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?
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.
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.
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.
The fight over whether or not Backpage dot com (formerly part of Village Voice Media) is responsible for the content of sex ads placed on its site by pimps and prostitutes and whether it is complicit in sex trafficking is over.
In a stunning reversal, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer admitted that, “the vast majority of these [Backpage] advertisements are, in fact, advertisements for prostitution services.”
According to Ferrer he was involved in a conspiracy “to create ‘moderation’ processes through which Backpage would remove terms and pictures that were particularly indicative of prostitution and then publish a revised version of the ad.
Tony Ortega is accountable for his support, defense and marketing of Backpage dot com.
Nicholas Kristof once wrote in response to the Village Voices (under Tony Ortega leadership) attacks against anyone exposing Backpage dot com.
“I’ve been an admirer of Village Voice over the years, including its great reporting on police abuses. But it’s really sad to see Village Voice Media become a major player in sex trafficking, and to see it use its journalists as attack dogs for those who threaten its corporate interests.
When you are done reading the following New York Times article you know where Tony Ortega six figures salary came from.
Backpage CEO Pleads Guilty to Laundering Money Using Cryptocurrencies
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?
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.
