“ I helped turn a weekly newspaper with a web site into a digital enterprise.”
– Tony Ortega, boasting to the New York Times Blog, September 14, 2012
We’ve been looking at various incidences of fallout following Ortega’s ‘help’ turning a failing weekly newspaper into a digital brothel enterprise, the likes of which the world has never seen.
In July 2011, at the height of Tony Ortega’s tenure as Editor-At-Large, the Village Voice was cashing in to the tune of roughly $30 million a year from Backpage’s prostitution ads.
Another week, another scandal tied to Backpage and its unscrupulous band of executives and sycophantic defenders.
Today we found a report on Decrypt that child prostitution site Backpage used multiple crypto currency exchanges to launder its cash. The site, which closed last year, moved hundreds of thousands worth of dark money through crypto exchanges.
The report states categorically:
“Backpage also furthered its money laundering efforts through the use of bitcoin processing companies.
Kamala Harris was the first charged the owners of Backpage.com with more than 10 counts of pimping.
Backpage.com, the infamous classified ad website, was notorious for hosting advertisements connected to sex trafficking. As has been discussed here and elsewhere, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 74 percent of all the reports related to child sex trafficking that the organization received were directly traceable to Backpage.com.
As attorney general, Harris made combating human trafficking a department priority.
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.
More fall out today following the news we reported to you recently about the former Florida teacher who purchased a 14-year-old girl for sex via the now-seized website Backpage.com after it was announced that he would be sentenced to 10 years in prison.
According to the Gainesville Sun, report on the story Jeffrey Farrell Davis, 36, who taught at Oak View Middle School in Alachua County from 2010 to 2015, was sentenced Monday after he pleaded guilty to a child sex trafficking charge in March 2018.
“Far from a widespread and rapidly growing problem, this is, instead, a small problem that stays about the same size because its underlying causes… are not targeted with federal funds the way scaremongering is.”– Tony Ortega
The above is a now infamous quote made by Tony Ortega back when he was in the business of defending, and providing political cover for, sex trafficking. The sentiments behind his words may be best summarized as: ‘Take it from me, sex trafficking is no big deal and anyone who says otherwise is just trying to scare you.
In a recent blog post we examined the issue of what good Tony Ortega has brought into the world through his work. The answer is, not surprisingly: not much. There have been, however, consequences from his role supporting Backpage.
On Monday of this week Dr. Joseph P. Campbell Jr. presented on the use of technology in detecting human trafficking at the Alexander F. Carson lecture series hosted by A.O. Fox Hospital in New York.
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.
There is an old joke about a history professor who would attempt to show his students the good in every historic event they studied. One day a particularly provocative pupil attempted to stump the professor by raising his hand and asking, “What about Adolf Hitler?” The professor paused a moment and said, “Well there is one commendable thing to say about him, in those last days trapped in his bunker with the Allied forces closing in…”
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.
We’ve talked a lot about Tony Ortega and the role he played giving political cover to the human trafficking website Backpage. We’ve looked at the prostitution, the rape, the murder and the child exploitation made possible by those who helped and supported Backpage over the years.
Now yet another horror story has emerged showing just how disgusting Backpage (and the people behind it) truly is. This week a Maryland man was arrested by authorities for knowingly passing HIV to four women who he met on Backpage.
Earlier this week we reported that Dan Hyer, the sales and marketing director of Backpage.com plead guilty in Arizona federal court to conspiring to facilitate prostitution. He is the second Backpage executive to plead guilty so far, with at least another six others slated to go to trial in early 2020.
Recently we’ve been asked here for a quick recap of what brought us to where we are in this case.
In the lead up to the coming trial of Tony Ortega’s former bosses the rising myriad of convictions must be giving team Tony Ortega no shortage of sleepless nights.
In addition to the convictions we mentioned in our last report, another has just come across our desk. This time it’s a Wisconsin man who prosecutors say transported seven young women across state lines and forced them into prostitution using ads on Backpage.
As convictions begin to mount we are here to keep you up to date on the latest developments of the Backpage scandal Tony Ortega has been so curiously quiet about since the subpoenas first started rolling out.
Today we got word of a July 29th sentencing date being set for the sales and marketing director of Backpage.com, following his earlier guilty plea of conspiring to facilitate prostitution in yet another of Backpage’s seemingly endless schemes.
We have said from the beginning that many convictions would result from the criminal enterprise once known as Backpage.
This week we witness the start of that justice.
On April 10, 2019, one man from Claymont, Delaware and two from Wilmington were convicted of trafficking minors for sex via Backpage.com throughout Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Dkyle Jamal Bridges, a 33-year-old from Claymont, and two Wilmington men, Kristian Jones, 25, and Anthony Jones, 35, were found guilty of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion with adults and minors, and sex trafficking three minors by force, fraud or coercion.
Recently we’ve been taking a look at the nefarious, often turbulent, tenure of one Tony Ortega during the dying months of the Village Voice. We saw how under Ortega’s leadership, The Village Voice’s circulation dropped from 240,265 to 213,358 in the space of a year. That’s a crushing 11% drop… and it was only the beginning.
We saw how Ortega, now overseeing a giant publishing boondoggle, was having a decidedly difficult time finding an audience willing to read his free give-away paper.
Obstruction of justice is a phrase we’re hearing a lot in the news today. But it doesn’t just have to do with presidential politics. Obstruction of justice can take many forms. Like that time when Tony Ortega’s sleazy Backpage bosses, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, sold the Village Voice.
They split the sale, removing from the offer the Backpage sex ad site. This of course was the paper’s goose that laid the golden eggs.
“Backpage exists solely so that people can freely express themselves—sometimes in ways that make other people uncomfortable. We’re First Amendment extremists that way. Always have been.”
So begins one of Tony Ortega’s many ardent defenses for his sex peddling bosses at the Backpage. “First Amendment extremist”, what is that phrase even meant to convey if not a brotherhood of narrow-minded, radicalism he shares with his fellow ‘extremists’ everywhere.
Tony Ortega
In our article “Tony Ortega’s Village Voice: A Backpage Front” we drew your attention to the grand scheme behind The Village Voice and Backpage, specifically how they were from the beginning planned to be separated in order to fully concentrate on the mega profits produced by Backpage in its lust to sell young women for sexual services.
It bears repeating, however, that this came as no surprise to Tony Ortega who from the beginning was in on the scam.
