mrgirl's Sound of Freedom Review

My Relationship with Child Sexual Abuse

In 2020, after posting my controversial Cuties review (in which I said the director had done a good job of making the twerking 11-year-olds look hot), I received a hail of death threats.

Defiantly, I made this video as an intro for future movie reviews. I’d like you to watch it.

The Sound of Freedom, regardless of its authenticity, is a fantasy film about hurting and killing child predators.

As an advocate for child safety who is also widely considered a pedophile, I am in the unique position of having been on both sides of this fantasy.

When I was growing up, my father psychologically evaluated families and testified in child abuse cases for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. Sometimes he would tell me stories about his job.

“I interviewed a kid who won’t stop playing Mortal Kombat.”

“Like me?” I was nine, and quite enamored with the game myself.

“No, not like you. He gets violent whenever anyone makes him stop.”

Whoa. You can do that? You can just do Mortal Kombat in real life? To your own mother?

He always made sure to impress upon me the difference between normal people (us) and abusive people (the ones who get their kids taken away).

“There’s no such thing as verbal abuse,” he loved to say.

One day as he drove me to school, a little bubble rose up through the slime of my subconscious and popped.

“Hey, why did you make me stop being friends with ***** in preschool?” First I wasn’t allowed to go to his house, then he wasn’t allowed to come to mine either, officially severing our relationship. I'd demanded an explanation for my best friend being taken away at the time, but was told to ask again when I was older.

So now I was 12, and got my explanation:

“His father was raping him.”

I quietly absorbed this.

“And he was mildly retarded. It wasn’t good for you.”

But he was my best friend.

“Max, you were carrying around Kleenex and wiping his nose for him."

I pictured *****’s father raping him. I assumed my father meant anally, and even for a four-year-old, ***** had been a small person.

I didn’t feel anger then, and I still don’t now looking back. What I felt was more like dread. The way you’d feel upon discovering you’d been standing at the edge of a pit in total darkness.

People fall in all the time.

Child Sexual Abuse Facts from YWCA | Archive

About 93 percent of children who are victims of sexual abuse know their abuser. Less than 10 percent of sexually abused children are abused by a stranger.

One in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused before they turn 18 years old.

The younger the victim, the more likely it is that the abuser is a family member. Of those molesting a child under six, 50 percent were family members. Family members also accounted for 23 percent of those abusing children ages 12 to 17.

The Sound of Freedom panders to our collective delusion that child sexual abuse can be stopped with violence. That you can out-violence violence.

Link | Archive

Child sexual abuse is a pit. You can’t kill a hole. You can fall in. You can push others in. And sometimes you can pull people out. Usually not.

Two of my middle school girlfriends, one molested by her stepfather and the other by her uncle, were both unwilling to report their abusers to any authorities. Their families knew about the ongoing abuse and did nothing.

In my twenties, over breakfast the morning after we first had sex, I asked a new girlfriend, “Have you ever been raped?”

She grew stern and said, “I wasn’t raped. I was molested.”

By her grandfather, who had also abused her mother and some other female family members. There was some light shunning but basically the family didn’t talk about it.

I pressed her to confront her parents, as she obviously had some unresolved feelings about their non-reaction to the abuse. She waffled for months, telling me she’d already spoken up and they didn’t seem to care. Finally she caved, and re-told them she’d been molested.

They reacted with shock, apparently having blocked out all knowledge of the abuse, and then promptly dropped it again.

Another girl I dated had a family with a nearly identical sexual abuse pattern—the grandfather molested his daughter, was still left alone with his granddaughter, and then molested her, too, all without consequence.

When I was 16, my mother told me that her father used to take baths with her until she was 14. We were out to dinner after a family therapy session (she had just kicked me out of her house, and would later tell me she had done this partly because she was sexually attracted to me.)

In response to the bath story, I said, “So he sexually abused you?”

“No. He was just inappropriate with me.”

I struggled to imagine how my naked fourteen-year-old mother and her father could have positioned themselves in the bathtub without any sexual abuse taking place.

I told my father about it (they were divorced by then) and he said it sounded like she was exaggerating—most likely they stopped taking baths when she was 10, not 14.

