Tim Ballard, the disgraced “anti-sex-trafficking” expert, was the subject of a hit 2023 biographical film and serial sexual misconduct allegations in the same year. After Ballard’s fall, the people he helped arrest in Washington want to know why no one seems willing to take a second look at their cases.
Back in 2014, a Washington State Patrol sergeant named Carlos Rodriguez was hunting for money. His unit, the Missing and Exploited Children Task Force, faced a budget shortfall, and legislators were of little help—they were in the midst of broad austerity measures, and their mood was decidedly tightfisted. Rodriguez needed a new revenue source to tap. Amid the crisis, a coworker happened to tell Rodriguez about Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a nonprofit group out of Utah that had been privately organizing and funding its own international sex trafficking sting operations. Inspiration struck, and Rodriguez reached out to OUR and its founder, Tim Ballard.
The details of the negotiations between Rodriguez and OUR are not known, but the result was a signed contract: OUR would fund a series of stings carried out by Rodriguez’s task force. The operations would follow a formula popularized by Dateline’s “To Catch A Predator” series: Police officers would portray themselves as minors—or as adults facilitating contact with minors—in internet chatrooms and encourage men to meet up with them for sex. The undercover officer would provide an address. In the event that a targeted person showed up, he would be confronted by a SWAT-like police team and arrested.
Rodriguez supervised the first collaborative sting operation in Aug. 2015. OUR staff embedded with the Missing and Exploited Children Task Force, providing training as well as financial backing to the tune of $20,000. The sting itself was originally dubbed Operation Underground Railroad, though in later press releases, it was rechristened Operation Net Nanny.
Ezra Wright was 20 years old when he was arrested during a Net Nanny operation in 2016. The circumstances surrounding his arrest were typical of the stings. He responded to a “casual encounter” ad posted by an undercover Washington State Police (WSP) officer identifying himself as an adult woman on a website that was supposed to be exclusively adult.
“It was more of a scam” than it was detective work, Dan Wright, Ezra’s father, told The Appeal. Wright says the undercover operative approached his son with “a very fast-paced” solicitation, “heavily steering the conversation” toward an in-person hookup. Convinced that the person he exchanged messages with was a grown woman engaged in elaborate role-play, Ezra Wright took the bait. He drove to the address he was given and knocked on the door. In the next moment, Washington State Patrol officers ordered him to the ground at gunpoint.
At first glance, Net Nanny was an unqualified success. The stings landed hundreds in prison and …
So is it all about the money for LE?
The need for funding is what this started as in WA by one unscrupulous gent and they found a way to get it with another unscrupulous gent which has now grown like a weed (and just as bad). Hence, this is why the WA State Senate has been trying to get considerations for different sentencing for those who are caught up in these passed into law. Have to wonder if one in the senate knows someone who was caught up in it, which is what we’ve always said in the forum about no action until they are touched by what they sanction to start. In the end, the math does not add up and never will.
Sting operations coupled with plea deals make for a flurry of arrests and convictions for LE and the DA/Prosecutors with very little legitimate police work or prosecutor effort. “Justice” on the cheap. Makes for good press and statistics for DAs/Prosecutors standing for re-election.
This is an excellent article, thank you. One has to wonder why it is pretty much only America, home of the most “extreme” free speech constitutional rights on earth, that does these stings? (The UK allows third parties to do it, and there are prosecutions based on them, but those are relatively recent–some other countries may as well, but I doubt to the scale of the US.) After all, every single one of these men is only being prosecuted for something they said to an adult–there is no other “criminal” behavior. How can speech between adults that does not involve threats to actual people be felonious in a country where the First Amendment has been granted such sweeping protective power over our speech? How can judges let the likes of Ballard and “Operation Underground Railroads” be the arbiters of what speech is legal and is illegal in the United States? These aren’t sophisticated, powerful legal minds with massive war chests behind them, they’re suburban sheriffs angling to get an extra $50k here and there.