Ending Child Sex Trafficking Part1

Jared Bradley [00:00:22]:

I have a special guest named Paul Hutchinson. Paul is the executive producer behind the smash movie, “Sound of Freedom, and if you haven’t had a chance to go see Sound of Freedom, you absolutely need to go see it. This movie is about. Geez. If you don’t know about it then you’ve been living in a rock. It’s one of those movies that came in a non-traditional way to reach the theaters and I’m gonna  have Paul explain that. Most importantly is the mission behind the movie. I invited Paul here to talk about child sex trafficking and just the blight on. That entire industry is 150 billion dollars and it’s just sick practice. It needs to stop and I think Paul is one of the main guys that’s going to help to make that happen. Paul, welcome to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you on.

Paul Hutchinson [00:01:46]:

Thank you Jared. Excited to share with your audience. 

Jared Bradley [00:01:53]:

I’ve been reading up on you and it’s interesting. I’ve been on your website as well as IMBD, that’s kind of the Hollywood website, and one of the first things I love to know is who I’m dealing with and who I’m talking with. I could tell a lot about you just based on the different descriptions from those two websites. Other than being knighted by the Knights of Templar, I think the rest of the accolades that IMBD gave you weren’t near as important as what I think you had on your website and I just want to give this to my audience, this is a quote on your website that says “he who has a powerful positive impact in the most lives wins”  and you know Paul, I think that says a lot about you. You are the type of guy that honestly the world needs and I know you’re probably not one to dwell too much on accolades. I just want to tell you right up front, we appreciate what you do and God bless all of your efforts and everybody that you’re working with. 

Paul Hutchinson [00:03:15]:

Thank you Jared. The most important part of that sentence was “everybody I’m working with.” I will say this in the Sound of Freedom movie, there are hundreds of unsung heroes and many of these men and women are still today undercover. They don’t need their faces known, they can’t, because of the work that they’re doing yet, they were very much involved not only in the Columbia Rescue Mission but many of the other ones that were portrayed in that movie. You have to take a lot of different roles and put them all together in a few characters but they’re good people, everywhere that are fighting this fight, that are rescuing the children, that are doing so from a place of the heart, a place of integrity, and doing it for the right reasons. I respect those men and women. 

Jared Bradley [00:04:06]:

You have been on over 70 of these rescue missions and the Sound of Freedom obviously focuses just on the one in Colombia. Wait. Where do we go with this? there’s so many questions I have.

Paul Hutchinson [00:04:24]:

Well I can tell you where it started with the sound of freedom and then you can ask some questions about some individual missions. The one in Cartagena Colombia was my first, that was 10 years ago, that galvanized my commitment to eradicate this problem. You can’t unsee something that dark.  At one point, I was sitting on a chair around this table with the traffickers and some of our operators and the traffickers got up and went into the house where they were keeping the children. I could hear some of the children crying and about 10 minutes later they came out. They had four virgins scared to death, three little girls, one little boy, this little boy they had given him cocaine because he was so scared, it was gonna hurt. I mean, what kind of monster thinks that that’s attractive? I was sitting on a chair and they presented this little 11 year old girl, the same one in the movie they were kind of focused on, they called her princess. She actually was there at that Island at that rescue. We just took a lot of different stories together and put them into the movie. She was standing in front of me scared to death shaking and they had put makeup on her face. You could tell that she had been crying because of the tears that had run her makeup, and she was looking at me with this fear in her eyes, like I was the guy who was there to defile her. I  was so glad it was us there and not some monster. I took her little hands, looked in her eyes and I asked her name. I said, come with Thomas and she didn’t answer.  I’m sure it was because her real name wasn’t princess, she was trying to figure out what she should say and I said, “Esta bien.” And I told the traffickers, “we still had to negotiate and send her back in the house.” But I made a commitment at that moment to myself, to God, to that child, that I would spend my life eradicating that problem. So I spent the next 10 years helping that foundation and many others on many undercover operations and led or played a key part in over 70. And we can go into depth on a bunch of them in 15 different countries where the kids came from and how we took these guys down. The moment that changed my life forever was seeing her eyes making that commitment and then half an hour later after the agents came and stormed the party, the child protective services people came into the house with the children and they started laughing and singing with the children. That Sound of Freedom was the most beautiful sound that I ever heard. That’s why we named the movie The Sound of freedom. I told him, I’ve spent my whole life making rich people richer. I want to make a difference, I want to help, what can I do? and if my skill sets, if my resources, if my whatever can help in fixing that problem I’m all in. So that’s where it all started for me. 

Jared Bradley [00:08:05]:

Wow! Paul, where do we go from there?

