Rescuing 5,000 Victims from Sex Traffickers with Paul Hutchinson, Founder of the Child Liberation Foundation

Speaker A: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Global Gurus, where every Friday we explore stories of international business and speak with industry leaders operating around the world. Thank you for joining us. As uh, most of you know, we start each podcast with a running segment called Faux Pas Fridays where we provide a funny blooper or a mistranslation that does not quite convey the professional image your organization wants to project. So here to present this week's Blooper and to launch our show is your host, Philipp Oyerbakh of Oyerbakh International.

Speaker B: Hello everyone. Today's guest has done some amazing work all over the world and I thought we would start with two very short bloopers, two very short signs, and the meaning of the words change according to the intonation and the word order. So this is a prime example of why AI, artificial, uh, intelligence, does not always work well with language translations. Because AI is very literal and in this kind of context you need cultural adaptation accordingly. So, uh, one is a sign in a Nairobi restaurant which says very simply in English, customers who find our waitresses rude ought to see the manager. And the second is a sign in an Athens hotel which says visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 daily. With that, today's guest is Paul Hutchinson. Uh, Paul is the primary investor and executive producer of the film Sound of Freedom which is currently, uh, in cinemas certainly in the United States and probably all around the world. The film stars Jim Caviezel, Mira Sorvino, Manny Perez and Bill Camp. The film highlights the story of a former Homeland Security agent and the rescue of over 120 victims in Colombia from a child trafficking organization, one of the largest child rescues in history. Paul himself had the pivotal role in the rescue and in the movie his part is played by the well known Mexican actor and producer, Eduardo Vera Verastigui. Is that the correct pronunciation?

Speaker C: That's correct. Eduardo Verastegi.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker C: He's also the producer of the Sound of Freedom.

Speaker B: Ah, uh, perfect. In the years after that mission, Paul founded the Child Liberation Fund, an organization actively involved in the fight against child trafficking. And he personally has led or held a critical role in over 70 undercover rescue missions in 15 countries. In total, Paul has contributed to or been directly involved in the rescue of over 5,000 children. Prior to his child rescue work, Paul was the co founder of uh, Bridge Investment Group Partners. Bridge now has over $48 billion in assets under management and is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange as brdg. Paul is happily married to the well known Colombian actress Ada Vanessa and donates his spare time to local charities, civic organizations, political groups and universities. Some of Paul's other achievements include he's the recipient of the 2022 International Medal of Freedom. He is the International Commissioner of Human Rights. He's a board member of the Make a Wish foundation and is recognized as one of the enlightened 50 top innovators committed to the common good. Welcome Paul. Delighted that you're with us. It's a tremendous honor.

Speaker C: Thank you, Philip. Excited to share with your audience.

Speaker B: Thank m you. So you have two equally fascinating personalities. One is the international real estate businessman and the other, which I'm sure is your true passion, which is the head of the Child Liberation Fund. So let's start with the career that supported you and from which you retired in 2017. And that's the company you co founded, the Bridge Investment Group. Uh, bridge has almost $49 billion of assets under management and these include over 50,000 US UH apartment buildings and extensive senior housing complexes and has investors from around the world. How did you start in this business and attract international investors, a feat which most real estate companies have not accomplished?

