeps a framed, hand-drawn picture beside her bed, a private reminder that she survived, that she escaped, that the life she has now was fought for inch by inch. It is not art for display. It is a talisman of survival.

According to her account, she shared the meaning of that drawing only in trusted spaces; with fellow survivors and during court testimony against her traffickers. She believed the first time the image itself was shown publicly was in her interview with Rolling Stone in 2022.

Yet years earlier, Operation Underground Railroad had been promoting a digital Valentine’s Day card bearing striking thematic similarities to that deeply personal symbol. Marketed as the design of a survivor called “Liliana,” the card was presented as a feel-good token of “love,” detached from the reality that the image it echoed represented escape from sexual exploitation.

This is not an isolated oddity. It reflects a pattern critics have described repeatedly, the conversion of private survival into public sentiment, the repackaging of trauma into something sellable. In that transformation, meaning shifts. A reminder that you are safe now becomes a seasonal product. A personal symbol becomes fundraising material.

The moral problem is not subtle. What Delia understood as a marker of endurance was, in the public marketplace, rendered into a gesture of romance, context stripped away, pain softened, dignity traded for emotional appeal.

And the irony cuts deeper still. By Delia’s own account, the man who trafficked her first approached her with the language of love. Promises. Romance. A better life in New York. That vocabulary of tenderness was the bait that led her into years of captivity and sexual exploitation.

Now imagine that same word — love — printed across a digital card inspired by her survival.

It would be grotesque if it were fiction. As fact, it reads like moral vertigo.

The marketing copy reportedly misidentified her origins, even the region she came from. Details blurred. Biography softened. Specifics sacrificed for sentiment. Because the point was never accuracy, it was emotional appeal.

Who is the audience for such a product? A lover? A spouse? A child? A crush? A stranger browsing for a feel-good gesture? The answer is implicit, the consumer is not meant to confront the reality behind the image. The suffering must remain aesthetic, not understood.

This is Human Trophyism in miniature, survival turned into symbolism, symbolism turned into merchandise.

Not memory. Not dignity. Not truth.

Just something to click, buy, and send.

Now place that marketing next to the sworn testimony of Jon Lines.

If this sounds like a one-off lapse in judgment, remember the broader record. Multiple civil suits have alleged Ballard abused women in the context of purported operations; Associated Press reported on one such lawsuit and its description of a “couple’s ruse,” while also noting Ballard’s denials. AP has also reported that the Salt Lake County District Attorney declined to file criminal charges in one matter, citing insufficient admissible evidence, a legal conclusion that does not, by itself, resolve what happened.

Return to Delia

Now return to Delia, because the moral center of this story is not the man who sought the spotlight. It is the woman whose life was used to power it.

Delia’s post-trafficking life, as reflected in survivor-centered reporting, is the opposite of the hero fantasy. It is learning, working, navigating systems, carrying language, and carrying memory. It is the quiet endurance of someone who has every reason to disappear and instead chooses to be seen on her own terms. That is what survivor agency looks like: not being “had,” not being displayed, but deciding when and how your own story is told.

Which is why the Stockwell line, “Look at this trafficking victim we’ve got”, is so damning. It is not merely tasteless. It is philosophical. It reveals the worldview in which victims are inventory, something acquired, something showcased, something that confers status on the possessor.

That worldview also explains the card. On the surface it is a minor grift: $4.99 for a digital Valentine’s Day message wrapped in a survivor narrative. But in its bones it is a morality play designed to flatter the buyer: you are not just sending an e-card; you are participating in “rescue.” The survivor becomes a brand ambassador for your good feeling. The organization becomes the broker of righteousness. And the truth, who rescued whom, who testified, who risked deportation, who endured, gets shunted offstage because it is inconveniently specific.

This is why myths matter. When a demigod is revealed to be a small, cowardly man, the fall does not merely injure him. It stains everyone who propped up the myth, the donors who paid for the fantasy, the politicians who used the story, the media ecosystem that rewarded the performance. They pay twice, and the public is lied to.

It is fashionable in some political circles to recoil at words like power, inequality, systemic racism, and misogyny, as though naming a structure were the same thing as inventing one. But the story you have just read is not theory. It is mechanism.

A well-connected white man becomes the face of an industry built on the suffering of girls and women who are disproportionately poor, brown, and legally vulnerable. He is granted access, deference, platforms, donors, and eventually cinematic myth. He moves easily through political spaces where trafficking is invoked not as a complex criminal justice and human rights issue, but as a moral symbol… folded neatly into debates about borders, national identity, and cultural decline.

Meanwhile, the survivor’s reality is bureaucratic and fragile. It involves prosecutors, victim advocates, immigration filings, therapy appointments, court dates, and the long, unglamorous work of rebuilding a life. Her legal safety can hinge on consistency, stability, and the quiet coordination of professionals whose names never appear in movie credits.

But in political storytelling, survivors are streamlined. They become shorthand for larger anxieties: immigration, crime, the fear that the nation itself is under siege. In that atmosphere, a survivor’s story stops being hers and becomes a credential for someone else’s authority, a way to stand next to power and say, I have seen the darkness, therefore trust me with the solution.