Paul Hutchinson [00:08:12]:

In the movie, just for reference, my character was Pablo. I was still undercover when we filmed the movie, I didn’t ever think that I would ever be public and so we didn’t name him Paul Hutchinson. We actually found a Latin actor. It’s the same one who’s the producer of the film Eduardo Verástegui plays Pablo. The investment manager who quits his job to go help in this plight of rescuing the kids. For the next year and a half they had me continue to play that role. I wasn’t Paul Hutchinson, I was Paul Stone. The problem was this, there’s a lot of guys like Jeffrey Epstein. They’re wealthy, they’re well spoken, they’re connected, they’re got big ass egos and the sting operation in multiple countries for the next year plus was to have the operators go deep cover, find these traffickers and tell them, “hey we’ve got a wealthy boss that’s interested in these horrible things” and get them to bring all of their inventory and connect them with a bunch of other traffickers in the region to pull all the kids together for one sting opportunity, where we could rescue them all and that could only happen if they had a rich playboy and I was kind of who I was, a rich playboy, I had built a big company, I had a basketball court in my basement, I had huge parties and nice cars. I never did anything immoral or illegal but I definitely had that image that they were looking to promote and it worked very well. Then after a year and a half of doing that, the foundation that I was helping provide services at the time, their board of directors decided that it was too dangerous for their teams to do the deep cover. To go in two in the morning in downtown Mexico City and find and connect with the traffickers. I had gotten really good at this undercover stuff and I had some other skills that made it somewhat safe in a dangerous place and so I was asked to move into that new role where I wasn’t the rich guy anymore. I was a guy working for a rich guy. In one place in Haiti, I  was asked to go in  posing as a doctor. There was a little boy who was kidnapped in front of a church house, his father was serving as a bishop in Haiti and  they had some other leads that they believed. He was in this region and there were a whole bunch of other trafficked victims that were in this area. So anyway, I was asked to change roles and that’s where it got really interesting. Me being able to be face to face with the most evil part of humanity. People selling eight, nine, ten-year-old children and convincing them to bring their children to a certain place or geotagging the location that they were keeping them. It was eye-opening to say the least. In fact if your audience has ever watched the documentary operation toussaint. Operation Toussaint was about the rescue that we did in Haiti. I had a friend that had a yacht, they provided the yacht for this, we had some high level influence celebrities that were there watching.  I had been deep undercover for months in cutting the head off the dragon. Wanted to just take down trafficking. You don’t see me in the movie, if you do, my face is blurred and I’m laughing with the traffickers but you don’t have cameras when you’re 2 am in downtown patientville outside of Port-au-Prince Haiti. At the end of that film you see this, there’s this little 14 year old girl, her face is blurred, she’s holding a teddy bear and she was taken when she was seven, her parents were killed in the earthquake nobody knew she was alive. This happens a lot in situations like earthquakes or wars like in Ukraine right now, where there’s a lot of displacement and the traffickers will move in. She was taken seven years before, and she was sold for sex 10, 15, 20 times a day for seven years and we were the first people to find her.  It was me and one of my operators, it was about two in the morning, in a really dangerous area of town. We had worked our way up to what I call a level three trafficker, these are the ones who physically hold the children in captivity. The other ones are ones that are creating the demand or whatnot. At that point. they say, “look, my boss will kill me and my whole family if I taste the candy before the party” but I have to verify you have it, so, I’ll give you a hundred dollars for each one or twenty dollars for each one that I can see and  they take you physically to where they’re holding them. And there was this door it was like four feet wide, it was about seven feet tall, steel, rusted on the side. Dangerous area of town. It was a female trafficker we called her Chill. She sticks a key in this door, opens it up and there’s this dirt hallway, dimly lit, got cobwebs and there were multiple cell doors down the left hand side. I’m talking no windows, no access, other than these steel doors down this hallway. She opens up one of these doors and the first thing that I see,  it’s not even a bed. It’s a steel plank held to the wall with a chain so that it could be folded up and a dirt floor, very small room, maybe six feet wide and six by six and to the left of that was a concrete block. And this child was sitting on that concrete block, looks at me with this blank look in her eyes, like this has happened for seven years I’ve given up. I wasn’t there but after we rescued her, I was told that she didn’t speak for two weeks and that the first words she said were ”I didn’t think anybody would come.” She had given up hope, six and a half years before and Jared, what makes me so mad, is that every single man who walked through that door for seven years, was there to harm her. We were the first ones to walk through that door that didn’t have that intention. Why would two guys from Utah, be at two in the morning and patientville outside of Port-au-Prince, why? because somebody has to stand up to this evil and every one of these kids have stories very similar to that. Now she’s in a healthy family, learning to dance, back to school. Anyway I’ll let you ask the questions. I just ramble sometimes. 

Jared Bradley [00:15:37]:

Thanks for joining us. Your attention today brings us one step closer to exposing and eliminating the evil that brings crime to our communities.