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.
Finding a cash cow and squeezing it for all it’s worth has been a running theme in the life of Tony Ortega. We’ve discussed how as Editor of The Village Voice, Ortega would, with outspoken regularity, defend his right to pimp out underage sex workers in order to keep generating the ad revenue the Voice so desperately needed as it began failing under his tenure. We’ve discussed how, now over half a decade out of work, Ortega has been sponging off his wife, Arielle Silverstein, and possibly her parent’s fortune to continue his one-man obsessive crusade against Scientology.
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.
Once a champion of backpage.com’s “anything goes” policy towards underage sex trafficking, Tony Ortega seems curiously mum on the topic since federal authorities — including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, five other federal agencies, and four state agencies — raided the site permanently forcing its closure.
Could it be that Ortega is laying low to avoid suspicion? Does he fear indictment for the role he played in not only advocating in defense of but for helping to actively foster Backpage’s child prostitution agenda by providing it a platform during his tenure as its Editor-in-Chief?
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 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?
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.
On Thursday, May 31, 2018, a Chicago federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart who requested credit card companies not to do business with Backpage dot com.
James Larkin and Michael Lacey accused the Sheriff of interfering with the Backpage business. The judge ruled Thomas Dart’s action was protected by the First Amendment. The appeals court reversed that ruling, but Judge Tharp granted Dart’s motion to dismiss the suit.
Why are folks over on Tony Ortega’s blog suddenly calling him a low class drama queen? I mean, it’s not like they are wrong but seeing these comments popping up on Tony Ortega’s hate blog got us thinking. Have Tony’ Ortega’s readers finally had enough of his unfiltered, immature garbage?
Apparently it all started when a longtime “fan” of his announced that he was fed up with the way Tony Ortega runs his operation.
Tony Ortega’s former boss, Michael Lacey, who stands accused of using the shuttered Backpage website to profit from human trafficking and prostitution is out on a $1 million bail bond. Apparently he is so conflicted about his role as heading the largest online brothel in the world that he’s decided to take a fun-filled trip to Hawaii to really give him a chance to work on his tan (and presumably whatever remorse his shriveled heart is capable of feeling having ruined so many lives.
Yesterday we wrote about the unique case currently underway in Florida courts brought by Florida Abolitionists, Inc. It alleges Backpage knowingly broke human trafficking laws and caused tremendous drains on the resources of the agency in its fight to end modern human slavery.
Interestingly, the lawsuit makes explicit mention of an attempted ruse pulled by Backpage officials (James Larkin and Michale Lacey) shortly before their refusal to testify at a Subcommittee hearing on the matter in January 2017.
We need to revisit Tony Ortega and Backpage’s crimes because some things injustices are just too monstrous to let slide. One important question is, how could all the disgusting dealings of Ortega and Backpage slip by with minimal attention and zero convictions in court?
It’s not reckless nostalgia to say life in the 90‘s was pretty great for folks in the West. Economies in the developed states boomed, trust in public and private institutions were relatively stable, and happiness indexes were on the rise.
