As you all know, I reviewed the anti-child trafficking film, Sound of Freedom. I found it to be a pretty good movie. That said, digging into the film’s background along with some of the film-makers, studio and Tim Ballard, there were a lot of red flags that came up. Operation Underground Railroad was founded by a right-wing religious former Homeland Security agent, Tim Ballard. This organization came under federal investigation in regards to how it received its funding, but it never got beyond the investigation. There have been a lot of accusations about the movie being tied to the conspiracy theory group QAnon, which Jim Caviezel has apparently subscribed to, which is a real shame. Well, it’s come out recently in the news that one of the “financiers” of Sound of Freedom is now in trouble with the law. Fabian Marta, who claims to have helped “save the movie from Disney” when they shelved it 5 years ago after buying 20th Century Fox, was recently arrested on charges of felony child kidnapping. This guy was notorious for grooming young women and children for his so-called “Sugar Baby/Sugar Daddy” parties. So, this guy is total slime. I wish I could say I was surprised. Them right-wingers have often accused the left of being pedophiles and child-traffickers, yet it’s the conservatives and religious people who are being caught, arrested, and convicted of these crimes. This begs the question: How long has Marta been doing this, and who knew about it? I want to believe that Angel Studios had no idea, but they are a faith-based film studio. Did Jim Caviezel know about this? Did Tim Ballard?
There are a lot of folks on Twitter who view Sound of Freedom as more of a “how-to” for traffickers rather than prevention, and I can definitely see that. I don’t agree 100 percent, but the movie does have issues. When I first heard about Marta’s arrest on Twitter, I had thoughts about taking down my review. I’m going to go on the presumption that Angel Studios didn’t know about Marta’s “extra-carricular” activities, so I’m not going to take my review down. It’ll stay up for the time being, and I still stand behind it. All this stuff that’s coming out about Sound of Freedom hasn’t deterred people from seeing it. But have people been actually seeing it? That’s another issue. There have been videos and pictures of movie theaters that the film-makers claim to have sold out in, that are completely empty. This is called astroturfing, and it’s the result of Angel Studios’ so-called Pay It Forward program. Somebody’s buying these tickets to artificially inflate the box-office numbers. The movie is about to hit the international scene, but I’m uncertain of how the international community is going to react to this, because they don’t seem to be far more skeptical about these movies than American audiences. So, yeah, a guy who helped finance a film about child sex trafficking is arrested for essentially child trafficking. It’s just another in a long list of black eyes that this movie’s been receiving, but it’s soldiering on. It’s bizarre.