As we’ve been discussing the events that would start in motion the beginning of the end for Backpage, we thought it might be helpful to explore the landmark case that started it all — the lawsuit filed by a 14 yr sex trafficking victim who was brave enough to stand against bullies like Tony Ortega who were seeking to discount stories like hers as ‘breathless hysteria’.
It should be said that, true to form, of course Tony Ortega would call his enemies ’breathless hysterics’.
Sometimes in the mad onrush of history we default into a sort of complacent read of events. Much of the shock of ‘breaking news’ at the time is lost on us as years pass and the calamitous impact of ‘events as they happen’ is dulled. This week we’re going to try something a little different here at the blog. We’re going to be jumping back in time as it were, to examine the contemporaneous reporting surrounding Tony Ortega and the part he played for the Backpage organization.
Time for a much needed update on the pending trial of the century, in which Backpage.com co-founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin will finally be called to account for the scores of sex trafficking crimes their platform made possible for so many years. The federal court trial is set for August 17 in Phoenix, Arizona.
The notorious masterminds behind Tony Ortega’s number one choice for underage sex slavery, Backpage.com, will be facing charges they knowingly published the ads and then laundered money from them.
On the subject of Backpage tragedies, a heartbreaking story came across our desks this morning. This one was a bit of a departure for us as it deals with the grief and chaos inflicted on the families of those who were trafficked by Backpage.
This is the story of Jennifer Holleman, whose daughter was sold for sex by the Backpage crime family. She has spent more than four years speaking out against human trafficking.
Latesha Clay
We’ve gotten a lot of questions in the wake of a story we recently ran about Latesha Clay, the 15-year-old girl recently sentenced to a maximum of 20 years for getting caught up in the Backpage scam Tony Ortega for so long championed in his editorial pages.
This was yet another in the growing list of tragic Backpage stories, only this time the young girl in question was both manipulated anad manipulating others.
We’ve gotten a lot of questions about Tony Ortega’s unquestioned obsession with Scientology over the past few months. The focus of the majority of these questions tend to revolve around a now-familiar theme: if Tony Ortega’s bigotry and hatred are what drive him how can any of us believe a word he says? Our sentiments exactly.
Tony Ortega’s obsession with Scientology makes him an unreliable source at best, and a willful propagandist hell-bent on smearing, slandering and libeling anyone who he disagrees with at worst.
Tony Ortega, whose litany of ‘crimes by association’ we’ve been detailing here on the blog at some length, may not have dreamt up the Backpage sex trafficking schemebut without doubt he bears a measure of responsibility for the destruction left in its wake. He was, after all, the propagandist of not behind the coordinated attempt to blind the public to the myriad of crimes Backpage’s “Adult Section” gave rise to.
Tony Ortega
During a recent unhinged screed Tony Ortega, famous for his tone-deaf lack of self-awareness, referred to a woman in question as an a ‘apologist for Scientology’.
That’s just how laughably hypocritical Tony Ortega’s assessment is given that he is on the record in multiple articles and interviews defending the sex-trafficking scam Backpage put in place to earn hundreds of millions from the countless young women and underage girls they victimized during their reign of terror.
We’ve been talking about the malicious practice of grooming, or preparing innocent victims for exploitation by unscrupulous operators, like Tony Ortega’s former bosses over at the notorious Backpage sex trafficking site.
We mentioned yesterday about an interesting case of a woman in Texas who survived her Backpage ordeal and is now taking the fight to the platforms that allowed, through their willful inaction and callous indifference, for the trafficking of countless women and children on their watch.
We informed our readers about the vile practice of ‘grooming’, which we defined as the process of developed dependence in order to lead someone into sex trafficking.
We argued that the sex pimping sites like Backpage, and even far less popular sites like Tony Ortega’s regrettable basement blog, incorporate a lot of these same tactics in order to generate a learned helplessness that makes them easy targets for pimps, online predators, and other Internet lowlifes.
Today we’d thought we might take a page from Tony Ortega’s playbook and offer up some real examples of things he might want to consider apologizing for before hyperventilating over his own invented outrage. Here are just a few:
Arielle Silverstein aka Bozuri.