Speaker C: Well, it started out with, uh, in my early 20s I had a successful marketing company and I sold that when I was 29 years old for a good amount of money. And I started investing in real estate. And I realized if I didn't hire a guy smarter than me, I was going to lose all my money in real estate. So uh, I put together some guys, in fact, uh, John Pennington had done a bunch of import export and he knew how to cross all the T's and dot all the I's. I knew that I could make it rain, but I needed somebody to catch the water, otherwise everything turns to mud, so to speak. And so start investing in my own money. And in the beginning, when you're, when you're building an investment fund and uh, you have zero credibility like we did, our, our only way of being able to make it work is we had to contribute a considerable amount of money of our own. And we would tell people, hey, you know, if, if uh, we're ah, we're invested alongside you, uh, we gave like a 16 preferred rate of return and we didn't take any management fee. So in the beginning we had no credibility. And it took a whole year to raise a couple million dollars. And a big chunk of that was our own. And so after that we built the company when it was small to be able to support itself when it was big. Meaning we made sure that we had audited financials on everything that we were doing. So it was easy for people to see our track record and recognize what we were doing. And then beyond me and John, I remember early, uh, on, we were in this little office. It was so small that we would bump elbows if we turned around at the same time together. And John's asked the question, how do you become a multi billion dollar company? Did you see it in the beginning? And he said no. He said, actually, we'd be in there making phone calls, trying to raise money for $25,000 by Friday. And he said Paul would hang up on a call and he would turn around, put his little pinky by his, by his mouth and say, john, we're going to be a billion dollar fund someday. And John, John's like, uh, yeah, Paul, we just need $25,000 by Friday. So it's about that visualization of where we wanted to be is what I had. And he created the structure to make sure that we were doing it right from the beginning. We had so many people that came to us that said, hey, Paul, you know, you can do a lot easier if you don't jump through all those hoops. You don't have to get approved with the SEC and all this stuff, all that paperwork, all the money you're putting into legal, that's money you could put in your own pocket. And I'm like, no, I'm going to trust John. And he did it right. He did it right. Right from the beginning. He made sure that the structure was in a place where we could grow from there. The key to success was bringing on partners with credibility because again, I had credibility as an entrepreneur. I did pretty well in my marketing company. He did pretty well in his import export company. But we didn't know anything about building a fund. I told him, I said, john, I said, I'm going to get you an honorary doctor, um, honorary law degree just because he studied the legal stuff inside and out to make sure we had it right. Well, then I get a phone call from a, uh, friend. He said, paul, he said, you want to climb Kilimanjaro? I'm like, where's that? He's like, it's Africa. It's the biggest, biggest mountain in Africa. And I'm like, well, I haven't even climbed Mount Olympus, and I can see that out my window. So why would I go climb some mountain in Africa? That doesn't make any sense. He goes, no. He said, well, well, uh, we're leaving in about four months. You've Got to, you've got to give up your Saturdays between now and then and, and train and it's going to cost you about $10,000 to go. And I'm like, well then hell no. Why would I, why would I give up all my Saturdays, train, give up $10,000 and go climb a mountain in Africa? He said, well let me tell you what we're doing. He said, I've handpicked 12 of the top business owners and CEOs, uh, internationally that I've worked with and trained with over the years. And he start, he said, uh, and they're all going to go together and climb the mountain and kind of get to know each other. And he starts reading down this list of people that were coming. And halfway through I said, John, now, uh, Travis was. And I said travis, when, now, when are we going again? Because I knew that building relationships with that caliber of people was going to expand everything that I was trying to create in my life. It was so valuable. And so I'm like, heck yeah, I'll go climb a mountain and throw up at whatever I have to do to go meet these guys. And in doing so met some key people that we brought on that gave us credibility as we started building the fund. One of them had built, he had like a, uh, done over $3 billion in real estate development, international stuff, whole bunch of things. And so I joke and say that yeah, me and him, his name was Doug, we, we became really good friends, throwing up at about 19,000ft on the mountain type thing, but took him to lunch every every month for the next year, brought him on as a partner. Now we started to have credibility which I didn't have before, and we could start going after the bigger. In the beginning it was armed, armed combat. It was, it was raising money, uh, quarter, uh, million at a time, at half a million at a time from high net worth investors. A lot of work. After we started building the credibility, then we brought on some bigger players that allowed us to go international. So that's, that's kind of the beginning of bridge. And from there, if you want, I can kind of tell you how we took it to an international stage.

Speaker B: Well, let's talk about, um, what I'll call the care and feeding of international investors. Do you have to treat them differently than you would do, than you would treat North American investors?

