Breaking Tony Ortega’s Exploited Loopholes

Tony Ortega

There are not many who would disagree with the notion that Tony Ortega has changed journalism for the worse. Of course he was not the first tabloid hack to try and cash in on selling lies for personal profit and a perceived measure of ‘clout’ from his fellow conspiracy theorists in the blogosphere, but he was among the more brazen failures in his endeavors.

Ortega’s former employers at Backpage, too, changed the world for the worse. While it seems that media outlets across the country have joined together in an unspoken agreement never to hire Ortega to write for them again, Backpage continues to have influence over the way unscrupulous would-be sex traffickers conduct their business.

The town of Kenosha in Wisconsin, however, is taking steps of its own to address the proliferation of Backpage-inspired online sex-peddling. In fact, the Kenosha City Council announced recently that it will look at updating local statutes governing prostitution to cover more than just soliciting sex on the streets.

A Kenosha Police Department proposal which went before City Council last Monday night would change the municipal code language on disorderly houses and loitering to help reflect how things have changed in the post-Backpage era of modern sex trafficking.

As Kenosha Police Deputy Chief Eric Larsen said,

“ Prostitution has changed in its nature and how it goes about things. What we’ve found is that we were … put in a position where we would have to charge prostitutes criminally because the ordinance only spoke about hailing, waving of arms, running out to cars and things like that, when the dynamics have changed significantly… Essentially, we’re looking at online things now and different means of communication than the streetwalker-type violations.”

Could it be that this is what first drew Tony Ortega to defending Backpage in the first place? After all, for someone like Ortega who has had almost as many failed marriages as he has illicit online affairs, finding new partners could hardly have been easier among the prostitute-populated pages of the Backpage ‘Personals’ section he so loudly defended.

Indeed, as Deputy Chief Larsen himself says, the impetus for the change stems from operations more than a decade ago in which the department dealt with Backpage’s online sex soliciting.

As Larsen admitted:

“ We started getting complaints about prostitutes and finding that they were all over, at the time, on a site called Backpage and then on Craigslist, both Internet-based…We were finding prostitutes advertising and so we were at some operations and we made some arrests. We didn’t have any problem with the state statute in arresting them. But, the city ordinance doesn’t cover prostitution that’s Internet-based.”

Tony Ortega may have spent years of his ‘career’ trying to help Backpage wiggle out of legal loopholes, but for at least one city a movement is underway to help make that more difficult.

As Deputy Chief Larsen concluded in his address to the City Council on the matter:

“ There’s always loopholes for attorneys to get their clients out of tickets or jail time. Basically what we’re doing is we’re mirroring what the state has so it’ s enforceable .”

We here at the blog applaud such public minded moves and will always be on the side of those who stand up to Tony Ortega, Backpage and others who manipulate these loopholes to the disadvantage of others.