For as much as we’ve talked about the dangers of Tony Ortega’s hate-blog and the work of his former employers at the sleazy sex selling site, Backpage, it could be helpful to take a moment to set each in its proper context.
For example, Tony Ortega’s ‘angry troll on the internet’ routine generates so little actual revenue that it really must be considered more hobby than ‘job’. For all the time Ortega seems to fritter away over his pet obsession, he must be making embarrassingly little money from it – what’s more embarrassing is that he is living off of his wife, Arielle Silverstein, salary.
The more one examines Tony Ortega’s involvement as Editor-in-Chief of his former rag, the Village Voice, and how he defended their attempts to make money off of sex trafficking the sicker one gets.
We know have incontrovertible proof in the form of first-hand, corroborated accounts (as described in affidavits to the Court by victims and witnesses alike) that it involved child sex slaves. This disturbing fact is something which Ortega has continuously downplayed, in a desperate attempt to minimize it away.
Yesterday we took a look at how everything that Tony Ortega touches dies. Though the scope of our discussion was based on the disastrous litany of Tony Ortega’s failed employment history, this deep underlying truth about Tony can tragically be applied to numerous Jane Doe’s who have suffered at the hands of the Backpage, the one-time market leader for online human trafficking which Tony vociferously publicly defended time and time again.
Ashley Benson was a victim of sex trafficking who was brutally murdered by a man who bought her off the internet for sex using the Backpage website, the largest sex trafficking site this country has ever seen.
Benson was a young mother who was trying to put her life together for her son, but she was picked up by a pimp who physically and mentally abused her and then forced her to have sex with strangers for money.
We know from past reporting that Backpage refused to impose meaningful requirements before sex ads were posted on their site because they believed the Communications Decency Act would give them immunity from suit for child sex trafficking. They also believed requiring photo identification would substantially reduce their profits, and harm their bottom line.
Rather than take any reasonable steps to prevent children from being advertised for sex on their website, the Backpage intentionally underreported the number of child sex ads on their website.
Yet another bombshell case against Tony Ortega’s former employer, the infamous sex trafficking website Backpage comes to light this week.
This case involves an unnamed plaintiff known only as ‘K.R.’ She claims that Backpage directly violated the Code of Alabama §13A-6-151, and makes claims for violation of Alabama’s human trafficking statute, outrage, negligence and wantonness, and unjust enrichment against Backpage.
In early 2013, K.R. turned seventeen (17) years old. Around that time, she ran away from her home in Meridian, Lauderdale County, Mississippi with very little money.
Our last post discussed how Backpage attempted to characterize itself as ‘Sheriff of the Internet’, much in the way the proverbial fox would guard a henhouse.
They tried to create relationships with various law enforcement agencies in what amounted to nothing more than a PR strategy which sought to control the narrative around its involvement as the country’s largest platform for sex trafficking. In short, they weren’t content to skirt the existing system of law enforcement in place to guard against its practices, they wanted to rig the system to make themselves look like the good guys.
In or around 2010, as the Backpage began to emerge as a significant presence in the online sex advertising business, they developed a plan to minimize the attention devoted to its activities by the public and by law enforcement agencies, particularly concerning advertising of children on its website.
Defendants undertook to forge seemingly cooperative relationships with many law enforcement agencies and to convey the impression that they were actively and successfully engaged in efforts to identify and report child sex trafficking victims and otherwise “partnering” with law enforcement to minimize the risk of exploitation of children on the website.
Deceit through obfuscation. In every sense, this could have been a motto for the Backpage during the time Carl Ferrer was Tony Ortega’s superior at the helm of the largest sex trafficking platform the United States has ever known.
This week we’ve been looking at how Ferrer directly reached out to pimps and traffickers in order to help them beat the bogus ‘monitoring’ system put in place which Backpage had hoped would somehow fool investigators.
We wrote previously as Editor-At-Large Tony Ortega from 2007 to 2012 oversaw the sleazy Backpage’s “posting rules” and “content requirements.” But Ortega went further by publicly attacking anyone in the press who raised questions about the Backpage’s roll as the country’s leading sex trafficking platform, referring to reports of rising rates of underage prostitution as “bogus information”.
“The actual data behind this ‘epidemic’ is wanting in the extreme,” Ortega wrote, following an “investigative” article, paid by revenues directly acquired by Backpage’s advertising sex for money scheme.