Speaker C: Well, we did. Our international investors didn't want to be subject to uh, double taxation and things like that. And so we set up vehicles, structures that allowed them to invest in the US through something like a Cayman Islands investment fund. And in doing so, they didn't have to fill out tax paperwork and everything else in the U.S. now, the taxes were still paid. It was paid through the corporation in the Cayman Islands, and everything was, was taken care of legally there. But it, they didn't have to deal with all of that crap. They could, they could handle all the taxes in their country as well. So, yes, we, that was a big thing with the international investors. We, we also had to make sure that our fund was set up to be respected with international investors. You know, we, we had other funds in the area that chose a local bank as their carrier. No, we, we chose Wells Fargo in the beginning and some bigger ones. Our, our legal counsel, we could have gone with some local legal, uh, firms. But no, we, we use legal firms in New York and Hong Kong and guys that were respected internationally so that our investors would see that and we would have that credibility to go big and go international. So those are all super important is to, to look at our strategy through the eyes of an international investor. What do they not want to have to deal with, with, uh, um, you know, double taxation and filing out US Tax returns and all this stuff and what, what kind of things give us extra credibility with them. That was important as well.

Speaker B: Makes perfect sense. One of the phrases, or, uh, one of the things you've written is that you had various encounters with people who steal or calm others in business transactions and who think that those actions are simply part of doing business. Could you elaborate about that and specify whether these practices are more prevalent in some countries than others?

Speaker C: Well, I'm not going to throw any specific country under the bus, but I will say there was a general culture with a number of our investors in Asia that it was just different. It was different than the west in that some of them actually thought, now, um, this isn't like the whole country, but many of them thought that if they could finagle a business deal and put something, you know, in front of you that you didn't know or do something that I wouldn't think would be moral and ethical in business, in their mind, it wasn't about being moral and ethical. It was about, hey, I'm a better businessman if I can, you know, put this in front of you and have you not see it, and I can, oh, look, I got away with that. No, that's, I don't do business that way. I do business with people who have integrity.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Now, we did have a lot of great investors from Asia as well that were fantastic. And so it wasn't, it wasn't all the way across the board, but I did notice that there was a larger number of them that, that just thought that that was a way of doing business, that, that that was out of integrity. If we could steal some ideas, that's just because I'm a better business owner. I don't, I don't feel bad about stealing all that is bad there, there. You're out of integrity there very much so.

Speaker B: That's, that's critically important. And in other podcasts I've talked about sort of what is the truth or what is uh, what is accepted and what's considered truthful or honest in the West. Just different in other countries where what is truthful is simply what's appropriate for the situation.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker A: With over 30 years experience, Auerbach International translates anything, contracts, manuals, books, websites, videos, movies, social media, meetings and more from or into 120 languages using master's level linguistics who are matched to your subject speciality and deliver quickly with a accuracy. For more information please contact us at uh, 415-592-0042 or see our website at A U E R B a c h ah-intl.com.

Speaker B: Now onto your true passion versus liberating children. Your website says that and these numbers are absolutely horrendous and mind boggling. 10 million children are sex trafficked worldwide. 152 million are forced into child labor, and of those 152 million, 73 million are engaged in hazardous labor in 143 countries. You describe the Child Liberation Fund as an umbrella organization that funds recipient charities to do the various aspects of the identification and rescue and reintegration work. Could you describe how the CLF operates and the functions that your recipients perform?

Speaker C: Yeah, so for a long time the Child Liberation foundation, you can go to liberatechildren.org and get some more information there. But for a long time it was just a place where I was putting some of my own money and it was funding some of the rescue missions that we did internally and things that we were doing to help other organizations. As we started to grow, we found more and more foundations that were doing great work. Guys that were way more qualified than me, guys that were former Navy Seals, Green Berets and former three letter agency type workers that left their government jobs and wanted to dedicate their skills to fighting trafficking in whatever way they could. And so as I identified these groups and these men and women who were really fighting the good fight and doing such A great job. It was important that we could use my money and others to help fund their operations as well. In fact, we have a couple right now. Uh, one has a whole team of, of dark web forensic guys that go in and take down child porn sites and expose people who are doing these horrible things to children and work with law enforcement on that. We have some other guys that are, that are actively taking down pedophile rings right now. We have guys uh, that have averaged 15 to 20 pedophiles a month every month for the last number of months. And they're, they're uh, they're training law enforcement on how to find these guys and how to take them down and, and how to get the street so that we can keep children safe. Realize this, that, that you can go rescue a child and yes, make a huge difference in the life of that child or you can also arrest a pedophile and save 10, 20, 30, even up to a hundred children that that person could be affecting over their lifetime. So getting them off the street, getting them to a place where they're not going to harm, innocence is a vital part of this fight.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Uh, it's like taking down the, the suppliers instead of just the buyers. Stories are extremely impactful and uh, I don't want you to repeat the story of the movie Sound of Freedom, but could you give us uh, some stories about children whom you, you personally or your associates have rescued?

