In the minds of many Backpage has become synonymous with sex trafficking. And yet, as we have attempted to demonstrate here on the blog, the crimes of this deplorable organization go far beyond selling children and vulnerable young women to online predators for sex.
This week, news emerged of a story involving a couple accused of murdering a man in Oklahoma.The couple had been lurking on Backpage-inspired prostitution sites in the weeks and even days leading up to his death.
Recently on the blog we took a long, hard look back at the timeline surrounding the rise and fall of Backpage.com. Today we’re turning back time to dive into a shocking example of exactly the sort of evil Backpage was up to during the years its own in-house propagandist, Tony Ortega, was so ferociously attacking any and all who would call for justice for the site’s countless victims.
Pictured bellow is Natalie, an innocent child with dreams of being a doctor before Backpage got its hooks into her — tearing her and her family apart.
In last week’s article we saw Tony Ortega up to his old tricks, attempting to spin the numerous critiques Backpage was receiving for its widespread sex trafficking as the work of “feminists, religious zealots, and bureaucrats”.
It’s clear in Tony Ortega’s desperate editorial that he knows he’s cornered. The only defense he knows how to make is to attempt to bully those he sees him for what he truly is. And so he flails about, firing off gross mischaracterizations (another Ortega hallmark!
In news breaking yesterday, it’s being reported that sentencing has been postponed until July 2020 for two Backpage.com managers convicted in cases that accuse the site of turning a blind eye to the rampant sex trafficking their online classified platform facilitated. Prosecutors intend to clearly demonstrate through key witnesses and damning internal company emails and chats that the top bosses at Backpage were aware that young women and girls as young as 8 were being sold for sex on their site.
We reported about the ugly story of another Backpage ‘monster’, Erin Graham from Madison Wisconsin. In our last article we highlighted the manipulation common among both the pimps who used the site and the crime bosses who ran it.
For example, Graham would regularly tell his girlfriend, Patience Moore, to act as a sort of mother figure for the victim, known only as ‘Cindi’ who testified he would beat Moore, and have her call them on the phone to beg them to come back.
What should be clear to anyone paying attention to the barrage of Backpage stories the media has been running with lately is that sex trafficking (of the sort Backpage’s diabolical co-creators Lacey and Larkin popularized, and shameless toady Tony Ortega defended publicly) is a heartless crime.
And indeed when a man from Madison WI was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison last Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge James Peterson called the accused to account for exactly that: the “heartless crime” of sex trafficking three women and attempting to traffic another.
Recently here at the blog we took a deep dive into the timeline of the government’s case against Backpage and all the sordid twists and turns its heartless founders, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, attempted in order to throw authorities off their trail.
Today a reader of this blog alerted to us a ‘response’ of sorts by Backpage’s chief propagandist, the ever-slippery Tony “Backpage Pimp” Ortega. What is fascinating about this editorial supplement, written by Ortega himself in his capacity as Village Voice Editor-At-Large shortly before he was fired, is the sheer number of lies and untruths he manages to pack into his skewed, contemporaneous account of events.
Today’s story about a Bronx man should come with a warning. If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time you probably understand by now that stories about Backpage have a way of constantly outdoing themselves. Each true account of its victims seems more depraved than the last.
Today’s story is no different. In what we hope to see as an increasingly popular trend in sentencing, the Bronx Backpage pimp could face life in prison after being convicted of sex trafficking girls as young as 8 years old and kidnapping, among other charges, according to federal prosecutors.
Backpage may be dead but like something out of a bad horror movie, it continues to terrorize from beyond the grave.
A man accused of running a prostitution ring out of two spas in Billings, Montana will admit one charge and see three others dropped as part of a plea deal.
Scott Donald Petrie will admit to a single count of transportation of a person with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
We’ve spent a good deal of time looking at the history of the government’s case against Backpage. It’s been something of tsunami of information as seen from from our 10,000 foot view of the sordid story of the rise and fall of Backpage. Today we dive back into the gritty details left in its horrific aftermath.
We’ve seen how the government plans on prosecuting its case against Larkin and Lacey. One of the key elements in the State’s argument against the two human traffickers will be the stories of the victims.
