Every Bad Faith Trick In The Book

We’ve exposed the extent to which Tony Ortega was willing to go as former Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice in providing cover for his pimp pals at Backpage. We’ve seen Tony Ortega lie, misdirect, and purposefully muddy the waters in order to confuse the public about the Backpage human trafficking empire which victimized countless young women and underage girls.

For a while Tony Ortega’s dog and pony show seemed to be working. The architects of the Backpage sex trafficking portal had even fooled Ernie Allen, the President and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Allen had accepted in good faith the fraudulent claim that Backpage was ‘making a serious effort to screen and monitor all the ads on their site and report all those that are suspicious.’ It was the same line Tony Ortega was repeating. The lie was designed to made Backpage look like they were the good guys, working to fix the problem of children being sold into sexual slavery on their website.

The truth, of course, was that children being sold to perverts was never something Backpage itself ever considered a ‘problem’. Far from it — it was their very business model.

However, it soon became clear to advocates and politicians alike that Backpage was acting in bad faith. Ernie Allen made a keen observation early on, when comparing Backpage’s approach to the ‘problem’ of sex trafficking to way it was handled by Craigslist, which his organization had also worked with.

He knew full well that Craigslist had already attempted to monitor ads and to report suspicious activity, only to see those efforts fail.

As Allen explained:

“ They screened, monitored, and reported. Ultimately they concluded that it was not eliminating the problem so they shut down their ads.”

And yet, Backpage continued to refuse to take steps to shut down their ads when their performative attempts at similar tactics failed.

All these years later, it now seems abundantly clear why.

When Craigslist learned underage children were being bought and sold on their platform they saw it as a crisis, and when they understood that crisis couldn’t be ameliorated they closed down the entire Adult site.

When Backpage saw women and children being trafficked they looked at it as an opportunity, and they used every bad faith trick in the book to cash in before being forced to shutter their sex selling syndicate.

And we should never forget it was cowardly, bad faith operators like Tony Ortega who helped them try and get away with it.