Speaker C: Yeah, there's a lot of them. A lot of them. We were in, in a country in Latin America. We had worked our way up to the head of the dragon on this trafficking ring and who, who through all of his uh, connections was trafficking hundreds and hundreds of children and so getting uh, contact with him and his cell phone number. As I was undercover turning that into the federal authorities, they were able to track his cell phone and find all of the different rings that he was associating with and get information as to their locations as Fantastic. And then he ended up bringing 23 children to a sex party. And of those there were representatives from other rings that he was working with. And one of these other rings was working with some American children. There was a little 13 year old American girl who had been touring around Latin America with her sister, her sister was, was 17, uh, got wrapped up with some of these bad guys and um, uh, they ran out of money down there and so they were trying to, and they told this little girl, hey, you know, you start working what for us and we'll give you this extra money you need. And they gave her drugs and then brought her into the trafficking ring. That happens all the time. We've had, we've had many, many different situations where, where we met children who were being sold by their babysitter, by their mother, by their uncle. Uh, it's important for your listeners to understand that um, it's not just the children that are being abducted and taken in a container ship across the ocean to another country. No, this is the kind of thing that happens in your own house, in your own neighborhood and it happens all the time. People think that that's the trafficking is the kids that are moved to another country. A majority of children that are being sold for sex sleep in their own beds at night. They're being sold by a familiar member and their parents don't even know. Sometimes some things that will happen is, is uh, one of these perpetrators will take uh, a nude picture online and put the face of this young 12, 13 year old girl on it so it looks like she's actually naked. And then they'll use that as coercion. They'll say oh uh, look at this, we've got this picture of you naked and we're going to send it to your dad, we're going to send it to your church. And unless you send us some more other pictures. And if you send us more now they have real pict and then they say now we're going to send these to uh, you know, authorities unless you come and, and perform this sex act. And now they've got a video of her. And so it's all just fear and control until they've got these young women and even older ones that are unfortunately being trafficked and their family doesn't even know about it.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Uh, and you mentioned that you know, this happens right under our noses. I remember when I lived in San Francisco there was a trafficking ring basically that the police uncovered just a few blocks from where I was living. And you know, one doesn't know what's going on in the neighbors houses, in an innocent house just down the street. And these horrible situations could be happening anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world for that matter. Absolutely.

Speaker C: Yep. Happens more often than people think that. The reality is one out of every four women that you know has been a victim of sexual violence as a child. Women as a whole, it's somewhere between 40, 50% minimum. It's probably higher that sometime in their life they've been a victim of sexual violence. And with men it's a little bit lower. But still it's estimated over 200 million men have been sexually abused under the age of 10 years old. And the average age of somebody coming out and saying this happened to me, the average age is 52 years old. Oh, that's, they've lived their whole life holding on to this trauma and not allowing it to Release it. I'm 52, I, I have, I've got grandkids, you know, I've already raised my kids. If people are holding on to that trauma that long, then it's affecting so many areas of their life. And it's important that, that we have these conversations with people so that they can open up, they can say, can shed that, that pain and come to a place where they can, they can heal from it.