For all the forward movement we have seen in the government’s coming case against the Backpage it is important to remember that while the horrific duo Michael Lacey and James Larkin and their team of villainous propagandists like Tony Ortega have had their dark dreams of building a platform to cash in on the selling of underage girls and desperate women for sex thwarted, the battle is not yet over. But its lines are now clearly defined.
“ The people I work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com.” – Tony Ortega In a just world, the seizure of Backpage by the Feds in 2017 should have been the knock-out blow to online sex trafficking. Instead, the endless game of whack-a-mole continues as we await upcoming court hearings on the matter.
A month after Fosta-Sesta (the Backpage-inspired law designed to thwart online sex-traffickers) passed, ads for commercial sex over the Internet plummeted 82 percent, according to TellFinder, a data analytics tool originally built by the Defense Department.
Two weeks after Fosta-Sesta passed, Carl Ferrer appeared in a closed federal courtroom in Phoenix. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to facilitate prostitution and launder money, surrendered Backpage and its assets, and promised to cooperate with federal authorities.
A day later, the Feds nailed Michael Lacey and James Larkin in Phoenix, charging them and five other Backpagers under long-existing criminal statutes. As many legal experts pointed out, the move suggested that the government never needed Fosta-Sesta to prosecute the pair; the president had yet to even sign it into law by the time the hammer fell.
On the day SESTA (the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) was introduced, the Internet Association—an industry consortium that represents Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more than three dozen other tech companies—released a statement criticizing the bill that would effectively end Lacey and Larkin’s dream of the Backpage sex trafficking empire, calling it “overly broad.”
While it was of vital important to pursue “rogue operators like Backpage.com,” the association said, SESTA was more butcher knife than scalpel; it would create “a new wave of frivolous and unpredictable actions against legitimate companies.
On January 8, 2017, the Senate subcommittee released its final report, titled “Backpage.com’s Knowing Facilitation of Online Sex Trafficking.” It pushed the theory that Lacey, Larkin, Ferrer, and their employees had invalidated their liability protections under Section 230: Rather than removing illegal and obscene content, the Senate clearly established that Backpage had helped develop it, using manipulative moderation practices to “sanitize the content” and conceal it from the eyes of the law—all in the name of earning a few extra dollars.
We have seen how Backpage had used litigation tactics by manipulating legal loops to keep from itself from facing the music.
Most courts had had no choice but to grant them temporary victories because of the unduly broad language of the Section 230 loophole.
But following the subpoena blitz we previously reported on, Portman and his colleagues on Capitol Hill had what they considered incontrovertible evidence in the way of Backpage’s own internal communication.
It’s no secret Michael Lacey and James Larkin built on the backs of (let’s be generous here) ‘questionable’ motives and a couple of key legal loopholes.
With Section 230 as their weapon, they pushed their way into the court system. At first it seemed the side of law and decency was losing after the slimy Backpage duo won an early series of civil suits, successfully challenging anti-Backpage laws in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Washington State.
“They love to inflate the numbers by talking about children ‘at risk’ of exploitation.”
That was how Backpage boss Michael Lacey characterized the work of the experts at the Crimes Against Children Research Center on the subject of child sex trafficking. In that statement, Lacey highlights his callous indifference to suffering victims and blinding concern for his own self-interest. If there were any question about Larkin and Lacey’s desire to help authorities put out the fire Backpage started, let this quote serve as a reminder to their true state of mind on the subject.
Backpage was already getting into hot water. A girl in Missouri had sued the site in mid-September of 2009, alleging that she’d been pimped out at the age of 14 and that Backpage had willfully “failed to investigate for fear of what it would learn.” In the official police report she explained that the site’s operators “had a strong suspicion” she was underage. Ultimately, a federal magistrate dismissed her case. The situation was tragic, the judge said, but Backpage was protected under Section 230.
The Communications Decency Act was a law conceived, as the name suggests, to rid the web of vice.
The new act was proposed in 1995 by Senator J. James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat who’d watched with growing alarm as “the worst, most vile, most perverse pornography” spread online. He was particularly concerned about what all this obscenity might do to America’s children.
Although Exon repeatedly described the legislation as “streamlined,” the Department of Justice warned that its indecency provisions were unconstitutionally broad.
