“ The phone rang and I jumped up to grab it, thinking it was the police. It was my daughter… Right away I began asking where are you? She responded by saying sorry for everything, mom.
… She was crying, I knew something was not right and became frightened. I told her tell me where you are, or I am calling the cops.
Her response was one I will never forget: she told me it’s going to be too late, I will likely be dead by then and nobody will find me.
Here at the blog we began our examination into the damaging lies Tony Ortega for so long spewed in order to protect and serve his Backpage masters, and just how damaging his intentional misrepresentation of the facts were in the lives of one family in particular.
Previously, in this harrowing story out of Canada we met a mother and her 16-year-old daughter who were about to discover that Backpage was anything but the bastion of “Freedom” Tony Ortega tried so badly to sell it as.
We’ve exposed the extent to which Tony Ortega was willing to go as former Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice in providing cover for his pimp pals at Backpage. We’ve seen Tony Ortega lie, misdirect, and purposefully muddy the waters in order to confuse the public about the Backpage human trafficking empire which victimized countless young women and underage girls.
For a while Tony Ortega’s dog and pony show seemed to be working.
Barely a week had passed since Tony Ortega wrote his poison pen piece attacking the validity of national child sex trafficking statistics, when Ortega lashed out again. This time the object of his unhinged rage was a human target.
Tony Ortega was going to use the opportunity to make his unconscionable defense of Backpage personal. And he didn’t care who he had to throw under the bus to do it.
In a year which has already seen its share of unprecedented twists, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Brnovich, has announced a new delay of what some have been calling the criminal case of the century — the trial of Michael Lacey and James Larkin.
Our readers will remember these two as the former pimp executives who oversaw a chain of alt weekly rags which included Phoenix New Times and the Village Voice of New York.
Tony Ortega had sold his soul to Backpage and its illegal human trafficking trade. The series of articles he had been writing in the summer of 2011, attacking men and women brave enough to stand up against the Village Voice Media had all but confirmed it.
In our last article we saw how Tony Ortega had drawn a line in the sand, aligning himself with the flesh peddlers and the human slavers against the forces of freedom and justice.
When we last looked in on Backpage, ads for underage “escorts” and “ exotic body-rubs” were providing millions in monthly profit for Village Voice Media, the company signing Tony Ortega’s paychecks.
Perhaps this is why Tony and his bosses were so desperate to change what was quickly becoming the national topic of conversation — the alarming fact that human sex trafficking was being supported by private corporations in the United States.
When last we saw the Village Voice, they had just received a letter of complaint signed by three dozen religious leaders making an urgent impassioned call for an end to Backpage.
This was, of course, merely the tip of an already mammoth iceberg.
More than fifty Attorneys General had sent Village Voice Media a similar letter some months earlier, demanding that Backpage demonstrate exactly how and to what extent it was working to prevent children from being bought and sold on its online marketplace, the way Tony Ortega had falsely declared it did.
This past week we’ve been examining Tony Ortega’s response to the numerous instances of protest aimed at him for his participation in the Backpage child sex trafficking scheme he so ardently defended while on their payroll.
We’ve seen how angry protestors fed up with Ortega’s two-faced ‘human-trafficking-as-First-Amendment-right’ defense of Backpage flocked to his offices to make their opposition to him felt in numbers too great to ignore.
We’ve seen how students from Tony Ortega’s own college raised their voices in defiance of his dogged insistence on protecting online perverts from anti-sex slavery advocates campaigning against the Backpage’s business model which commodified the sexual abuse of minors.
Tony Ortega has been trying to separate himself from The Village Voice and its online whorehouse money-maker Backpage ever since he was unceremoniously fired and sent packing.
A numberof Village Voice insiders we’ve talked to from that time have echoed what we’d been hearing, namely that Tony Ortega was being paid hush money to walk away and never breathe a word of his involvement with the Backpage syndicate.
While Tony Ortega has kept his fat mouth shut about his intimate arrangement with the Backpage bosses in recent years, his own contemporaneous words while acting as the operation’s public mouthpiece paint an explicit picture.
In our last installment we saw how Tony Ortega has a history of lying and gaslighting his way through his professional life every bit as much as personal life.
