“They Knew! They Lied! They Tried to Hide Their Crimes!”

Tony ortega

Back when Tony Ortega was shooting off his mouth in praise of Backpage, one of his favorite lies seems to have been what we’ve come to know as the ‘myth of Backpage self-moderation. Tony Ortega falsely claimed that Backpage took ‘proactive’ steps to root out instances of illicit prostitution and child sex trafficking. The reality is nothing could have been further from the truth.

Throughout the course of our ongoing investigation here at the blog, we have come to the conclusion that the corporate heads of the Backpage organization and their complicit co-conspirators like Tony Ortega had full knowledge that there so-called ‘moderation’ was only a publicity stunt designed to provide political cover against the growing concerns many Americans and their elected leaders were beginning to raise about the legitimacy of the Backpage business model.

Make no mistake, these are not merely allegations based on rumor or unfounded suspicions. These are the facts federal authorities have collected during the course of their years-long investigation into the Backpage scheme. And, unlike Tony Ortega’s half-baked apologism, these facts are unassailable.

Consider, for instance, how on November 16, 2011, Dan Hyer and Andrew Padilla received an email asking for “urgent” assistance in eliminating the word “teen” from the ads appearing on Backpage’s website: “ _Remove ads with teens or remove the text teen from . . ads._” Then, the following day, Padilla wrote back with an update that he had found “ _76 pages of results_” and that he had simply “ _edited_” all of the ads posted within the last two months (i.e., allowed those ads to remain on the website after sanitizing them).

Backpage knew underage sex trafficking was occurring on their platform. Instead of stopping it, they did all they could to disguise their crimes.

Sometime between January and March 2012, many of Backpage’s moderators (who were supervised in part by Padilla and Joye Vaught) underwent performance appraisals. These appraisals revealed that many of the moderators did “ _not report young looking escorts._” Nevertheless, these moderators were allowed to keep their jobs, and sometimes were given strong overall performance ratings.

They did this because Backpage knew full well what was going on and they were trying to hide their crimes.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, on February 16, 2012, Padilla sent an email to Vaught stating that Backpage should limit the number of child-exploitation referrals it was making to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

It is in this email which Padilla gives away the game when he explicitly states: “If we don’t want to blow past 500 this month, we shouldn’t be doing more than 16 a day.”

Why you may ask? By now the answer is obvious and rings out in the ears of anyone willing to hear the truth like the protest chants which even then were beginning to reverberate outside the Backpage headquarters — “They knew! They lied! They tried to hide their crimes!”