He also told me she’d professed her sexual attraction to me because she likes “being a bad girl” and it was the worst thing she could think of to say, but it wasn’t true.

All told, in my personal experience, when people find out a child is being sexually abused, they pretend it isn’t happening and hope it goes away on its own.

So, my eager pedo-hunters, does your bloodlust extend to throwing your own family into a woodchipper?

Probably not. This is my issue with the fantasy version. It makes being a hero a lot easier. Yeah, if I saw a kid getting raped in a parking lot by a serial killer dressed as a clown and I had an AR-15, I would save the kid.

It’s a lot easier to shoot someone else’s uncle than your own.

But if you want to save kids from abuse, take a good look around your Thanksgiving dinner table. The hyper-partisan approach to conversations about child welfare (where we call our political opponents pedophiles) does not do much for children.

I should disclose here that I strongly dislike Donald Trump. I find the QAnon, conspiratorial anti-pedo, anti-Jew shit among his supporters very disconcerting, and it all looks to me like an excuse to join an insane cult so you don’t have to deal with complex problems in the real world.

I voted for Biden because I think Trump doesn’t respect the rule of law and has no morals. However, Biden has sniffed, kissed, and fondled too many children in public to stay in my good graces. I think he is a pedophile who has, at best, been “inappropriate” with kids. In private, the truth is probably worse, common things being common.

The Review

Unlike other films that get dragged into the culture war, The Sound of Freedom dove in headfirst, even accusing Hollywood of being resistant to its release in a message from Jim Caviezel during the end credits.

So, while other films can use the “it’s just a movie” defense against political interpretations, Sound of Freedom has waived its Fifth Amendment rights.

Tim Ballard, our real-life hero (who may have embellished his story, which was then greatly embellished by the film), is an undercover Homeland Security agent. Speaking to a younger agent in an early scene, he says, “Our job is to get the pedophiles.”

Do cops really talk like that? Last year I interviewed ex-state cop John Pizurro, who served as commander of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force in New Jersey. He used words like “predator,” “offender,” and “abuser” to describe the criminals they pursued.

“Pedophile” sounds like how random people talk on the Internet, not cops.

The younger agent asks Ballard, “How many pedophiles you caught?” It’s used as the first line in the trailer.

A pedophile is someone who is attracted to kids—that is different from someone who actually looks at child pornography or who buys and sells children.

When I was a personal trainer, there were some high school girls who used to flirt with me. I was 32, but they were indeed attractive. However I did not have sex with them, let alone kidnap them. See the difference?

I’m concerned about the leaky definitions of these words because it sets a precedent for thought-policing and jailing (or killing) people for having paraphilias they’ve never acted upon.

That said, I can empathize with the fear that pedophilia will be normalized. It is possible the concept of sex with minors will be destigmatized, “pedophile” will be designated a slur and replaced with a euphemism (like MAP), and the age of consent will drop.

The age of consent is a fragile thing. It's not really based on anything except norms, so if we want to keep it several years beyond the age of puberty, we have to protect those norms. I find it hard to believe progressives will protect 15-year-old girls from sex when they are happy to give them double-mastectomies and other “gender affirming care.”

Anyway, cops don’t talk like that, I don’t think, so it felt out of place, especially in a movie whose effectiveness hinges on its authenticity.

Ballard tricks a sex trafficker in custody (who is indeed also a pedophile) into selling him a little boy. The trafficker is suspicious at first, but Ballard sensually caresses his arm and wins him over.

This struck me as homophobic but, hey, maybe I’m just a sensitive liberal.

When Ballard arrests him, he gets an insane manic grin and says, "You're under arrest for crimes against children.”

The trafficker says, “I trusted you."

Ballard shoots back: “Never trust a pedophile."

Oh hey the studio posted the scene on TikTok:

@angelstudiosincNever trust a pedophile. See "Sound of Freedom" in theaters now. Tickets at the link in bio. #AngelStudios #SoundofFreedom #AmplifyLight

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

You see what I mean about the fantasy thing? The hateful glee we feel thinking about how fun it would be to ruin the life of an actual real pedophile and laugh right in his face about it?