We saw yesterday how Tony Ortega lied during a speech to students at his own former college, feigning innocence in the face of honest protest against Ortega for his role as a sex trafficking apologist.
It has been said before but bears repeating — such bare-faced public lies are by no means isolated incidences in the life of Tony Ortega.
Here at the blog we wrote to explain a little context behind just how Backpage was converted into a human trafficking and prostitution enterprise, with men like Tony Ortega doing much of the heavy lifting to sell the idea to the public.
For six years Tony Ortega lived off the money directly generated through sex trafficking, much of it from minors. Unlike so much of Ortega’s reporting, this story is not based on hearsay or slanderous gossip.
The internet slang dictionary of record, defines the term “gaslighting” as a “form of intimidation or abuse, sometimes where false information is presented to the victim, making them doubt their own memory, perception and quite often, their sanity.”
For Tony Ortega, however, gaslighting is something more. It is the very definition of his personal and professional life.
When someone acts to alter simple obvious truths with lies they’ve created then deny having done any such thing, even as they are accusing the victim of imagining things, they can fairly be said to be engaging in gaslighting.
It’s been a while since we last checked in with what is happening in the whirlpool of lawsuits and litigation surrounding the Backpage sex syndicate for which Tony Ortega acted as defacto public-facing apologist.
For more than six years Tony Ortega paychecks were directly dependent upon how much ad space Backpage could sell to pimps looking to profit of sexually exploitable women, many of them underage.
We here at the blog have long contended that Tony Ortega and the men at the top of this sex-for-cash scheme were fully aware of their actions.
Without doubt, the question we most often get asked here on the blog is, “Why isn’t Tony Ortega in jail already?!”
Believe us we understand your frustration in this, especially considering Tony Ortega’s bosses have already been outfitted with ankle monitors as they await their respective upcoming trials on a veritable laundry list of federal charges.
Indeed, one of the Backpage heads, Michael Lacey, walked out of a federal courthouse in Phoenix by posting a $1 million bond after spending a night in lockup following the FBI raid against the Backpage crime syndicate.
Tony Ortega is probably best known as the propaganda minister for the role he played as chief defender of the notorious illicit prostitution and child sex trafficking website, Backpage during its debauched heyday as the world’s most infamous online brothel.
Readers of this blog will remember how Backpage was raided and forcibly shut down by Federal Authorities for its sexual exploitation of marginalized women and young children.
What rarely gets spoken about however, is how unethical, unscrupulous bottom feeders like Tony Ortega took full advantage of the avalanche of cash generated by Backpage’s blackmarket human trafficking.
We have written about Tony Ortega and the economic incentive he had in maintaining the Backpage hierarchy of pimps controlling the victims they exploited. We suggested in that piece that Tony Ortega was a willing participant in this scheme, unlike the many nameless victims Backpage took advantage of as it generated hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising profits.
Today another story came across our desks, demonstrating yet again how the pimp pyramid model Backpage set up (and which Tony Ortega worked so hard to propagate) was used to intimidate, bully and victimize those women and young children it profited off of.
Among Tony Ortega’s many demonstrable lies, one whopper he invented to help clear infamous sex-trafficking hub Backpage must surely rank somewhere near the top — the lie of course, was that Backpage existed solely for consenting adults to find each other.
Yeah, right!
Even someone as shortsighted and narrow-minded as Tony Ortega could not have been foolish enough to think anyone would fall for that one. Still, that didn’t stop Ortega from trying to sell it to the public.
By this point, readers of this blog have seen countless examples of Tony Ortega and his friends engaging in hate crimes ranging from casual bigotry of online hate speech to the dark and violent activities of some of the shadier creeps Tony Ortega pals around with.
Individuals like Paul Haggis who stands credibly accused of rape on a number of occasions.
There must be something that draws Tony Ortega to guys like this.
Recently we left off with an open question, echoing what many readers of this blog have been asking us here lately: “ Why isn’t Tony Ortega in jail yet?” Especially seeing as Tony Ortega, speaking as the public-facing element of Backpage, went on at length describing the so-called “careful process” used Backpage in its attempt to sanitize the ads.
And yet, it this exact process as laid out by Tony Ortega in his 2011 article seems to be the exact evidence which was used to charge and convict Tony’s boss at Village Voice Media, Carl Ferrer,
