This week we’ve been looking at the enduring legacy of destruction in the wake of the only underage sex peddling platform personally endorsed by Tony Ortega.
We saw how the murder in Atlanta ties directly back to Backpage’s thinly veiled revamp of its prostitution platform, rebranded now as ‘adult dating’. But the problem continues to spread across state lines.
As criminals benefit from technology in communication, wide distribution and anonymity, law enforcement agencies find themselves using the same platforms to stop those illegal revenues and gather evidence.
Even though federal authorities have long since raided and shuttered the world’s largest online prostitution syndicate run by Tony Ortega’s former bosses, new reporting suggests Backpage.com is still a marketplace for prostitution in places like metro Atlanta, according to a Channel 2 Action News investigation earlier this week.
Way back when prostitution first migrated from streets to smart phones, both Craigslist and Backpage were under pressure to stop online adult advertising, this new bombshell report explains.
It’s that time again! Time for your Backpage Sex Peddling trial update, brought to you by Tony Ortega and his criminally indicted bosses.
This week, we heard the first words Backpage.com co-founder and Tony Ortega’s former boss, Michael Lacey, offered about allegations he faces for running a prostitution ring and shady money laundering operation.
“Nonsense!” was all he said before his attorney added that his client had no further comment. Nonsense, as if to imply that all the lives he and the people who worked for him ruined and left discarded behind them were nothing but a joke to him.
Frequent readers of this blog will know by now the sordid unprofessional history of Tony Ortega. Between 2011 and July 2012, Tony Ortega, then Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice, launched a biased oppo-research campaign on organizations and individuals who attempted to report on sex trafficking in the United States.
Clearly Ortega was tasked by his employers, James Larking and Michael Lacey, to do damage control against the numerous accusations being levied against Backpage.
Any attempt to understand Tony Ortega’s strange obsession with defending the truly indefensible sex-for-cash prostitution ring prosecutors for the federal government have hauled them in to court to answer for, must begin with a survey of Ortega’s own quotes on the matter. On June 29, 2011, Ortega wrote:
“ Backpage.com has since inherited some of the adult business that left Craigslist…We’ve spent millions of dollars putting in place strict policies and monitoring services to make sure that it is only adults finding each other through Backpage.
When Tony Ortega was dismissed from The Village Voice in September 2012, The New York Observer disclosed that he lost his job as Editor-in-Chief for neglecting his duties in favor of his personal daily rants against Scientology. It got so bad that one staffer at the Voice complained, “He was increasingly obsessed with Scientology and had neglected almost all of his editorial duties at the paper. Sometimes he wouldn’t even edit features.
Maybe it’s not so hard to believe that it’s already been 6 years since Tony Ortega was let go as the editor of The Village Voice. Since that time it’s been an on-going saga of continuous unemployment, desperate boot-licking in Hollywood, and a lackluster (to say the least) foray into the narcissistic world of self-publishing.
Suffice it to say, Tony Ortega will most likely be out of the running for the ‘Most Industrious Man of the Decade’ award this time around.
This last month was designated by the White House as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, dedicating the month to raising national awareness of the issue of human trafficking and highlighting efforts to combat this violent crime and those who would enable and endorse such practices.
There’s no mistake that last year saw a decided series of devastating blows to human trafficking in general and Tony Ortega’s former employer, backpage.
People have been talking a lot lately about Tony Ortega and his infamous defense of the Backpage, since the story is once again making headlines as the federal government moves ahead with its case against the people behind it.
Tony Ortega asserts that the classified section was never a platform for selling sex, but a new report from law enforcement is clearly demonstrating this to be yet another of his lies.
Repercussions from the recent pressure being put on Backpage and its conspiratorial enablers like Tony Ortega continue to be felt across the country.
Just this week in Florida, a woman was sentenced to life in prison for prostituting a 14-year-old female runaway by setting the girl up in a motel room and creating a profile for the child on backpage.com.
The woman in question, 35 year old Katilia Brekeysha Seymour, was convicted of human trafficking following her arrest more than two years ago in Pinellas County.