The first half of the movie is pretty good. Jim Caviezel masterfully embodies common feelings about child exploitation—hopelessness, rage, and frustration with a system that allows kids to fall through the cracks. The long, static shots of his face are the best in the movie.

The second half falls apart. Ballard rescues the little boy sold to him by the trafficker, but the boy’s sister is still missing. Ballard vows to save her.

He comes up with a plan to announce the opening of a high-end child sex club and buy up all the slaves in Cartagena, Colombia.

In a slow setup, Caviezel and his allies LARP as predators to convince the local traffickers to sell them children. It feels like Ocean’s 11, and the tension built in the first act disappears.

(One of the traffickers wears eyeliner and acts really gay—homophobia strike two.

Then there is a joke about a man awkwardly kissing another man’s hand, and that’s three strikes, folks—the movie is homophobic.)

The fake sex club ruse works. Around 50 children are saved and the traffickers are arrested, but the little girl isn’t among them.

Ballard refuses to give up his search. He finds out the girl has likely been sold to a rebel warlord deep in the jungle.

The bounds of believability stretch as Ballard poses as a doctor providing humanitarian aid, rides a boat into the jungle, and convinces the rebel army to allow him into their camp. He finds the girl and, in a scene straight out of a Mr. Beast video, calls her name and grins at her while she freaks out.

Naturally, the warlord has chosen her to be his personal child sex slave (she is the most attractive child sex slave in the movie so this makes sense), which means Ballard has to sneak into the warlord’s hut to save her.

In the worst moment of the movie, we cut from Ballard pretending to be a doctor during the day to Ballard sneaking around the encampment in the middle of the night. This shatters the already-unraveling illusion of true-to-life accuracy, because it wouldn’t even fly for a totally fictional character to pull this off.

Ballard sneaks into the warlord’s hut (he’s outside drunkenly singing with his comrades) and wakes up the girl, who screams, alerting the warlord.

Ballard sees the warlord coming back to the hut, so he hides under the girl’s bed. The girl tells the warlord she screamed because she had a nightmare, so the warlord decides to fuck her right then and there (he says it will make her feel better).

Ballard sneaks up behind him, beats him up, and chokes him to death while the girl watches.

None of that actually happened.

A fact-versus-fiction breakdown has been provided by Operation Underground Railroad (the anti-sex trafficking nonprofit founded by Tim Ballard, from which he has recently departed for unknown reasons).

Sound of Freedom: Based on A True Story (Except for the Parts That Aren't)

This did not happen. However, in real life, Tim did lead a group of O.U.R. operators, posing as doctors, into a jungle on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic a few years after Operation Triple Take in search for Gardy.  

No one was rescued, but the operation did advance the search for Gardy, and operators were able to provide medical care to many children in need. 

They should have stuck with the truth. Failing to save the day would have made for a strong ending that highlights the need to do as much good as you can in the face of futility. It would have left me feeling unsettled and motivated, staring into that dark pit again, knowing that Gardy is in there.

Instead we get sold the same old fantasy we always do with action films—the fantasy of a perfect situation where killing someone you hate happens to also be the most moral choice.

Interestingly, Operation Underground Railroad seems to echo some of my criticisms:

This story depicts what human trafficking typically looks like. FALSE 

At the first of the film, it shows security camera footage of several different kidnappings. This is real footage, and while this type of human trafficking exists, it isn't the majority. When we hear the phrase “sex trafficking,” our minds often picture dusty, dark alleyways in foreign countries where orphaned children from the streets are kidnapped, exploited, and sold. And that is a horrific reality, but it is also important to understand that sex trafficking is not just a foreign issue, but an acute domestic concern within the United States that is ever increasing. 

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, human trafficking has been reported in all 50 states (NCMEC, 2022). Predators are soccer coaches and trusted teachers, neighbors across the street, uncles and aunts.   

