What a rocky year it has been for Tony Ortega and his sex trafficking pals over at Backpage. In some respects it’s almost difficult to fathom that a year has passed since the CEO of classified ads website Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, pleaded guilty to federal charges and the site was permanently shut down.
In the meantime, we’ve seen how scores of pimps and accomplices have been taken down and served stiff prison sentences.
Recently on the blog we took a long, hard look back at the timeline surrounding the rise and fall of Backpage.com. Today we’re turning back time to dive into a shocking example of exactly the sort of evil Backpage was up to during the years its own in-house propagandist, Tony Ortega, was so ferociously attacking any and all who would call for justice for the site’s countless victims.
Pictured bellow is Natalie, an innocent child with dreams of being a doctor before Backpage got its hooks into her — tearing her and her family apart.
We’ve previously reported that Tony Ortega has just cause to be worried about being legally implicated in the broad-sweeping net federal prosecutors are using to round up all those who played a part in the Backpage sex trafficking scandal. Today we find another reason for Tony Ortega to be concerned that justice will soon catch up to him.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has asked a federal judge to reconsider his decision to not order sanctions against the lawyers who represented Backpage.
Ortega has always sucked up to his bosses. From his early days as a hack journalist to his present incarnation as unemployed hack Twitterer, time has not changed Tony Ortega all that much.
At heart he is still the same disingenuous blowhard, content to ignore the human tragedy of child sex trafficking so long as someone was willing to pay him for it. In those final days of Backpage’s reign as the the world’s most reported-on sex scandal, Ortega would routinely go after reporters.
This week’s case involving Backpage boss, Michael Lacey, and his prima donna request to have his ankle monitor removed in advance of his latest Hawaiian vacation highlights and underlines both the narcissism and lack of remorse the accused in this case have displayed at every turn.
While it is always distressing to see the moral depravity of Tony Ortega’s former colleagues, such examples of conduct can serve to remind us of the mentality behind the schemer’s Tony Ortega himself once praised as the guys ‘smart enough to create Backpage’.
Tony Ortega Backpage Apologist
This past week we hinted at new evidence in the strange case of debauched Backpage impresario Michael Lacey’s request to a federal judge to have his ankle monitor removed to accommodate his upcoming Hawaiian vacation.
To more fully explain this, it’s helpful to take a look back at the turn of events which lead to Backpage becoming largest platform ever devised for the sexual trafficking of human beings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
