Poetic Justice for Sex Trafficking Profiteers
Backpage, the human sex trafficking website Tony Ortega worked so hard to legitimate and normalize, may be gone but its dark reverberations are still felt in communities everywhere.
That said, it’s not often that good news comes out of the sickening world of sex trafficking, where tens of thousands of children and young women are sold for sex each night across the country. So when we here at the blog find news worth celebrating, we share it with you.
For all our discussion of the tremendous damage the child-sex selling web site Backpage which Tony Ortega staunchly defended and even bragged about, ours was hardly the only country ravaged by its lustful greed. Over the weekend an overseas reader sent in a reminder that his country, Australia, was also ruthlessly victimized by the mob-like business model Ortega promoted.
These are the facts Tony Ortega won’t ever tell you.
Official records show hundreds of Australian women were tricked, coerced and otherwise threateningly pressured into selling themselves via paid advertisements on one of the many international portals connected to the Backpage website.
Tony Ortega
It’s no secret that Tony Ortega lives to attack people online. Not all people, of course, as evidenced by his strange preoccupation with actively defending and excusing the behavior of known child predators.
Today we uncover yet another example of this clearly worrying fascination with defending those who would sexually abuse children.
Early in his career, long before his pathological obsession with a religion, Tony Ortega was listlessly casting about for ‘easy marks’ upon whom he might vent his impotent rage.
Recently we wrote a piece in which we called Tony Ortega ‘radioactive’ for this habitual lack of professionalism and his penchant for bald face lying in the face of contradictory reality.
Our recent blog posts about Ortega’s dubious history as a writer for cheap tabloids prompted one reader of this blog to recall yet another offensive piece which Ortega had published years ago.
First, however, we offer you a little context calling your attention to what has been a very disturbing trend on YouTube and other social media platforms in which so-called ‘content creators’ engage in wildly dangerous, irresponsible pranks in order to attract an audience.
Raymond Rodio III
Tony Ortega’s title as world’s most repugnant basement-dweller may be in jeopardy after news broke recently of a Long Island man being sentenced to 9 1⁄2 years in prison for running a Backpage-driven human sex trafficking ring out of his parents’ basement.
District Attorney Tim Sini said 49-year-old Raymond Rodio III would find his victims by posting ads on Backpage, the now infamous child sex trafficking site Tony Ortega once proudly shilled for.
In the world of ligation there are no shortage of dirty tricks for those unscrupulous enough to employ them. This seems to be the case especially when those charged with a crime understand how weak their legal defense is and, more importantly, just how guilty they are of the charges before them. This certainly seems to be the case in the upcoming Backpage trial, about which we have discussed much over the past few months.
We began a fact-checking investigation into the contemporary reporting surrounding the Backpage take down and comparing it to the biased, skewed, and highly propagandistic myths Tony Ortega had long been publishing about the notorious child sex trafficking platform. To put it mildly, the facts of the Backpage case do not square with the perverse hagiography Tony Ortega was trying his damnedest to sell his readers in the pages of the Village Voice tabloid.
In Fact Checking Part I we began an exploration into exposing Tony Ortega’s many lies on the subject of the Backpage underage sex trafficking debacle with a frank and honest discussion of the need for vigilant fact checking.
While the vital necessity of verifying ‘truth claims’ made by real journalists remains an important concern, it is never more crucial than when it comes to unethical tabloid journalists like Tony Ortega.
Lots of ink has been spilled the past couple of days in the fallout of the recent presidential debate. No small portion of the discussion has centered around of the need for fact checkers to verify information being broadcast to public by those in positions of assumed authority.
Indeed, being that ‘fact-checking’ is something we take very seriously here at the blog, this caused us to prick up our ears.
As we come to a close in this close-up examination of the official code of ethical conduct for journalists, we note (unsurprisingly!) that so-called ‘tabloid journalists’ like Tony Ortega have had a demonstrably poor showing when brought face-to-face with these professional standards.
Today we reach the fourth and final of the major ethical principles as articulated by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) on the journalistic imperative to be accountable and transparent in all reporting.
