Fact checking Part III: The McDonald’s of Trafficking

We began a fact-checking investigation into the contemporary reporting surrounding the Backpage take down and comparing it to the biased, skewed, and highly propagandistic myths Tony Ortega had long been publishing about the notorious child sex trafficking platform. To put it mildly, the facts of the Backpage case do not square with the perverse hagiography Tony Ortega was trying his damnedest to sell his readers in the pages of the Village Voice tabloid.

When last we left off the CEO of Backpage had just been busted. Far from being the bastion of ‘First Amendment Rights’, as Tony Ortega described it, the website by this time was widely known to host explicitly sexualized “escort” advertisements.

Of course, Tony wanted you believe the “escorts” in question were nothing more than innocent, consenting adults looking for romance.

But they were nothing of the sort.

The majority of these victimized women were coerced, some under threat of violence and death. Some were controlled by drugs. Some by false promises.

And, sickeningly, many of them were well under the age of legal consent.

The website was facing accusations in multiple jurisdictions for engaging in sex trafficking. Indeed, hundreds of trafficking cases across the country were being linked to the site.

Not that reading Tony Ortega on the subject of Backpage would tell you that side of the story. As with most things, Tony Ortega is only interested in the version of stories which he invents himself.

Though Tony may have been stubbornly refusing to call Backpage what it was, the California Department of Justice suffered from none of his conflicts of interest. And they pulled no punches.

In an affidavit for a warrant filed by Brian Fichtner, a special agent of the California DOJ, described the Backpage operation as:

“ Defendants have known that their website is the United States hub for the illegal sex trade and that many of the people advertised for commercial sex on Backpage are victims of sex trafficking, including children.”

Quite a contrast to the rosy narrative Ortega was pushing of ‘Backpage as the future of online classified advertising’, marveling at how ‘smart’ his bosses were to have dreamt up such a scheme. Being, himself, on the Backpage payroll Tony must have been in reverent awe at the business’s ability to practically printing money.

At least that’s the impression he gives every time he would ‘gush’ like a fan girl of at what he claimed was the ‘genius’ of the Backpage model.

Once again, however, the reality of the situation could not have been more polar opposite from what was actually going on.

Perhaps no one said it better than Carol Robles-Román, president and chief executive of the women’s legal defense fund, Legal Momentum, when she bluntly exposed Tony’s vision of Backpage as a cheap, tarted-up fake by calling the site what it really was:

“Backpage is _an online brothel that provides underage kids to pedophiles… They made it so easy. They_’ _re like the McDonald_’ s of trafficking.”