WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Hillsdale Interview: Paul Hutchinson

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Paul Hutchinson, the Executive Producer and inspiration for much of the story of The Sound of Freedom, joins WRFH to discuss the success of the film, his upcoming book that gives the backstory to the movie, and how his organization Liberating Humanity is fighting to eradicate this evil forever.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM, and I'm Michaela Estreuth. With me today is Paul Hutchinson, executive producer of the movie Sound of Freedom. He was involved in the rescue mission of trafficked children in Colombia, which was the main focus of the movie. Mr. Hutchison is founder of Liberating Humanity, an organization aimed at eradicating abuse, addiction, and other trauma. You can learn more about this organization at liberatinghumanity.com. Mr. Hutchison is releasing book The Sound of Freedom, the true story behind the blockbuster film, and he's here to discuss it with us. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Michaela.

Honored to be here with you and your audience. Awesome. Well, we're great. We're so thankful to have you. And just to start off, would you mind telling us a bit about yourself, your story, and how you got to where you are today? Absolutely. So my background is I was a fairly successful businessman.

I build a number of companies, sold my first. one in my early 20s that help people with anxiety and depression disorders and sold that and started building a real estate investment fund in the movie if you've seen Sound of Freedom the when Jim Caviesel is trying to figure out how he's going to fund that mission and he's like he says to his wife if I can convince Pablo I can make this work and then the the Mexican actor who's actually the producer of Sound of Freedom is Pablo Pablo Delgado the the the multi-billionerial billion dollar investment fund manager that that quits his job to go help rescue children. That's,

that's me in real life. And, um, and so I was, I was donating a lot of money to charities. I have a certain set of skills that makes me somewhat safe in a dangerous place. And, and I got a phone call from our attorney general. And he asked if I could, uh, help with some financing of some rescue missions of some children that were identified in South America. And then I got a call from the Homeland Security agent who was identifying some of these children. And he said, Paul, he said, there's not just 20 children in Cartagena. We've identified more than 50 and more than 100 children in the surrounding cities that are all being sold for horrific things. He said, we believe we can rescue all 100 children on the same day, but I need your help. And I said,

well, how much do you need thinking he needed money, more money? And he said, I need you. Can you be in Columbia in two days? He said the head trafficker down here has a piece of property. He wants to develop into a child brothel, a sex resort type of a thing. He needs a few million dollars to make it work. He believes he can make tens of millions of dollars a year selling children to wealthy Americans. He said, well, that's horrific.

but how can I fit in? He said, well, he said, we're going to have you come and pretend like you, you know, undercover. You're going to pretend like you're interested in funding this resort under one condition. He has to show up with all of his inventory and all of the other traffickers he's working with, literally bringing all of these children together at one time. He said, that way we can have them all in the same place at the same time so that we can rest. them all on this thing. And so that's exactly what happened. Two days later, I'm in Columbia. You know, I won't go into all the details right now unless you want me to, but I'm face-to-face with

the most horrific people on the planet negotiated this deal with them. And it ended up being the largest child rescue mission in that region ever. In fact, one of the largest child rescue missions in history anywhere in over 120 victims that were recovered. and are no back with their families. And so that's my role in the movie. I became the primary, the first investor in the film, and executive producer. You know, I was sitting there face to face

with these evil people selling children. But the thing that changed my life forever was when they brought some of the children out. And I'm sitting on this bench, this chair, and they bring these little virgins, this little 11-year-old girl, in front of me, scared to death, shaking, tear stains rolling down her makeup face. And I made a commitment at that moment that I was going to dedicate my life to eradicating

this evil. And so I couldn't take millions of people to see what we have seen, but we could help millions of people feel what we had felt. And so that's why we created the movie. And since that time, I have led or played a key part in over 70 undercover restaurants. mission in 15 countries to help eradicate child trafficking. Wow. Okay.

So after that first initial rescue mission, do you come back to the United States and started liberating humanity? Yeah. Okay. So I created originally, I created a foundation called the Child Liberation Foundation. You can go to liberatechildron.org and get some more information on the Child Liberation Foundation. In the beginning, I created that foundation just to help fund the missions.

I was working with the Homeland Security agent and his foundation at the time, and we were helping to fund some of those things that they did, and then broke away from them about five years ago and continued funding other operations with the Child Liberation Foundation. And I did rescue missions everywhere all around Latin America and Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Mexico, and Thailand, and all over in Ecuador recently. But I realized after 10 years of doing undercover child rescue missions,

I realized that there's more children being sold today than there were 10 years ago. And I realized, okay, Paul, if your goal is to eradicate this evil from the face of the earth, you're not doing a very good job because the numbers are growing. And so what I did, Michaela, is I had to ask myself where it's coming from. I found myself wishing on every mission. You know, we would rescue 10 children. We would rescue 20 children. And yes, it's so beautiful having them, you know, getting out of that hell.