Tony Ortega
Whenever we speak about the scourge of tabloid journalism, without fail reasonable and rational people inevitably raise the question, “Who spends their time reading tabloid garbage?” We, however, would like to pose our own question: How can dishonest, self-described tabloid “journalists” live with themselves?
As we’ve seen again and again, the answer is that tabloid hacks aren’t looking for the truth, they are only interested in a concocting a sleazy “story” that will attract eyeballs.
“Tell me what company you keep and I’ll tell you what you are.”
The above quote comes from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, an author widely regarded as one of the greatest novel writers of all time. We don’t know about you but when we hear the phrase, “Tell me what company you keep and I’ll tell you what you are,” the first person who comes to mind for us is Tony Ortega.
Passed in 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is a federal law designed to combat organized crime in the United States. It allows prosecution and civil penalties for racketeering activity performed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. Simply put, racketeering means engaging in an illegal scheme involving one or more of 35 offenses, including kidnapping, murder, bribery, arson and extortion.
G. Robert Blakey, a federal criminal law professor at Notre Dame University who helped draft racketeering laws across the nation, describes it this way:
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, odds are you’ve heard us refer to Tony Ortega as a hypocrite a few times. Indeed, when it comes to making a case against Ortega on these charges we’re spoiled for choice given the width and breadth of his double-dealing underhandedness.
For example, we’ve made much of the sham ‘defense’ Tony Ortega offered up in the hopes of swaying public sympathies to the Backpage sex trafficking profiteers he was infamously paid to shill for.
It seems strange now to think there was ever a time when Tony Ortega wasn’t cowardly hiding in his basement, refusing to breathe a word about his love for Backpage. Only a few short years ago, you practically couldn’t get him to shut up on the subject.
Tony Ortega would often use words like “freedom”, “smart” and “brave” to laud the Backpage business empire he was once employed by.
These days when Backpage gets mentioned the words you hear are more likely to be, “slavery”, “sex trafficking” and “underage”.
Backpage Bosses
Ever since we ran our story on Kamala Harris, Twitter has been going wild retelling the sordid history of Backpage; specifically, how the notorious human trafficking and solicitation site was a target of Kamala Harris’s back when she was the attorney general of California.
So far we haven’t seen too much in the way of Tony Ortega’s name popping for work he did to advance Backpage’s pro-trafficking stance, but in revisiting the history of Backpage Twitter users are getting a much-needed education on the topic.
Tony Ortega
Reporting on hacks like Tony Ortega can almost become something of an abstraction after a while. By this point, we are all well aware of what an arrogant, self-serving fabulist Tony Ortega is as ‘journalist’. Not being confronted daily by the actual words and ideas as expressed in Ortega’s unhinged blog screeds, however, one can easily lose sense of exactly how predictable his writing style is.
Today we’d thought we’d go back to the archives to remind us all of the caliber of unprofessionalism we are talking about when we discuss the so-called career of Tony Ortega.
Jose Torres
It’s easy sometimes to feel helpless. Especially, in light of the all the horror Tony Ortega’s bosses at Backpage were able to unleash in the few years their human trafficking operation was cashing in on selling women and young children for sex, leaving a path of human misery in their wake.
Today, however, the FBI is asking for your help in bringing justice to one Backpage pimp. His name is Jose Torres and for years he was running his own version of Backpage scam.
Barry Schiff
If it’s one thing we believe in here at the blog, it’s that tougher sentencing for those who coerced, threatened or tricked young women and underage girls into participating in the Backpage sex trafficking ring should be the rule, rather than the exception.
Maybe that’s why this story we read over the weekend restored a measure of hope to us that Backpage pimps, and their editorializing apologists like Tony Ortega, are increasingly finding judges taking a zero tolerance approach when it comes to Backpage’s illegal sex trade.
Tony Ortega has been complaining about Kamala Harris, probably at the behest of his former Backpage bosses, James Larkin and Michael Lacey.
As it happens, Kamala Harris’s political rise was propelled by a year-long, high-profile campaign against known sex traffickers like the bosses who oversaw Backpage. And the fact that she helped throw pimps and their enablers in jail for selling illicit sex with coerced women and victimized children can’t come as welcome news for sex-peddling apologists or conspiratorial corporate lapdogs like Tony Ortega.