The racial and class asymmetry here is not incidental; it is what makes the transaction possible. When the hero is a white American man with institutional backing and media access, he is presumed credible before he speaks. When the witness is a young immigrant woman whose safety once depended on the discretion of the system, she is presumed usable.

In Jon Lines’ deposition, the phrase attributed to Cherstyn Stockwell — “look what we’ve got” — lands with particular force. It is not merely callous. It reveals a worldview in which a survivor can be treated as a symbol first and a person second. That mindset does not arise in a vacuum. It grows in a culture where women’s boundaries are negotiable, where immigrant lives are politicized, and where suffering can be repackaged as moral theater for audiences eager to believe in saviors.

Americans like to believe the rules are neutral. But imagine the roles reversed. Imagine an unknown Black man with no institutional backing removing a white female crime victim from her jurisdiction just before trial, presenting her in political settings, and claiming proximity to her suffering as proof of his moral authority. It is difficult to believe the response would be indulgent.

Power is not just what you do. It is what you are allowed to do without immediate consequence.

Then comes the Valentine’s card, the petty artifact that reveals the whole moral economy. It’s the American way!

O.U.R.’s pitch asked the public to buy a $4.99 digital card wrapped in the story of “Liliana,” a survivor said to have designed it. Your reporting asserts that the card was not hers and that the idea was appropriated, another theft layered on top of theft, taking something a survivor used as hope and repackaging it as merchandise. If Lines’ testimony describes the seizure of Delia’s body for publicity, the card illustrates the seizure of her narrative for profit, a private source of resilience turned into a storefront.

And all of this, every hearing, every photo, every pitch, sits on top of a simpler truth: Delia is the one who did the hard work.

Tim Ballard, Cherstyn Stockwell, nor anyone at Operation Underground Railroad ever offered an update on the young woman they branded “Liliana.” They could not even keep straight where she was from, or how old she was, while marketing her suffering with confident precision. What they never told you was what she said in her victim impact statement, words not meant for spectacle, but for reckoning:

“Francisco, I hope that you go to hell because that is where you put me.”

That is not the voice of a symbol. It is the voice of a human being who survived something most of us could not bear to imagine. But her humanity was inconvenient to the story being sold.

They did not tell you she speaks three languages.

They did not tell you she works as a victim advocate.

They did not tell you she listens to Mexican music, Chicago, and Air Supply, small, ordinary details that make up an actual life.

Because an actual life complicates a useful narrative.

To them, she was not Delia. She was “Liliana”, a name polished for presentation, a character in a script that needed her pain but not her personhood. A product that conferred moral glow and financial return.

It is hard to find language strong enough for this. But here is the truth stripped bare:

After men treated her body as something to be sold, Ballard and co. treated her survival the same way.

Different setting. Same transaction.

And that is not rescue. That is exploitation wearing the costume of virtue. Ballard’s business is exploiting the exploited. Nothing more, and there is nothing less.

She endured trafficking. She testified. She faced perpetrators in court. Rolling Stone’s account is not a superhero movie, it is a record of an ordinary person forced into extraordinary courage. That is what heroism actually looks like: not the man with the microphone, but the woman with the case number.

This is where the myth does its deepest damage. It rewrites the ledger of courage. It turns the survivor’s risk into the rescuer’s glory. It takes a girl’s agency, polishes it into a fundraising narrative, and sells it back to the public with the hero’s name on the receipt.

So what should an honest ending sound like?

It should sound like the collapse of a myth that needed other people’s wounds to stay upright. It should sound like the record, “court proceedings, sworn depositions, and years of reporting, finally catching up with the storyteller.” And it should sound like Delia getting her name back.

There is a reason myths are dangerous beyond their falsehood. They harm the very people they claim to honor. They pull attention and money away from survivor-centered services and toward spectacle. They encourage a “raid” mentality instead of a witness-protection mentality. They invite the wrong men into the room and then act surprised when the room becomes unsafe.

Delia deserved protection, not possession. She deserved coordination, not kidnapping-style bravado. She deserved a movement that treated her as a person, not a prop.

And if Tim Ballard’s legend cannot survive that demand, then the legend was never about the victims. It was about him.

Call It What It Is

There are no softer words for this. It is Suffering Appropriation. It is Human Trophyism.

---

Resources and Further Reading

Tim Ballard written testimony to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee (2019)
White House meeting remarks on human trafficking and border security (2019)
Deseret News reporting on Ballard meeting with Ivanka Trump and senators (2017)
VICE World News reporting on Ballard’s departure from OUR and misconduct investigation
Associated Press reporting on lawsuits and allegations involving Ballard
Utah DA declines to charge Tim Ballard, founder of anti-child-trafficking organization | AP News
Rolling Stone, “Sex Trafficking Survivor Speaks Out,” 2022
American Crime Journal investigative reporting on Ballard and OUR
OUR promotional Valentine’s Day card (Facebook post)
Jon Lines sworn deposition testimony (Exhibit J)
The Arrest of Earl Venton Buchanan – American Crime Journal |