Breaking: Tim Ballard's Victims Speak Out to The Blaze News Media - Eric Moutsos' Thoughts

An 'extensive and very manipulative ... plan': The apparent ruse of the couples ruse.

To those in the outside world, it might seem obvious that engaging in sexual contact for the sake of helping trafficked children is wildly inappropriate. But the women who spoke with Blaze News indicated that Ballard gradually implemented an "extensive and very manipulative ... plan" to convince them to participate in things they otherwise would never have considered doing.

One of the main tactics Ballard used, they claimed, was to lean on their desire to help victims. "Is there anything you wouldn't do to save a child?" he would allegedly ask.

According to one woman's summary, in preparation for a possible mission, Ballard said something to the effect of: "This is going to be a really seedy place. What if this happens? Would you be willing to do this? Well, well, what if I need this? Would you be comfortable doing that?

"And then it's all about testing those limits," she added.

The women also claimed that Ballard would then bad-mouth unnamed women who had allegedly gone on couples ruses in the past, slamming them as "crazy" and claiming that they had fallen in love with him along the way. Such stories, perhaps apocryphal, seemingly motivated the women to prove their mettle and their devotion to the cause by trying to outdo their supposed predecessors on the couples ruse.

When they found themselves questioning the legitimacy of tactics involving sexual contact, they often doubted their own instincts, relying on Ballard's breadth of knowledge about rescue missions to convince themselves that such tactics were normal. "Just remember that Tim's the expert in your learning," one woman recalled telling herself. "Just don't question him. Just do it, as he's right and you're wrong."

She also claimed that sometimes an associate of Ballard — whose identity is unclear but whose role appears to have included booking flights for those going on O.U.R. missions — would remind her about Ballard's superior field experience. "Don't assume you know better than Tim," he'd say, she claimed. "He hates it when these women he brings undercover start thinking they're smarter than him. He's been doing this for 20 years. He knows so much more than you know."

Ballard even allegedly told some of them that engaging in sex play with him might improve their marriages, even as he also allegedly told them not to tell their husbands about what they were doing. "You can take that sexual charge ... home," one accuser claimed he told her.

Another woman claimed that Ballard repeatedly warned her that, should she fail in her couples ruse mission, she would have wasted the hard-earned money that honest donors had entrusted to O.U.R. She said that he also told her that a poor performance from a fake girlfriend had ruined a mission in the past. "I was feeling like ... I have to prove to him that I won't misuse donors' dollars," she explained to Blaze News.

Another common theme from the women who spoke with Blaze News is that Ballard would use spiritual manipulation to coerce them into sex. Most, if not all, of the women who spoke with Blaze News have had some affiliation with the LDS church at some point in their lives, and in many cases, he would cite for them a passage from the Book of Mormon in which a man kills another man at the promptings of the Holy Spirit. According to multiple women, the purpose of this reference was to demonstrate that sometimes the Holy Spirit asks people to perform "unconventional" tasks, presumably such as engaging in extramarital sexual contact during couples ruses.