Speaker B: Well, the, the largest sexual abuse scandal of course is the Catholic Church, but it's not just the Catholics. It's in many churches and, and also just. I presume you'll confirm that it's sometimes just relatives, many off. Very often it's, it's uncles and you know, other male relatives who may do this to the male members of the family or the female.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it's super prevalent. And it's not, is not just males that are perpetrators. This is what people misunderstand as well is, is a lot of the traffickers, a large percentage of them, more than you would think of, the traffickers that are selling children are females. And so you'd think that this is just a male dominated thing, but it, but it happens everywhere. And it's uh, something we have to understand that there's this cultural degradation that's taking us away from our moral compasses that is, is making it so that we're, we're objectifying women and we're, we're objectifying each other. And we're coming from a place where we think that it's okay to, to uh, control or dominate in some way. And so as we, I mean even things like pornography now, everybody who's watching this right now is, has probably seen pornography. It doesn't mean you're going to become a pedophile. But every single one of these guys we arrested started out with an addiction to pornography. That, that what happens is for some of them they, it's like a drug and they need something harder to have that same fix. And for some of them harder is, uh, is, is more grotesque and rape videos or whatever. And for some of them harder is a little bit younger, a little bit younger. And pretty soon they're, they're fantasizing about things they wouldn't have even thought was attractive five years ago. And then they're acting out on these horrific fantasies. This is, this is the evil we need to fight and we need to change our perceptions of ourself and change our perceptions of each other and, and, and come into a place where we can heal from our trauma of our past ends up coming out in forms of physical abuse, verbal abuse, anger issues, or even in some cases, passing that trauma on in terms of sexual abuse of others. That's what we have to help people heal from.

Speaker B: Absolutely. You spoke about men and how they would usually start with simple pornography. What about the women who are trafficking or involved?

Speaker C: I found that the traffickers, the ones that are selling the children actually came from, uh, came from that life themselves. They were trafficked and then, you know, they, instead of getting killed off as a organ harvesting thing or whatever else, they, they end up perpetuating the problem. And you would think that it caused so much pain in them that they wouldn't want to cause that pain in others. But they're, it's the only life they know. And, and unfortunately, with an insatiable demand, with hundreds of millions of people that are pursuing these kinds of things and being the, the demand when it comes to human tr. That's, that's what we need to fix. Because otherwise there's always going to be people that are going to supply that demand.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Undercover missions, such as the ones that you've often undertaken require the, the equivalent of spycraft, um, financial and physical resources on the ground, logistics about infiltration and transport potentially masquerading as a, in a different identity, safe houses, and a lot more. Uh, I presume you did not attend the CIA school, so how did you learn all these different skills and how did you learn to pull these elements together to accomplish an extraction?

Speaker C: We had really, really good teams that have been trained in a lot of that stuff. Uh, one of my mentors, early on undercover, had been working for the US government in the CIA for over 14 years and was teaching some members on our team things to look for and how to work through it. So yeah, I had the least amount of training from a lot of these guys, but I could bring a lot of resources. And unfortunately, Philip, the reason why it was effective for me and some of my other operators to do this is that we came, I, I came from a place of financial security. You know, uh, you think of the Jeffrey Epstein's of the world that were, you know, had plenty of money and a huge ego and, and that's the kind of people, these traffickers are looking for. They, they're, they're. They're looking for guys with really big, you know, arrogant egos and big checkbooks that think that they can do whatever they want to do with their money and their time. And some of them have gone down this dark road of controlling other people, of mismanagement of their sexuality, even in their own personal relationships. And then they go down a deep, dark road of engaging in these horrible activities with trafficked women and children.

Speaker B: When you're entering these incredibly dangerous situations, do you notify our embassies first? As a kind of security measure, I wanted to ask whether you involve the local police, but police in many countries are corrupt themselves and they facilitate the exploiters and the traffickers.

