How Tony’s Mudslinging Lie Became His Line In The Sand

Barely a week had passed since Tony Ortega wrote his poison pen piece attacking the validity of national child sex trafficking statistics, when Ortega lashed out again. This time the object of his unhinged rage was a human target.

Tony Ortega was going to use the opportunity to make his unconscionable defense of Backpage personal.  And he didn’t care who he had to throw under the bus to do it.

To achieve this, Ortega had set his sights on destroying the journalistic credibility of CNN’s Amber Lyon. Lyon was a reporter and co-producer of a documentary on sex trafficking called “Selling the Girls Next Door” which had just explicitly named Backpage as the worst human sex trafficking offender in the United States.

To Tony Ortega, however, she looked like an easy target.

Tony began his verbal assault on Lyon by trotting out a familiar tactic, criticizing concerns over sex trafficking on American shores as nothing more than “media mass paranoia”.

It was an obvious mudslinging lie by Tony Ortega.

Perhaps he was jealous of Amber Lyon’s career. She was everything Tony Ortega was not —a serious, established journalist with a respected professional history of fact-based integrity. Tony Ortega, on the other hand, isn’t, wasn’t, nor has ever been any of those things.

We may never know whether it was petty jealousy, or craven cowardice which motivated Ortega to write his piece against Lyon, but what is clear (as we have previously pointed out) is that Tony Ortega insisted on aligning himself with the callous, people-destroying greed Backpage stood for. And he was adamant about putting on it on the record.

As Tony Ortega wrote:

“ Seven years ago, the people I work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com, a competitor to Craigslist…. What happens when two adults find each other through Backpage.com? I couldn’t tell you … [It] exists solely so that people can freely express themselves—sometimes in ways that make other people uncomfortable. We ’ re First Amendment extremists that way . Always have been.”

Tony Ortega was drawing a line in the sand.

On one side, truth telling journalists, anti-child trafficking activists and political reformers — on the other side, crooked liars like Tony Ortega and the soulless people he was dumb enough to work for.