“Seven years ago, the people I [Tony Ortega] work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com, a competitor to Craigslist. While other newspapers were doing little more than publicly condemning Newmark for the way Craigslist has, for years, eaten into their classified ads revenue, we decided to fight back. That’s just how we operate.” – (The people Tony Ortega worked for were Michael Lacey and James Larkin).
“Backpage.com has since inherited some of the adult business that left Craigslist.
It might be tempting for some to think that the deluge of justifiable outrage over the Backpage underage sex trafficking scandal is somehow a recent phenomenon. It is not.
For years voices of everyday citizens have clamored against the infamous crime syndicate and its lapdog, Tony Ortega. Even close to a decade ago, we knew and understood the seriousness of the crimes these scumbags were engaged in profiting from.
Sometimes people surprise you. You can know someone your whole lifetime and still learn new and fascinating aspects of their personality. This certainly not the case with a guy like Tony Ortega.
For as long as we have been covering him we feel we can honestly say the only thing surprising about him is how utterly predictable he is. Longtime readers will need no further reminding that his decades long obsession with Scientology has ultimately been nothing more than a means of trying to get his audience riled up, fanning the flames of bigotry and hate so that he can make fast buck selling the rage he’s fomented right back to them.
We recently reported that fifty women are suing Salesforce, alleging the company profited by helping Backpage to engage in sex trafficking.
Too long the story of Tony Ortega’s bosses and their worldwide human trafficking ring has lingered in the shadows, on the periphery of other news stories favored by the mainstream media.
Today we are happy to report this appears to be changing, as NBC news picked up the Salesforce story and has been bringing it to national attention.
In Greek mythology the Hydra was a many headed monster that guarded the entrance to the underworld. Part of what made this beast so terrifying was that whenever one of its heads was cut off, another two would grow in its place.
While the Hydra was never more than a myth, the Backpage was a chilling reality. And just like the multi-headed beast at the mouth of hell, Backpage is proving how hard it is to kill.
It seems like every time we check the news here, the horror story known as Backpage and the cadre of ghouls who continue to support them despite the fact that the truth of their intentions is daily coming into sharper focus.
As we all know by now, this year started off with the long awaited raid by federal authorities this year, effectively shuttering the sex trafficking section of their operation.
As the notorious website Backpage was under fire by legislators and the public over alleged prostitution ads linked by critics to sex trafficking of minors, San Francisco software titan Salesforce stepped in to save the site and help it grow, a new lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit filed by 50 “Jane Does” alleges:
“Salesforce knew the scourge of sex trafficking because it sought publicity for trying to stop it… But at the same time, this publicly traded company was, in actuality, among the vilest of rogue companies, concerned only with their bottom line.
This week we’ve been looking at the enduring legacy of destruction in the wake of the only underage sex peddling platform personally endorsed by Tony Ortega.
We saw how the murder in Atlanta ties directly back to Backpage’s thinly veiled revamp of its prostitution platform, rebranded now as ‘adult dating’. But the problem continues to spread across state lines.
As criminals benefit from technology in communication, wide distribution and anonymity, law enforcement agencies find themselves using the same platforms to stop those illegal revenues and gather evidence.
Even though federal authorities have long since raided and shuttered the world’s largest online prostitution syndicate run by Tony Ortega’s former bosses, new reporting suggests Backpage.com is still a marketplace for prostitution in places like metro Atlanta, according to a Channel 2 Action News investigation earlier this week.
Way back when prostitution first migrated from streets to smart phones, both Craigslist and Backpage were under pressure to stop online adult advertising, this new bombshell report explains.
It’s that time again! Time for your Backpage Sex Peddling trial update, brought to you by Tony Ortega and his criminally indicted bosses.
This week, we heard the first words Backpage.com co-founder and Tony Ortega’s former boss, Michael Lacey, offered about allegations he faces for running a prostitution ring and shady money laundering operation.
“Nonsense!” was all he said before his attorney added that his client had no further comment. Nonsense, as if to imply that all the lives he and the people who worked for him ruined and left discarded behind them were nothing but a joke to him.
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.
When Tony Ortega was dismissed from The Village Voice in September 2012, The New York Observer disclosed that he lost his job as Editor-in-Chief for neglecting his duties in favor of his personal daily rants against Scientology. It got so bad that one staffer at the Voice complained, “He was increasingly obsessed with Scientology and had neglected almost all of his editorial duties at the paper. Sometimes he wouldn’t even edit features.
Maybe it’s not so hard to believe that it’s already been 6 years since Tony Ortega was let go as the editor of The Village Voice. Since that time it’s been an on-going saga of continuous unemployment, desperate boot-licking in Hollywood, and a lackluster (to say the least) foray into the narcissistic world of self-publishing.
Suffice it to say, Tony Ortega will most likely be out of the running for the ‘Most Industrious Man of the Decade’ award this time around.
The role Tony Ortega played (and continues to play by remaining silent) supporting the notorious Backpage website is no secret to frequent readers of this blog, but the seismic ripple effect in the wake of the Federal raid which seized more than 12 million dollars from those associated with the underage sex-for-hire platform is something few could have predicted.
This week it was announced that human trafficking has become such a danger in California that it will be now be part of the curriculum at seven local school districts when then San Diego County District Attorney’s Office made public it will spend $3 million to fund The San Diego Trafficking Prevention Collective to provide education about human trafficking to more than 237,000 students.
Previously on this blog, we covered the massive bombshell story detailing how Tony Ortega’s former bosses just had their bank accounts seized to the tune of more than 10 million dollars.
Today another intriguing development in the story.
The sentencing of the former CEO of Backpage.com, the infamous website knowingly used for the purposes of underage prostitution, has been pushed to July 18 from its original January date. The move to delay formally throwing the book at Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer, who originally pitched the executives of the New Times tabloid chain (which employed Tony Ortega at the time) on the idea of an online prostitution advertising website, came at the request of the federal government.
It’s no secret these past few years have been a terrible run for the Tony Ortega brand (such as it is) what with entering into his umpteenth consecutive year of deadbeat unemployment, the blow Twitter’s new algorithm struck against his army of fake sock puppet supporters presumably purchased from shady off-shore bot farms, and the chorus of criticism he has been receiving from his very own blog posters calling him out for mistreating his so-called ‘sources’.
The staff at the Village Voice, working under Tony Ortega, had a reputation in New York City for ruthless retaliation on people that poked their nose into its classifieds section, Backpage. Readers of this blog will recognize Backpage as the human trafficking site which tried to cloak itself under the First Amendment’s “Freedom of Speech” clause. In the twisted logic of the Backpage the “Freedom of the Press” guaranteed in the Constitution means one can call “classifieds” part of the “press” and sell human beings in the classifieds section.
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.