Speaker C: So, uh, well, it is important to know that, you know, we, we don't go into a country and just say, okay, we're going to be big Rambo and just, you know, go find these kids. No, we. We start with meeting with the US the vetted U. S. Connections in the area, the people who were part of the FBI or CIA. There were connections there, the embassy area, and from there identify top leaders in the federal police or the government in that country that we can truly trust. Because you're right, there's a lot of people who are underpaid in the police forces in these small towns that are part of the problem. And so you don't want them to know that you're there undercover because you might get shot. And, um, and so we do have full authorization. And we'll go in and we'll say, listen, we want to work with you under your laws, under your. We need to understand very clearly what we can and can't say what we can and can't do, because really we're here working for you. And, um, this is what we'll say to the head of the federal police, and we'll say, we will, we will pay for everything. We will do all the work. We'll find all these traffickers and we will bring them to you on a silver platter, so to speak. And, uh, you do the arrest, arrest us as well. The bad guys will think that we've got extradited to the US to stand trial. And all we ask is that, number one, the bad guys stay in jail for good. And number two, we have full access to the kids and get them rehabilitating back to their families. And we'll give you all the credit. Your people will think you're heroes, and we'll do a bunch of training so that your teams will know how to handle this with or without us once we're gone. So that's the key to success. We can't just be a bunch of Rambos running around and finding these kids. No, this is. This is coordinated efforts with trusted people in these countries who are good men and women who work in law enforcement, usually on the high, on the federal level, and, uh, and make sure that we have their blessing when we come in and help them to identify the kids that are in their country being trafficked.

Speaker B: That's a fascinating and wonderful model. Give credit to the local authorities and don't take it yourself so that they feel empowered. And then obviously, I presume that their populations trust them to do the right thing.

Speaker C: Well, it's so interesting is that, you know, after I won't tell the details of the mission on the movie, but after that mission, real life, I went back down for two about two months later, met with, uh, the brigadier general, the top military official in the area. And he. He got visibly emotional when. When he. He saw me, and he gave me this huge hug, and he said, there's never been a US Organization that has done more good for the children in our country than. Than what that foundation did and what you guys did. He said, you guys didn't take any credit. We couldn't. We were undercover, he said. The media picked up the story and announced that Colombian Federal officials arrested 20 traffickers. 20. 20, uh, five traffickers, 20Americans, and rescued over 100 children. And the good people of Columbia rose up and said, yeah, this is what we want. And it created a motivation in which those. Those agents did five additional stings without our help over that next couple months, rescued hundreds of more children. And we had some teams that went back in to see if they could find any other children being sold, like, a few months later. And these guys said, um, all the guys on the street are like, no, no, didn't you hear? Didn't you hear? The. The feds arrested all these guys that were selling kids. They even arrested all those Americans. You better not say anything. You know, they said, you can't. They've closed it down. You can't buy children in Colombia anymore. Like, yeah, that's how you fix a problem right there.

Speaker B: That's amazing. It's fantastic. After you rescue the children, do you keep them in the hostage country for rehabilitation and trauma counseling, or do you have dedicated rehabilitation centers in certain other countries?

Speaker C: It depends. If the children were reported abducted from another country, then, of course, we get them back to their families. It's Easy to find where they came from if they didn't. Sometimes the parents were involved. You know, half the children that were rescued in, in Southeast Asia, Thailand area were sold by their own families. And in that kind of a situation, you don't want to return them to a family that's going to sell them again. But we've also found that just taking kids out of hell and putting me into a new hell isn't going to fix it. Right? That a lot of the, there's a lot of broken systems out there, that the foster program in the US Is a broken system. And so the goal is to get these kids into a healthy, preferably a family, a family that, that, uh, that can give them the love and support they need. In fact, we have one of the sister foundations that the Child Liberation foundation helps and supports and works with, is out of Guatemala and they have helped thousands of victims recover. And their, their model is beautiful. Their model is they, they have this beautiful piece of property. They've got a farm with chicken, uh, coops and, and, and greenhouses, et cetera. And then they have wealthy donors that want to come and help with what they're doing that will come and build, pay for and build at uh, like a small house with three or four bedrooms and whatnot. But then they will find a family, maybe a mom and a dad and a child that are too poor to, to live where they are. And they say, listen, here's what we're going to do. We're going to give you a home and we're going to give you a job working here on the farm and we're going to give you three more children. Right? So, and, and we'll, we'll help pay for everything. And you'll, you'll have therapists and psychiatrists, need a loving mom and dad to be able to help some of these traumatized children work through some of their issues and feel loved and accepted. And so is beautiful in creating this way better environment than just a random, um, you know, safe house and whatever for the kids, but giving them that, that healthy environment with the mom and dad there. So just some, some little things of different places. We're working with, with the, the Child Liberation foundation right now. One of our projects is what we call Liberating Wings. And that Liberating wings, uh, or the Healing Wings project is, will take existing safe houses where the children have been brought in and they've got, maybe don't have the same model that they had in Guatemala, but they've got, they've got Beds and psychiatrists and some people that are helping them, but they don't really have a place to expand their, their creativity and their, their talents and their gifts and, and focus on healing as well. And so we're building extensions on those, those facilities. Called it a liberating wing, you know, an extension, but it really is just a room. You know, it's a room with sound bowls in it and some art type things in there, and a place they can learn some different skills and so things that we can do to help them truly heal as they're, as they're working through some of these issues and learn new skills so they don't end up growing up and not knowing what to do with their life.