But what if we could save them before they're ever traumatized? Because now they're holding this pain throughout their life. What if we could save them before they're traumatized? in the first place, and what does that look like? And I realized that just fighting fire with fire wasn't going to fix the fact that that fire already destroyed. We need to ask ourselves why this is the fastest-growing criminal enterprise in the world, why it's so pervasive out there, why there's 20 and 30 and 40 and 50-year-old men and even women that are engaging in these horrific acts. Where is that negativity coming from? And there's so many things that human

humanity can do as a whole, that we can liberate ourselves from these horrible addictions in this generational trauma. Many people in your audience right now have experienced child trauma that many of them don't even remember, that one in every two women, 50% of all women that you know, have been a victim of sexual abuse at some time in their life. And one fourth of all women were a victim of sexual abuse as a child, many of them in their own homes. This is a number that people don't talk about. Now, with men, it's a little bit less. It's one in every five at some time in their life, about 20 percent. But even those, one-fourth of those that happened under the age of 10 years old, many of those in their own homes. So what's happening is we've got this

generational trauma that's happening. And very few kids are willing to go come forth and even say anything. In fact, the average age of somebody talking about that trauma is 52 years old. That's my age. I've already raised my kids. I've already, you know, built my career. If we can catch it early, you know, with kids that are in high school or junior high or even college age that can start getting that release, that help that they need so that it doesn't ever come out in things like verbal abuse or physical abuse or even sometimes the sexual abuse of a child, that trauma being passed down, we can stop that. And we have programs.

You can go to Liberatinghumanity.com. You can learn about some of the fully immersive, transformational healing experiences that we've put together for people to release that trauma, release their addictions, release all of that crap that they're holding on to so that they can be the best. version of themselves, and they never pass on their trauma to another child. So that's what liberating humanity is about, and that's how it ties in with the Child Liberation Foundation as well. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM, and I'm Akila Estruth. With me today is Paul

Hutchinson, executive producer of the movie Sound of Freedom, and the author of the new book, The Sound of Freedom, The True Story, behind the blockbuster film. So, Paul, if you could go in, you mentioned earlier about being involved in the film. Can you give how that process was and how close the plot of the film is to you, who your experience in that rescue mission? Absolutely. So, you know, when we, when we experienced that rescue in Columbia and with over 100 plus children that were rescued, we knew that the only way to fix this problem was to help

humanity as a whole understand what's going on. Back at the time of Abraham Lincoln, it wasn't the guys that were rescuing the slaves that created the biggest difference. It was people like you, Michaela. It was like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote the book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was the media of the age. They didn't have, you know, television and radio like we have today, but her book, Uncle Tom's Kevin, created an awareness with good people

of what was going on in slavery in the South. And, in fact, years later, when Abraham Lincoln met Harry, he shook her hand, he said, so you're the little lady

that wrote the book that started this big war. And so today, what you're doing and spreading good news and awareness with the radio, what we were doing with the Sound of Freedom movie,

that's similar to that book. That's how we create global movement as we help millions of people really understand the travesties that are going on so that we can stand up and do something about it. And so we took this story to Sony and Lionsgate and Paramount and we wanted to get one of these big media

producers to get behind it. And they were interested in the plot, but they wanted full literary control. They wanted to be able to manipulate it however they saw fit. and with a lot of the crap that's being forced fed to us by media, by Hollywood, we have to ask ourselves, is that what we want to do is give up full control of it? And we decided, no, we're going to take it by ourselves.

So I put up the first money to pay for all of the script writing and everything. It costs us about $600,000 to just get it to the point where the script was all done and ready for production. And then it was going to require another $14 million to produce this film independently. And again, we didn't want to have the controls placed upon us by big media and Hollywood, et cetera. So we privately funded that as well. And then we wanted to distribute it. Now, part of the distribution was we were going through Fox International.

They had helped us with some of the filming in Colombia. but Disney bought out Fox and was not interested in being our distributor. And we fought for five years. This film was finished five years before it came out. And we were fighting everywhere trying to find distribution ice, and nobody wanted it. We got turned down by Amazon. We got turned down by Netflix.

We got turned down everywhere on traditional distribution networks because they didn't want to show the world what we had seen. And so we had to bring this to the people by the people. And so we went out to a group called Angel Studios who helped with their grassroots movement and through social media channels helped to promote this and take it to the world. It answered your question how close it is to the real story. Everything you see in the movie happens in some way. There are many characters that were brought in that weren't part of that original mission. The character Vampiro, we actually called him Batman.

He worked with the cartel, was an informant who worked on some other areas, some other missions. The little boy in the movie was not really the brother to the little girl that was there. They were two separate children that were rescued, in fact, in two separate missions. at the end of the movie, that jungle scene, that was not in Colombia. It was actually in Haiti. It wasn't that little girl. It was actually a little boy who was kidnapped in front of a church house that we were looking for with some other kids. And it was an entirely different team that was in there and helping to rescue these kids.

And so we took a number of different rescue missions, a whole bunch of operators, and put them all together into one storyline with just a handful of actors and so that the audience could get a feel for really what's going on in child trafficking. So after all that hard work to get the movie even just produced, how do you think, based off last summer, how do you think the film did? Well, it's a miracle is what it is. We became the number one independent film in the world. and last year, we did over $270 million in box office hits.