Did Arielle Silverstein ever apologized to the members of the religions she viciously attacked while working for for United Nations?
Faking a story about rapes then when caught, doubling down on the lie.
By any reasonable accounting this has been a very bad year for James Larkin and Michael Lacey, the former capi di tutti i capi of the Backpage family — the largest online advertiser child sex trafficking the world had ever seen.
Despite the perfectly transparent attempts by the likes of Tony Ortega to deflect attention from their sordid enterprise and attack critics who dared to raise their voices in protest we have seen how, if anything, the furor has only increased as Backpage’s day in court draws closer.
Following our recent post exposing Tony Ortega’s servile defense of Backpage we’ve been getting all kinds of questions about public outrage at the time. As always here at the blog, we’re here to help.
As one angry reader of the Village Voice, Strider01, observed in the wake of Tony Ortega’s truly idiotic ‘arguments’:
That [the Village Voice] thinks its readers will overlook this implies a disrespect for the intelligence of any one who can see how much Village Voice Media has to benefit (in term of its bottom line!
By any reasonable accounting this has been a very bad year for James Larkin and Michael Lacey, the former _capi di tutti i capi_of the Backpage family — the largest online advertiser child sex trafficking the world had ever seen.
Despite the perfectly transparent attempts by the likes of Tony Ortega to deflect attention from their sordid enterprise and attack critics who dared to raise their voices in protest we have seen how, if anything, the furor has only increased as Backpage’s day in court draws closer.
Arielle Silverstein and Tony Ortega
When James Larkin and Michael Lacey, the pimp runners of the Village Voice Media, finally shoved their prostitution propagandist-in-chief Tony Ortega over the side of their sinking garbage barge in the most dishonorable discharge that rag of paper had ever seen, the cheers of a grateful nation were almost deafening. We, along with many literate Americans, believed we had seen the last him. After all, this was Tony Ortega’s umpteenth unceremonious firing.
The other day we told you about the alarming parallel that seems to exist between recent stories of Backpage’s sexual exploitation of young women for financial gain going viral and the exploits of real life criminals in charge. Tony Ortega’s sham coverup, shilling for this soulless corporation is connecting with readers and needs investigating.
For example, in our recent story of Lawrence Ray, prosecuting authorities explained he extorted approximately $1 million from five victims.
The other day we were first to break the story to our readers of a pending tv series based on an article about Backpage which went viral. Today we received news of a similar type story – another damning article dealing with the underage sex trafficking mill and the human vermin like Tony Ortega who worked to normalize it. It too, went viral. Instead of getting a series order from a high profile production company, however, this one led to an arrest so sordid and dark it could be a David Fincher film.
Tony Ortega and his equally suspect wife, Arielle Silverstein, have a history of palling around with some of the worst of the worst.
In the same way Tony Ortega went to bat for his old bosses Michael Lacey and James Larkin over at the Backpage in their pursuit of building a half-billion dollar enterprise from the sale of children to online perverts for sex, Tony and Arielle seem to attract unsavory scumbags in their personal and professional lives the way a sack of hot garbage attracts flies.
It’s not often we follow entertainment news here on the blog but today something came across the transom that we just couldn’t ignore.
Last year Christine Biederman, who spends her time as a lawyer and part time investigative reporter based out of Dallas, Texas, wrote an incredibly damning exposé on the Backpage empire and the story of its (still-unfolding) child sex trafficking trial.
The piece sent shockwaves through the journalism world not just for its succinct 10,000 foot view of the entire sordid affair, but also for the incredible access she was granted to the two criminal masterminds (if one can use that word) behind the scheme, Michael Lacey and James Larkin.
Not that Tony Ortega, self-professed ‘expert’ and paid propagandistic shill, asked us but we thought it might be high time someone offered this pretend journalist a crash course on ‘facts’. The fact is we worry Tony Ortega may have a severe fact allergy.
Much to the credit of print journalism, Tony Ortega has always been regarded as something of sad joke within the industry. From his bizarre attempts to write fake stories under assumed names to sow chaos and confusion, to the prominent role he played in advocating on behalf of pimps and child sex traffickers to say Tony Ortega is not exactly a straight shooter would be a tremendous understatement.