Speaker B: So it's amazing. Are there, I'll call it a rehabilitation farm as in Guatemala. Are they in other parts of the world as well that you have, uh, similar.

Speaker C: Yeah, we're expanding that model right now. Now that we're, now that I'm done doing undercover, we're putting a lot of our resources into expanding the vision and the scope of the Child Liberation Foundation. And so that's something that we're full time focused on.

Speaker B: Wonderful. Assuming that the parents are loving and did not sell their children into slavery, at what point after a rescue do you notify the parents that their children have been saved?

Speaker C: As soon as we can find them, for sure. You know, that's, that's an important part is finding those parents and seeing really what was going on. We, we had one recently, and it wasn't recently, it was a few years ago in Acapulco where this girl was being sold, she was 13, being sold by her own aunt. The aunt was working with the traffickers. The aunt who, the mom had no idea what was going on. And uh, this, this uh, little girl was being babysat by her aunt who was showing her pornography and told her, oh, your, your daughter's, you know, I mean, she was telling this little girl, she said, you know, you're going to lose your virginity sometime anyway. You'll lose it to these Americans. We'll pay you a couple hundred dollars. She was charging us thousands of dollars for this child and uh, you know, grooming her to be trafficked. And so of course that mother was notified immediately because, you know, this, uh, she had no idea what was going on. The aunt was booked into prison. And so, yeah, as soon as we can find the kid, the parents, we're, we're getting them back to them. Absolutely.

Speaker B: And I assume you asked the children whether the parents were collaborating in the trafficking, in the selling of the child or whether the parents.

Speaker C: Yeah, sometimes the kids don't even know. There's. There's probably more work that needs to be done there in, uh, finding out really what's going on with that. So the therapists handle all of that stuff with the kids and finding out where they came from, what their background was. I mean, we had a child recently, was originally in Ecuador. Her mother died when she was 8 years old. M. Her father was a, uh, raging alcoholic, and so they took her to live with her uncle at eight years old. By the time she was 10, her uncle was raping her. And she told the family. The family didn't believe her. And so by the time she was 12, 13 years old, you know, she has been being raped at home by the. By her uncle, who's supposed to be her protector. The traffickers, uh, notice her behaviors at school, and they start grooming her and convince her to go with this one trafficker, convinced her to leave and go with him to Peru and bought her a ticket to Peru. They went to Peru and. And he took away her passport, bought her some really sexy clothes, took away her phone and said, here's what you're going to be doing, and you, uh, need to bring in a thousand dollars a day and prostituting your body, otherwise you'll get beat up. And she ended up, you know, having to do that for. For a couple years. She got beat up a few times, and the last time was so severe she was in the hospital. And, uh, so then the authorities were called, and we, we were able to identify where she had come from, where they were selling her. Out of all of this stuff. In that situation, where does she go home to? You know, you don't. You don't want to send her back to her alcoholic father or her. Her raping uncle. Right. It's super sad how many of these kids come from these horrible situations at home and they go, you know, out of the. Out of the boiling pot, into the fire, so to speak. You know, it's from bad to worse in getting trafficked is what's going on.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Uh, can you tell us any other rescue stories?

