“The Sick Joke of Backpage”

Tony Ortega

By this point we believe we have firmly established that Backpage clearly understood that Tony Ortega’s fraudulent defense of their child sex trafficking practice was nothing but lies. That being said, however, we would be remiss if we didn’t offer our readers a look into the vast amount of evidence federal prosecutors have been quietly amassing as Michael Lacey, James Larkin and Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer prepare for what will no doubt be the human trafficking trial of the century.

In order to help Tony Ortega spin their continuing public relations propaganda Backpage sought the assistance of a public relations firm based in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2011. On October 12, 2011, Carl Ferrer received a written copy of the firm’s presentation. Later, some of the Backpage defendants attended a meeting at which the presentation was discussed in more detail.

The presentation warned that Backpage’s business practices would inevitably result in legal trouble (“One day the proverbial is going to hit the fan”) and characterized Backpage’s “media strategy” as “ Do not acknowledge the prostitution.”

The presentation also noted that the “ _ads on the backpage.com site_” generally fall into three categories, one of which is “ _Pimps and Men Looking for Kids._”

Nine days later, James Larkin received an email discussing whether the Backpage website should include a warning message concerning the sex trafficking of children. This email contained the following joke:

“Andrew [Padilla] thinks it too heavy handed and thinks our web site name will be entrapment.com (Hilarious).”

The fact that the Backpage scheme to sell children for sex was unravelling and the corporate heads running the business were cracking jokes says just about all there is to say about what scumbags these people are.

Nowhere in the vast volumes of correspondence between the Backpage defendants and their co-conspirators offer anything close to empathy for the lives of the underage youths they were exploiting. We know this because for the past few weeks we’ve been painstakingly going through the evidence on behalf of our readers. There is no sense of conscience, no sense of shame expressed in a single email or interoffice note.

What we have said from the beginning about those in the Backpage conspiracy becomes truer every day: they were, and remain remorseless monsters who saw children and vulnerable women as a means to an end.  Every lie they told, every bit of propaganda Tony Ortega pushed on their behalf was all to service their bottom line.

The incalculable human suffering they caused, the harm they inflicted and lives they destroyed were nothing but a sick joke to them.