Tony Ortega’s “journalistic” career began with The Phoenix New Times in the mid 90’s when the company’s then flagship paper, The New Times, became part of the Village Voice Media merger in 2005.
After a four-year stint as staff writer, Ortega wrote for The New Times Los Angeles for three years before returning to become Associate Editor of The Phoenix New Times. Following this, he became managing editor of The New Times-owned The Pitch, in Kansas City, where he worked from 2003-2005 before leaving to become editor of the New Times Broward-Palm Beach.
Tony Ortega was bent out of shape when the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” campaign went viral. He felt compelled (or perhaps ordered by his masters at Backpage dot com) to squash it. Ortega’s futile propaganda to suppress the campaign only proved his support of sex trafficking.
Ortega made it very clear where he stood when he wrote:
Congress hauled in Craigslist on September 15, 2010. There, feminists, religious zealots, the well-intentioned, law enforcement, and social-service bureaucrats pilloried the online classified business for peddling “100,000 to 300,000” underage prostitutes annually.
When Tony Ortega was on the payroll of Michael Lacey and James Larkin he touted Backpage’s process of screening personal ads for illegal content. This is the same process that the Subcommittee criticized at page 17 of its report as serving “to sanitize the content of innumerable advertisements for illegal transactions—even as Backpage represented to the public and the courts that it merely hosted content created by others.”
What was Ortega covering up?
Backpage.com was taken down and seized by federal law enforcement, according to a notice posted online.
The FBI also raided the residence of Michael Lacey, a co-founder of Backpage.
Tony Ortega was a longtime employee and confidant of James Larkin and Michael Lacey. Ortega was an employee of various New Times publications from 1995 until being promoted to Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice in approximately March 2007, a position he held until September 2012.
This week a young woman who was sold for sex through ads placed on Backpage cleared a major legal hurdle when a Massachusetts Federal Court Judge allowed her civil suit despite the now familiar arguments from Backpage’s attorneys that it is not responsible for third party content (sex ads) placed on its website.
The suit involves a now 18-year-old woman who, as a minor, was sold for sex in Massachusetts and Florida through ads that were placed on Backpage.
When Tony Ortega “lost” his job as editor of the Village Voice in September 2012, it was more than a humiliating demotion. It was an unceremonious descent into obscurity, an involuntary downsizing to a laptop in a New York apartment, spinning stories and strangling truth on a little-read and virtually incomprehensible weblog.
Before being booted from the Village Voice, besides being known (and widely ridiculed within and without his own industry) for his obsession with writing biased and misleading stories about the Church of Scientology, Ortega was notorious as the poster boy for sex-trafficking ads.
Sometime ago NPR did a short story on Backpage and how they are defending “Online And Anonymous: New Challenges To Prosecuting Sex Trafficking”
McDougall, legal counsel for Backpage did most of the talking for the company. She said, “shutting down the adult classifieds on Backpage would do more harm than good because the content would simply move to less cooperative sites.
What kind of insane excuse was that? If we don’t help the pimps out, someone else will?
Former Village Voice editor, Tony Ortega, went down in New York history as the man who hammered the final nails into the coffin of the once venerable alternative weekly.
And, as the man who used “junk science” from vested interest groups to make the sex trafficking of underage girls something much less than the national epidemic it is. All in defense of the sex ads on the Village Voice Media classified ad website Backpage dot com, the platform that props up the Phoenix-based company.
We read yesterday about the story of K.R. and how at the hands of a longtime Backpage user known as ‘Alonso’ she was trafficked and sold repeatedly for sex. In her suit in Alabama K.R. alleged she was consistently threatened, physically abused and forced her to take intoxicating agents including illegal drugs and alcohol.
From May 28, 2013, until approximately August 8, 2013, Alonso reserved rooms on thirty-seven (37) different nights in various hotels to carry out the sex trafficking venture Backpage had made possible.
On Thursday, May 31, 2018, a Chicago federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart who requested credit card companies not to do business with Backpage dot com.
James Larkin and Michael Lacey accused the Sheriff of interfering with the Backpage business. The judge ruled Thomas Dart’s action was protected by the First Amendment. The appeals court reversed that ruling, but Judge Tharp granted Dart’s motion to dismiss the suit.
Why are folks over on Tony Ortega’s blog suddenly calling him a low class drama queen? I mean, it’s not like they are wrong but seeing these comments popping up on Tony Ortega’s hate blog got us thinking. Have Tony’ Ortega’s readers finally had enough of his unfiltered, immature garbage?
Apparently it all started when a longtime “fan” of his announced that he was fed up with the way Tony Ortega runs his operation.
Tony Ortega’s former boss, Michael Lacey, who stands accused of using the shuttered Backpage website to profit from human trafficking and prostitution is out on a $1 million bail bond. Apparently he is so conflicted about his role as heading the largest online brothel in the world that he’s decided to take a fun-filled trip to Hawaii to really give him a chance to work on his tan (and presumably whatever remorse his shriveled heart is capable of feeling having ruined so many lives.
Yesterday we wrote about the unique case currently underway in Florida courts brought by Florida Abolitionists, Inc. It alleges Backpage knowingly broke human trafficking laws and caused tremendous drains on the resources of the agency in its fight to end modern human slavery.
Interestingly, the lawsuit makes explicit mention of an attempted ruse pulled by Backpage officials (James Larkin and Michale Lacey) shortly before their refusal to testify at a Subcommittee hearing on the matter in January 2017.
We ended our post yesterday noting how both Tony Ortega and his atheist, activist wife, Arielle Silverstein, are known liars. While being identified as a source of ‘bad faith’ information might not even register in atheist community, being a liar and calling yourself a journalist is and remains an unforgivable sin.
Not only does Tony Ortega often fabricate from whole cloth the “facts” he reports, he also insidiously inserts his own views into his reporting.
Federal law enforcement have apparently left out Tony Ortega from their investigation, yet he was intimately involved in managing the Backpage sex ads at the Village Voice and defending it when it came under scrutiny by the media and Federal authorities. He was not an innocent bystander but an important participant.
Here is just an example of an article Ortega wrote when he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice defending Backpage dot com.