Speaker C: Oh, I have lots of those. We have lots of them. There's a. There's a documentary called Operation Tucson that talks about the rescue that we did in. In Haiti. Uh, 34 children there in Haiti. Now you are not going to see me in there because I'm still undercover at the time, and I didn't need to be known by the world. Uh, you'll see me a couple times. My face is blurred and I'm laughing with the traffickers Now. I had been deep cover for months. I multiple times going into Haiti, I wanted to cut the head off the dragon and make sure that wasn't even coming back. And so in doing so I found all these traffickers. And one of them, at the end of that documentary, you'll see this little girl that's, that's uh, holding this Teddy Bear. She's 14 years old. She was taken when she was 7. Her parents were killed in the earthquake in Haiti and, and nobody even knew she was alive. And she was being sold 20 plus times a day for sex for seven years now. I was the first person to find her. I went, uh, worked my way up to what we call a level three trafficker. These are the guys who physically the children in captivity and, and it was me and one of my operators and this, this female trafficker is who we were introduced to. Sticks this key in this door, opens it up and there are, the first thing I see was this, this dirt hallway with uh, dark and, and dimly lit and there was multiple cell doors down the left hand side. No windows, no other access. She opens up one of these cell doors. I see it. It's not even a bed. It's a concrete, I mean it's a, it's a steel, um, plank held to the wall, held to the wall with a, with a chain and so it could fold up in this, this six foot diameter room and dirt floor. To the left of that was a concrete block. And this little girl was sitting on that concrete block. Looks up like, you know, this happens all the time with this blank look in her eyes. That child didn't speak for two weeks after we rescued her. And from what I was told, the very first words she said were, I didn't think anybody would come. Oh, um, she gave up hope seven years before.

Speaker B: Yes, of course, you know, so she

Speaker C: was rescued with 34 more children. She's now in a healthy home learning to dance, back to school. So yeah, uh, there's so many just

Speaker B: like that incredible work that you're doing. What else would you like our listeners and subscribers to know about your mission and how you accomplish it?

Speaker C: Well, first of all, I'd love you guys to follow me on social media. You can just type in liberating and I'll be the first one that comes up. Liberating humanity is, is what I'm under, under Instagram and Facebook and everything is under liberating humanity. And uh, it's actually a little dot IN between liberating and humanity. So if you just type in liberating, I'll come with up. Or you can go on the website and get some resources to keep your family safe and things that you can do to um, help heal and learn more. You um, can find us at liberating and then a hyphen or a dash humanity. Liberatinghumanity.com will get you a lot of great information and things uh, that you can do to keep your family safe. Or if you want to donate either there or directly to the Child Liberation Foundation.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker C: And there's links on liberating humanity that should get you to the Child Liberation foundation. Or you can go directly to liberatechildren.org so do that and together we as a global community can eradicate child trafficking.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And your, all of your contact information or uh, the websites that you've mentioned will also be under your bio on the podcast link itself. Wonderful. People can go there and do it. Wonderful. Have there been. Well, I shouldn't ask have there been, but I presume there have been threats uh, on your personal life over the years.

Speaker C: There's, there's, it's not, it's not entirely safe being in this space. But you know, we're all of us know how to handle ourselves and, and I believe in God and I was protected face to face with these horrible people and I think that we'll be continue. In fact I know that we'll continue to protected in that way. And so yeah, the actor who played me in the movie, Eduardo Verasti, he got threatened just a few weeks ago, uh, uh, somebody who threatened him. So yes, it does happen and uh, it happens a lot. So we're fighting evil face to face with the most evil people that would sell children. We're fighting that. But there are so many good people in this world that are getting behind this movement. Movement that I know that will. We're going to win.

Speaker B: Absolutely. This has been an extraordinary Global Gurus, uh, interview with Paul Hutchinson and I thank you so much for uh, joining us and sharing your stories and for the extraordinary, marvelous, unbelievable work that you have done and you continue to do for humanity. So it's tremendous honor to, to know you.

Speaker C: Thank you. Philip enjoyed spending time with you and hello to your audience.

Speaker B: Thank you.

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