Another Lie on Top of a Deception Inside a Hoax

We’ve written at length about the measure of responsibility Tony Ortega shares for his role in helping to legitimate the black market sex trade Backpage engaged in. In fact, questions about the level of Tony Ortega’s involvement in the Backpage child sex trafficking ring are the ones we most regularly get asked here at the blog.

We would point out, of course, there are no shortage of other scandals Tony Ortega has been related to in one form or another over the years.  And if you’re beginning to wonder how Tony manages to find himself in so many of these shady situations, remind yourself this is Tony Ortega we are talking about here – the same guy tried to lie his way out of his now infamous ‘rape hoax’ by creating fraudulent alter ego whom he then ‘fake fired’ .

So, while we are all waiting to see what implicating details come to light following the upcoming trial of Tony Ortega’s Backpage bosses, we thought we’d take a look at another ‘amateurishly manufactured scandal’ in which Tony Ortega played a key role.

Back in 2012 Tony Ortega was desperate for anyone he could use to fabricate some scandal involving the object of his lifelong obsession, Scientology. It was then he found a trashy reality star named “Mimi” who was willing to say and do anything to gain a little personal publicity and media attention. In short order the two of them hatched a plan to falsify the sort of tawdry gossip-driven story only a hack like Tony Ortega would consider ‘journalism’.

At the time Tony Ortega was still editor of The Village Voice, offering up paper-thin defenses of Backpage while trying to muddy the national conversation on sex trafficking with his cheap propagandistic distractions.

Together with Tony “Rape Hoax” Ortega, Mimi’s story of being kicked out of Scientology took on a decidedly different tone, embellished with the same sort of shameless fiction that infuses the majority of Tony’s hit-pieces.

Naturally, Tony’s story failed to make much of a splash but it appears that Mimi’s was influenced by Tony Ortega’s willingness to exploit the worst in people for selfish ends. And just as she had learned from Ortega, it didn’t matter how dark or disgusting things got.

This became all too evident when Mimi took her next step to get tabloid publicity – by “leaking” a sex video which she tearfully explained had been stolen from her luggage while traveling.

Not a word of it was true, however.

Taking a page straight from Tony Ortega, the whole thing was a completely fabricated lie to get the public attention she so desperately desired. The facts were the sex tape had been staged and there was no theft, it had all been calculatingly leaked.

Indeed, even her false claim in a later schlock article that it had been the stolen sex tape which killed her father by giving him a stroke when he learned of it was untrue – nothing but another lie on top of a deception inside a hoax.

In other words, pure Ortega.