Mel Gibson’s publicist dispels rumors about the actor working on a child sex trafficking documentary

Some social media users are cheering actor Mel Gibson for being "one of the few people in Hollywood speaking out against the corruption," as one recent Instagram post claimed.

"Mel Gibson has announced he has been secretly working on a 4 part docu series exposing the 34 billion dollar global child sex trafficking trade," the June 6 post said. "He has joined up with Tim Ballard in Operation Underground Railroad to rescue trafficked children!"

It was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Alan Nierob, Gibson’s publicist, told The Associated Press on June 7 that Gibson "is not making any documentary."

Operation Underground Railroad is a nonprofit aimed at rescuing children "from sex trafficking and sexual exploitation." It was founded by Tim Ballard, who said that Gibson isn’t a producer on the organization’s upcoming documentary about child sex trafficking, according to Entertainment Weekly.

Featured Fact-check

Threads posts

stated on October 26, 2024 in a Threads post

Four Florida counties had “zero results” Oct. 26, and “something underhanded might be happening.”

Ballard said in a statement to the magazine that Gibson called him in 2022 "with valuable intelligence regarding children who were rumored to be vulnerable to human traffickers in Ukraine" and that he "deserves all the credit for taking the initiative to further the critical work that we do." 

But Ballard said that "reports this four-part series is actually being produced by Mr. Gibson are not accurate."

What’s more, we found no evidence of Gibson announcing that he was working on such a series. We looked for news stories, statements from the actor or other credible sources to corroborate the claim, and came up empty. 

We rate this post False.