Mike Rinder and Tony Ortega
The more you look at Tony Ortega’s actual “professional” history, his sketchy economic connections, and his highly suspicious shilling on behalf of the notorious Backpage sex ring, the more difficult it becomes to wrap your head around why Tony Ortega is not yet behind bars.
Ortega’s fellow tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist Mike Rinder, has been known to casually dismiss Ortega’s relationship to Backpage by offering a list of excuses as long as your arm, usually filled with such gems as ‘Tony was a simple newspaper editor for the Village Voice,’ and ‘he had nothing whatsoever to do with the advertising side,’ or our favorite — ‘Tony knew next to nothing!
Christopher Dupuy
Yesterday we examined the latest Backpage case out of Texas in which victims, unbeknownst to themselves, found their pictures and private information in sex ads on Backpage.
We saw last time how one of the women, Amy, was in disbelief when she was alerted to the advertisement on the Backpage website.
Amy quickly changed her phone number and then contacted the police. When she was asked to identify a possible suspect, the only person who came to mind was the appellant in the case, Christopher Dupuy.
It’s been a while since we’ve received any update on the numerous Backpage sex trafficking cases working their way through the courts at the moment but all that ended when an official opinion filed by the State of Texas crossed our desks recently. This case is particularly terrifying as it shows the true nature of the business Tony Ortega worked to prop up with his phony “we stand on our First Amendment Rights” schtick.
In years since Tony Ortega began first harassing Scientologists, at times using underhanded and illegal means to do so, he has been very tight lipped about exactly how often he ignores state and federal laws in his pursuit of his blatantly false stories.
Since the Backpage scandal started to unravel, and the level of lawlessness of his co-worker co-conspirators began to be revealed to the public, Tony Ortega has never once exposed any act that would put his child-sex selling bosses (James Larkin and Michael Lacey) into criminal jeopardy.
Arielle Silverstein spreading the Draw Mohammed Day campaign on social media
Beginning around the time of the federal raid to shutdown the Backpage sex ring, headed by Tony Ortega’s former Backpage syndicate, social media platforms began to bogusly claim that any new limits on their operations would “break the internet.” In reality they seem to be the ones doing most of the damage – from the brand of malicious propaganda Tony Ortega pumps out regularly to the online hate speech and extremism his wife Arielle Silverstein traffics in from the comfort of her U.
Tony Ortega has been on a long, inevitable decline in both relevance and recognizability since his days as former editor-in-chief of The Village Voice.
Regular readers of this blog are already familiar with the undeniable facts that The Village Voice and Voice Media Group are both complicit in the sex and human trafficking of children and women through Backpage. Today we are going to pull the curtain back and further expose their hypocrisy.
Back in the day, Tony Ortega was nothing but a small time, no name tabloid writer. In countless ways, very little has changed over the intervening years. Especially as far as name recognition goes. The only difference is he now calls himself “unemployed blogger on the fringes of the internet.”
Still, during his time as a small-time hack writer Tony Ortega took a lot of actions which, to this day, he has never really talked about.
We’ve long known that law enforcement takes a very dim view of those who give aid and assistance to known sex traffickers. Increasingly, the legal system is demonstrating a similar view, by allowing more and more cases to proceed against those who partnered with Backpage to exploit underage children and vulnerable women.
We’ve seen isolated cases cropping up against Backpage from individual victims seeking justice for the abuse and sexual violence they endured during that company’s time as the world’s largest online brothel.
Arielle Silverstein
For years, Arielle Silverstein’s United Nations salary has supported not only the vengeful campaigns of vilification we’ve been examining on this blog but those of her husband, the chronically unemployed blogger, Tony Ortega. And just like his other half, readers of this blog know Tony Ortega is driven by bigotry and hate.
While working at The Village Voice, Ortega served as a principal apologist of the sex trafficking website Backpage.
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.