You know, the first weekend that it was out, it beat out Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible and all of these big movies. We just, boom, hit it and hit it hard. And it's not about the money. It's about the fact that there are millions and millions of people who have seen the film and has helped them have those hard conversations with their children so that they can keep kids safe. I truly believe that millions of children are safer today because of the fact that we made that film. And I'm super grateful for the success.

In fact, we are one of the top 10 independent films in all of history with only a $14 million budget and over $270 million in box office. In fact, even Amazon, who turned us down before, came back and said, yes, we are, we're very interested now in putting your film on our platform. And so we got a much, much higher number from them than what we originally were trying to negotiate with them and putting it on their platform as well. So it's been a miracle. And it just shows that good people everywhere want this kind of content. They want things that are going to shine the light on the darkness and help them keep their children safe. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. And I'm Michaela Estruth.

With me today is Paul Hutchinson, executive producer. of the movie Sound of Freedom. And so now you've written a book based off of the film, but also the events that you were a part of. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Correct. I was involved in a number of rescue missions that little parts of each of them were some of them were included in the film. I talk in the book. The first one-third of the book is the, we call it the making of an undercover operator. And I go through a lot of things that I learned over the years in everything from situational awareness to hand-to-hand combat to compassion and understanding where problems are coming from like this.

These are all things that the reader is going to be able to better their lives in learning skills and learning things that they can do to be more vigilant and keep themselves safe in a dangerous world. And then I go through the details of the Columbia Rescue itself in how it impacted my life and the details of how I was brought in, the different operators that were involved in that, and the real stories of these children and where they came from. And then I talk a little bit about some of the other rescue missions,

including the one that we did in the jungle in Haiti, and some really dangerous ones we did in Mexico, where it'll help the reader really understand what's going on in this world. And then I talk about making the movie, and bringing that global movement and what that looks like as well. So again, you can go to Sound of Freedombook.com, and it will hyperlink you right over to that page about the book on the Liberating Humanity website.

From there, you can go and learn a lot of different things on liberating humanity, everything from how to combat your addictions and how to break free from childhood trauma and how to what understanding situational awareness and how to keep your kids safe in dangerous situations, et cetera. So these are all tools that we have put together to help people live a better life, break free from their own childhood trauma, and learn things they can do to keep their children safe.

Well, those are all the questions that I have for you. Is there anything else that you wish to share? Yes, I think that a lot of your audience are college-age-age, and some a little bit older as well. A lot of people, they leave the movie Sound of Freedom, and they say, okay, what can I do? How can I help? You know, I want to go fight this crime.

And the worst thing that you can do is go to Columbia and try to go rescue kids. You're going to get shot. And you'll probably get arrested if you don't get shot. And it's just a super dangerous world out there in that space. The best thing you can do to fight this, is to become very aware of how trafficking works. If you have children, go home and hug your kids. The average age of a child that is brought into sexual exploitation,

the average age is 12 years old. That's average, meaning there's 8-year-olds or 7-year-olds, there's 14-year-olds all over. And so being aware, and as you raise your kids, having a relationship with your children where they can very comfortably come to you and say, hey, I don't like it when you make me hug Uncle Harry because he touches me this way. Or I don't like going to this friend's house because her brother is talking to me in ways that I don't like.

Or our babysitter is showing us pornography and tells us that we should trust her more than you. These are grooming behaviors. And there are things that these predators use to get these children in very vulnerable positions. And so the majority of children that are being trafficked are not ones that are taken in a container to another country and kidnapped, whatever. The majority of these children actually sleep in their own beds at night. And exploitation in this way happens at all ages. And it starts in many cases with either drug addictions or the perpetrators trying to get some kind of dirt on you. You know, they get you to do some sexting pictures, and they've got a half-naked picture of their victim.

And then they say, well, you know what? I'm going to send this picture everywhere. I'm going to send it all over your school unless you do what I say. You need to be, you know, here at this location every Wednesday after school. And if you say anything to anybody, you know, I know where your mother lives, I know where your sister lives, and you don't want bad things to happen to them. These are all fear and manipulation techniques that the traffic. will use to lure people into this horrific situation and social media as well.

So it's super important that you're vigilant while you're online, knowing that these perpetrators are looking and are paying attention to where you are and what you're doing. I don't want you to live in fear, but it's important to be vigilant. It's important to pay attention and have situational awareness at all times to keep yourself safe from the perpetrators that are out there that are trying to exploit women and children. Well, thank you, Mr. Hutcherson, for joining us. I really appreciate all you had to share, and you can visit Liberatinghumanity.com to learn more about his organization and the book that he's writing The Sound of Freedom, The True Story Behind the Blockbuster film.

Mr. Hutchinson, yes, thank you so much for joining. That is perfect, perfect, but Kayla, and I'm so grateful, so grateful for you taking the time to to have me share with your audience. And if anybody has any questions or anything, you can go onto the contact page on Liberatinghumanity.com, or you can just go to Soundof Freedombook.com, and it'll hyperlink you right over to where you can pre-sign up for the book

and get some more information on staying safe in this world. Our guest has been Paul Huddersson, executive producer of the movie Sound of Freedom and author of the new book, The Sound of Freedom, the true story behind the blockbuster film. And I'm Michaela Estreuth. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.