The film also depicts children in shipping containers. It is important to note that Hollywood took creative license in portraying the different ways that children can be trafficked. While cases exist where children are transported in various vehicles, most trafficking happens through a manipulative grooming process. “Sound of Freedom” illustrates this well in the child modeling scenes where children (and sometimes their parents) are led to believe that they can make money by modeling, receive food if they come to their house, or receive love if they become the trafficker’s boyfriend/girlfriend – and it ends in sexual exploitation or trafficking. It is vital for parents, young adults, teens, and children to know the signs of grooming so they can recognize when someone may have ill intent.   

I would rather see a movie about the more common kind of child sex trafficking, the kind we can do something about in our own communities. I hope they make one.

I’d recommend The Whistleblower (2010) and Spotlight (2015) if you want to watch something more grounded in reality.

The movie ends as the girl, safely back at home with her family, plays a hand drum and sings what turns out to be the main theme song, called “Sound of Freedom.”

During the end credits, Jim Caviezel appears on screen to give us a final message:

[…] I want to make one thing clear. This movie you've just watched isn't about me or Tim Ballard. It's about those kids. You know, Steve Jobs once said, The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. Abraham Lincoln credited Harriet Stowe when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.

I have never heard her called anything but Harriet Beecher Stowe.

This powerful story inspired millions to rise up and fight against slavery. I think we can make Sound of Freedom the Uncle Tom's Cabin of 21st century slavery.

You can’t make your movie a cultural phenomenon by directly telling the audience it ought to be one. Also, nearly every American is already against child sex trafficking, so I don’t see how this film can have the same impact as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

This film was actually made five years ago. It wasn't released till now with every roadblock that you can imagine being tossed in the way. And the names you see here on the screen, took a stand, and they made sure this story could be shown to all of you. And now all of you have the opportunity to continue telling this story. We don't have big studio money to market this movie, but we have you, and the baton has now been passed to you.

Every film faces roadblocks, especially mediocre films like this one. I think he’s implying that the pedophile Jews (“big studio money”) who run Hollywood don’t want anyone raising awareness about human trafficking.

You are the storytellers that can get people to come see this film in theaters. When you come to a theater, you experience movies differently. There is no pause button, there are no distractions. We all have an experience as we watch the film together as a community. It makes it possible for strong messages like this one to take root. Sound of freedom is a hero's tale, but I'm not talking about the character I play. It’s the heroic brother and sister in this film that worked to save each other. They are the true heroes. The most powerful person in this world is the storyteller. Together, we have a chance to make these two kids, and the countless children that they represent, the most powerful people in the world by telling their story in a way only the cinema can do. For a couple of months, while Sound of Freedom is in theaters, these kids can be more powerful than the cartel kingpins, or presidents, or congressmen, or even tech billionaires. We believe this movie has the power to be a huge step forward toward ending child trafficking, but it will only have that effect if millions of people see it.

Okay. How is the movie a huge step forward toward ending child trafficking?

Now I know it's weird, because we're in a theater, but feel free to pull out your phones and scan this QR code. We don't want finances to be the reason someone doesn't see this movie. So Angel studios boldly has set up a pay-it-forward program where you can pay for someone else's ticket who might not otherwise see it. If you're able, we invite you to pay it forward by buying a ticket for someone else, or if your budget is tight, share the already available free tickets with as many friends as you can, or do both. Join us and millions of others as we ring Sound of Freedom and hope throughout the world. And just remember this: God's children are not for sale. Thank you.

The Sound of Freedom is a call to action to… watch The Sound of Freedom? Is the money being donated or used to fight human trafficking somehow?

Not that I can find, no.

According to this article on ministrywatch.com (never heard of them but they cite public filings), Operation Underground Railroad has been massively profitable as a nonprofit.

So it’s a mostly-fictional movie that is supposed to inspire us to buy each other tickets to the movie.

How the fuck is this going to end slavery?

Again, I’m not the type to watch a political movie and say “how is this going to fix anything,” but the filmmakers are literally saying that it might end slavery.

See, this is why pedo-jacketing is so popular. They can rake in all this money, say all these completely delusional things about the film, make shit up, manipulate people into buying extra tickets, and anyone who calls them out for it is siding with predators.

I guess I really am a pedophile.