The role Tony Ortega played (and continues to play by remaining silent) supporting the notorious Backpage website is no secret to frequent readers of this blog, but the seismic ripple effect in the wake of the Federal raid which seized more than 12 million dollars from those associated with the underage sex-for-hire platform is something few could have predicted.
This week it was announced that human trafficking has become such a danger in California that it will be now be part of the curriculum at seven local school districts when then San Diego County District Attorney’s Office made public it will spend $3 million to fund The San Diego Trafficking Prevention Collective to provide education about human trafficking to more than 237,000 students.
Previously on this blog, we covered the massive bombshell story detailing how Tony Ortega’s former bosses just had their bank accounts seized to the tune of more than 10 million dollars.
Today another intriguing development in the story.
The sentencing of the former CEO of Backpage.com, the infamous website knowingly used for the purposes of underage prostitution, has been pushed to July 18 from its original January date. The move to delay formally throwing the book at Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer, who originally pitched the executives of the New Times tabloid chain (which employed Tony Ortega at the time) on the idea of an online prostitution advertising website, came at the request of the federal government.
It’s no secret these past few years have been a terrible run for the Tony Ortega brand (such as it is) what with entering into his umpteenth consecutive year of deadbeat unemployment, the blow Twitter’s new algorithm struck against his army of fake sock puppet supporters presumably purchased from shady off-shore bot farms, and the chorus of criticism he has been receiving from his very own blog posters calling him out for mistreating his so-called ‘sources’.
Schadenfreude is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of others.
It’s a complex negative emotion. Rather than feeling sympathy towards someone’s misfortune, schadenfreude evokes joyful feelings that take pleasure from watching harm come to someone. While research suggests his emotion is displayed more in children than adults, some adults also experience schadenfreude, they are just usually better at concealing their expressions.
The staff at the Village Voice, working under Tony Ortega, had a reputation in New York City for ruthless retaliation on people that poked their nose into its classifieds section, Backpage. Readers of this blog will recognize Backpage as the human trafficking site which tried to cloak itself under the First Amendment’s “Freedom of Speech” clause. In the twisted logic of the Backpage the “Freedom of the Press” guaranteed in the Constitution means one can call “classifieds” part of the “press” and sell human beings in the classifieds section.
Way back when Tony Ortega’s bosses in Phoenix were dreaming about shredding and burning all the evidence implicating them in the global sex-for-profit scandal that was starting to spiral so out of control they were once again at risk of going to prison, a deal was struck.
Tony Ortega was promised that as long as he toed the party line and played nice, he’d be rewarded with an executive assignment as chief editor at a far “more lucrative and prestigious” rag than the “lowly” _Village_Voice.
All the sit-ins and sign-waving on the news lately in the wake of the Senate’s confirmation of the Court’s newest Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, have gotten us thinking about the power of protest.
Sometimes even the littlest gestures can have big impacts. Take for instance the time 15 protesters stood outside the Golleher Alumni House at California State University, Fullerton, chanting “No sex trafficking” in light of a speaker who was invited by two Cal State Fullerton alumni chapters.
The vast majority of women who are raped or sexually assaulted do not report the crime to police, as surveys in light of allegations facing Supreme Court hopeful Brett Kavanaugh suggests. Tragically, this is so because in many cases because the victims have little confidence that their attacker will ever be brought to justice.
Once recent poll found that 1 out of 6 women have experienced some form of harassment, while 35 percent have been sexually assaulted.
In our last post we referenced the bipartisan support that lead to The U.S. Senate’s condemnation of Backpage and its vocal supports when it voted overwhelmingly in February to close an Internet law loophole that has shielded Backpage from liability when they ran ads for minors being offered as prostitutes.
The law this amends, the Communications Decency Act of 1996, was intended to foster an open Internet free of threats of lawsuits for content some might dislike.
Back on January 10, 2017, it was a day of reckoning on Capitol Hill for the Backpage, when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a new report saying that Backpage had knowingly facilitated underage trafficking on its site by actively editing ads posted in the “adult services” section. It was then that website’s top executives were subpoenaed to attend a hearing where the Subcommittee, led by Sen. Rob Portman and McCaskill laid out their findings, which were based on over a million pages of internal company documents.
