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.
Recently we reported on the history making case filed against Tony Ortega’s ex-employers earlier this year in which a young girl allegedly suffered multiple rapes through the sex trafficking made possible by James Larkin’s and Michael Lacey’s Backpage platform.
We can now reveal that while that particular case remains groundbreaking, it isn’t the only one filed against Backpage. Across the nation those making claims of victimization at the hands of Backpage (and Tony Ortega’s propaganda on behalf of his employers) and their sex trafficking syndicate are rising up to seek legal retribution.
Harvey Weinstein’s downfall began when the first of his victims began to speak out. The Paul Haggis rape case began when the women he allegedly raped chose to come forward. The MeToo Movement itself only became a force for change as women found the courage to take a stand against their abusers.
Earlier this year in state district court in Harris County, Texas something similar began when a human trafficking survivor, Jane Doe #1, filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against Tony Ortega’s former Backpage employers and the Houston-area hotels and truck stops where she was allegedly exploited, according to her lawyers at Annie McAdams PC and Sico Hoelscher Harris & Braugh LLP.
This week took a close look at Tony Ortega’s suspicious use of Twitter, the platform of choice for the unpublishable hate-critics of modern age. So far we’ve gotten a lot of great feed-back from our readers who it seems overwhelmingly agree that Ortega is a pathetic fraud desperate to position himself as the final word on all things Scientology.
Reassuringly, reading the passionate response from our readers it looks like he is failing in this attempt.
You can see it even in his “reporting” at his blog – more and more guest pieces, fewer original posts. Getting more and more nattery and bitter about Scientology beliefs (at least, his understanding of them) without any hope of reporting any kind of substantive, reality-based stories.
Maybe he’s given up? Maybe he’s distracted by the legal fall out caused by the explosion of his pet project sex-trafficking setup over at Backpage?
Since starting this blog scores of recommend reading and helpful links have been pouring in.
This week a particularly interesting youtube clip emerged, which corroborates a lot of what we’ve been covering the last few weeks — namely, compulsive liar Tony Ortega and his close ties to the seedy world of human sex trafficking.
This video overview of Tony Ortega exposes not only his links to the now infamous BackPage.com scandal but discusses how his paycheck at the Village Voice was sustained through their money-making efforts.
Tony Ortega is perhaps the best example of hypocrisy and arrogance in modern “journalism”. Here is a man who for years falsely accused L Ron Hubbard and all Scientologists of endorsing and condoning pedophilia while he himself had made 90% of his paycheck off of Backpage sex traffic advertising, which led to horrific instances of child rape and murder.
If you look at Tony Ortega’s history (not the one he tries to present the outside world), his economic connections (he’s broke and unemployed), and his defense of the notorious BackPage.
The Village Voice was having problems. The paper had just yet another round of layoffs as part of a nationwide cull by its parent company. Its future prospects were looking so dim, the Voice began to rely almost exclusively on sex and drug ads to stay solvent. It was so desperate for revenue that it had just filed a lawsuit against Time Out NY for using the phrase “Best in NYC.
Back before the scandal surrounding the demise of the Village Voice, before Tony Ortega’s bosses, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, in Phoenix began destroying all the evidence they could that might implicate them in the global sex scandal spiraling so out of control lengthy prison sentences seemed the only plausible outcome… Back before all that, a secret deal was made. A deal between Tony Ortega and his bosses.
Tony Ortega was promised that if he could keep his mouth shut, he’d be rewarded with an executive assignment as chief editor at a far “more lucrative and prestigious” posting than the “lowly” Voice.
As the MeToo movement has highlighted over the course of the past year, there is no shortage of rapists and serial abusers of women in Hollywood. A few short months ago it was revealed that Paul Haggis was accused of sexual misconduct by 4 different women; two of whom accuse him of rape.
Indeed, in December of last year Haggis became headline news when he was sued for allegedly raping film publicist Haleigh Breest in 2013 at his New York apartment after a movie premiere.
There is no shortage of fake news on the internet these days. It doesn’t take much to be a blogger willing to fill post after post with nothing but lies. But to be a blogger exposed as a liar on snopes.com, the internet’s gold standard for debunking and exposing deceit? Now that’s a whole different category of liar.
And guess who has his very own Snopespage? Why Tony Ortega, of course!
Arielle Silverstein, a performance evaluator for the United Nations—and wife of Tony Ortega—participated in deep-sixing an investigator of sex abuse against children by United Nations peacekeeping troops in North Africa, thus contributing to a cover-up of those crimes.
Those are allegations levied by U.N. whistleblower Peter Gallo, a former international investigator at the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services, who was part of a cadre of investigators and aid workers who sought to expose the abuse, but instead faced punishment for their efforts.
As reported in a piece earlier earlier this week during his tenure as Backpage apologist and attack dog, Tony Ortega attempted to to discredit his critics by smearing them in the pages of the Village Voice.
This is exactly what happened when Ashton Kutcher found himself in Ortega’s crosshairs for daring to speak up against the role Ortega was playing in pimping human trafficking.
The next victim of Ortega’s vitriol was to be reporter Amber Lyon at CNN for her exposé of child prostitution on the website who accused the network of “junk science” and “mass paranoia,” criticizing the broadcast as a “sensationalistic piece” that was “manipulative” and part of “a semi-religious crusade.
“_We made a decision some time ago that the only way we’d continue to stay in this game was to focus not on the same old political essay writing but on original reporting, surprising our readers by not being predictable, and by doing our best to piss off everyone — right, left, and center.”_Tony Ortega Editor-in-Chief, Village Voice
When Backpage had its domain seized by Federal authorities recently it may have appeared to be a sudden unexpected twist nobody saw coming.
Tony Ortega at the time of his expulsion from Savannna High School
Tony Ortega has long, sordid history as an internet troll attacking Scientology even as he worked to defend The Village Voice’s Backpage.com, the now infamous sex trafficking platform he supported during his time as editor.
It may not come as much of a surprise to learn that this pattern of behavior Ortega has displayed in recent years was very much a hallmark of his youth as well.
Finding a cash cow and squeezing it for all it’s worth has been a running theme in the life of Tony Ortega. We’ve discussed how as Editor of The Village Voice, Ortega would, with outspoken regularity, defend his right to pimp out underage sex workers in order to keep generating the ad revenue the Voice so desperately needed as it began failing under his tenure. We’ve discussed how, now over half a decade out of work, Ortega has been sponging off his wife, Arielle Silverstein, and possibly her parent’s fortune to continue his one-man obsessive crusade against Scientology.
Micheal Wolf is a name you’ve probably heard in the wake of his explosive exposé on the current American president, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump Whitehouse”. However, years before Wolf would become a household name for the role he played in laying bare corruption at the highest level, he was focusing his attention on another corruption scandal. This time concerning Tony Ortega and the part he played in defending the sex trafficking being run under the auspice’s of The Village Voice’s Backpage dot com.
