How Tony Ortega’s PR Crusade Made Protecting Children A “Low Priority” For Backpage

Carl Ferrer, Michael Lacey and James Larkin

When we last looked in to the ongoing saga of the Backpage crime syndicate we saw how by the end of that summer of 2011 the chief conspirators of the online sex trafficking ring, Michael Lacey, James Larkin and Carl Ferrer together with problematically unethical enablers like Tony Ortega, had repeatedly lied about and obscured the true aims of the Backpage business model.

By the fall of that year the wheels were beginning to come off the bus. Evidence of their wrong doing was mounting, authorities were starting to ask hard questions, and — despite the long propaganda war Tony Ortega had launched on readers of the Backpage-owned Village Voice — the public was beginning to turn against them.

Tony Ortega

Much of the public outrage was the result of rumors concerning child sex trafficking. Tony Ortega argued this was nothing more than ‘hysteria’, and that these complaints were politically motived by ‘child advocacy nuts ‘and ‘religiously-minded zealots.’

Tony Ortega’s falsely crafted narrative, however, was about to be shattered.

On October 6, 2011, Carl Ferrer sent an email discussing various proposals for addressing “ _the under aged issue._” With respect to one particular proposal, Ferrer acknowledged it was a good one but recommended against adopting it because Backpage would not derive any public-relations benefit from doing so:

“This is a good idea but it is not visible to AG’s [state attorneys general] so it has little PR value. It is a low priority.”

Indeed, concern that children were being sexually exploited for money on the very platform Backpage had created was always “a low priority” for the top bosses because it conflicted with the public relations spin campaign Tony Ortega was busy propagating. To put it in other words, the reason the safety of underaged kids was of such meager interest to the Backpage conspirators was that it might look bad for the business even to acknowledge there was a problem at all.

In legal circles there are words for obscene irresponsibility of this magnitude: criminal negligence and criminal conspiracy. And Backpage was about to discover, federal authorities take charges of these kinds very seriously.

As the first batch of Backpage ‘bad faith actors’ (Larkin, Lacey, Ferrer, Scott Spear, John Brunst, Dan Hyer, Andrew Padilla, and Joye Vaught) await sentencing for the parts they played in the Backpage scheme it is worth noting that they themselves may soon be learning the extent to which Federal Judges, too, take a dim view of those who criminally neglect child victims of sex trafficking in order to make a fast buck.