In our last piece we introduced you to Tony Ortega’s boss Carl Ferrer, the longtime CEO of the infamous Backpage under-age sex ring operation.
We’ve explained how helping sex traffickers and prostitutes avoid detection by law enforcement through their phony “posting rules” and “content requirements.” What is now being revealed in the various court cases in multiple dates underway currently is that the Backpage began “moderating” sex ads, which is the term they used for reviewing and editing sex ads on www.
Defendant Carl Ferrer, who has been the CEO of Backpage for many years, personally helped one sex trafficker ensure that his sex trafficking ads would be posted on the website after the Backpage locked his account for posting an ad for sex.
As previously reported this sex trafficker went by the username “Urban Pimp.” When his ads were temporarily blocked, he complained to the Ferrer that his sex ads were blocked and noted that he was trying to post sex ads in more than 50 cities in the United States.
We’ve been discussing the lawsuits, the sex-trafficking, the selling of children for sex Tony Ortega supported and condoned during his time as Editor in Chief of the Village Voice owned and controlled by the owners of Backpage.com.
Behind all the salacious sex abuses Tony Ortega is responsible for there remain more dark charges that have been leveled at his previous pet-project for which he bears similar responsibility – one of these is the murder of Ashley Benson, which was the direct result of Ortega’s insidious marketing scheme to cheat the system.
On August 17, 2018,Dan Hyer, Sales and Marketing Director of Backpage.com pleaded guilty to conspiring to facilitate prostitution, Hyer participated in a scheme to give free ads to prostitutes in a bid to drive business to Backpage. Hyer is yet another Backpage employee to plead guilty. He will be sentenced in November 2018.
Michael Lacey and James Larkin, who owned the Backpage trademark attached “Backpage” online sex trafficking site to the Village Voice.
Florida Abolitionist, Inc. is a non-profit organization in Orlando, Florida with a mission to combat and end human trafficking and other forms of modern day human slavery. It provides direct services to trafficked adults and children.
In a new lawsuit, Florida Abolitionist has filed against the men behind Backpage, it alleges Backpage knowingly participated in, and facilitated, sex trafficking. By doing so Backpage has increased the number of trafficked adults and children that Florida Abolitionist treats.
Carl Ferrer, Michael Lacey, James Larkin
Anthony “Tony” Ortega
After Backpage.com created the marketplace, Tony Ortega helped sex traffickers create and develop the content of their ads on the site so they could profit from each ad.
When law enforcement began to scrutinize the illegal activity occurring on Backpage, Ortega’s bosses took steps to help sex traffickers create ads that would avoid detection by law enforcement so that they could continue to profit from those ads.
Over the past decade or more, marketing for prostitution began to migrate to the Internet, as website operators have sought to enable buyers and sellers of sex to maintain their anonymity and minimize the risk of detection by law enforcement.
Named for the infamous “Back Page” of the Village Voice newspaper, Backpage.com became the primary destination for buying and selling illegal commercial sex online, accounting for 80 percent or more of all revenue from online commercial sex advertising in the United States.
By the time the Feds shutdown Tony Ortega’s former employers’s Backpage.com, it was largest source of online human sex trafficking in the United States.This chilling fact, seemingly the one subject upon which Tony Ortega is conspicuously silent, is not disputed.
That Backpage conspirators generated $135 million in revenue, the vast majority of which was generated from illegal ads for sex on the Backpage,is not disputed.
The facts above are not merely coincidental.
Readers of this blog will be familiar with the growing number of lawsuits filed in states across the nation against Backpage.com and sex-trafficking syndicate that was running for years, victimizing countless women and underage girls.
Such syndicate was Tony Ortega’s employer and Ortega was a well known Backpage.com apologist.
Today we present to you select portions of actual court documents laying out the factual allegations of the crimes. These documents are not an easy read for the feint of heart but we feel the evil detailed herein needs to be exposed for what it is.
It’s no coincidence that as state and federal investigations of Backpage continue heating up, the pressure on Tony Ortega is mountings significantly. Case in point – most of his blog posts lately have been shorter than usual and/or written by “guest” authors who help ramp up his cult of personality as the preeminent “Scientology expert” on the Internet.
Ortega has made a ‘career ‘, if such a word can be applied to a chronic malingerer, of making a mountain out of a molehills.
