Here at the blog we wrote to explain a little context behind just how Backpage was converted into a human trafficking and prostitution enterprise, with men like Tony Ortega doing much of the heavy lifting to sell the idea to the public.
For six years Tony Ortega lived off the money directly generated through sex trafficking, much of it from minors. Unlike so much of Ortega’s reporting, this story is not based on hearsay or slanderous gossip.
The internet slang dictionary of record, defines the term “gaslighting” as a “form of intimidation or abuse, sometimes where false information is presented to the victim, making them doubt their own memory, perception and quite often, their sanity.”
For Tony Ortega, however, gaslighting is something more. It is the very definition of his personal and professional life.
When someone acts to alter simple obvious truths with lies they’ve created then deny having done any such thing, even as they are accusing the victim of imagining things, they can fairly be said to be engaging in gaslighting.
It’s been a while since we last checked in with what is happening in the whirlpool of lawsuits and litigation surrounding the Backpage sex syndicate for which Tony Ortega acted as defacto public-facing apologist.
For more than six years Tony Ortega paychecks were directly dependent upon how much ad space Backpage could sell to pimps looking to profit of sexually exploitable women, many of them underage.
We here at the blog have long contended that Tony Ortega and the men at the top of this sex-for-cash scheme were fully aware of their actions.
Without doubt, the question we most often get asked here on the blog is, “Why isn’t Tony Ortega in jail already?!”
Believe us we understand your frustration in this, especially considering Tony Ortega’s bosses have already been outfitted with ankle monitors as they await their respective upcoming trials on a veritable laundry list of federal charges.
Indeed, one of the Backpage heads, Michael Lacey, walked out of a federal courthouse in Phoenix by posting a $1 million bond after spending a night in lockup following the FBI raid against the Backpage crime syndicate.
Tony Ortega is probably best known as the propaganda minister for the role he played as chief defender of the notorious illicit prostitution and child sex trafficking website, Backpage during its debauched heyday as the world’s most infamous online brothel.
Readers of this blog will remember how Backpage was raided and forcibly shut down by Federal Authorities for its sexual exploitation of marginalized women and young children.
What rarely gets spoken about however, is how unethical, unscrupulous bottom feeders like Tony Ortega took full advantage of the avalanche of cash generated by Backpage’s blackmarket human trafficking.
We have written about Tony Ortega and the economic incentive he had in maintaining the Backpage hierarchy of pimps controlling the victims they exploited. We suggested in that piece that Tony Ortega was a willing participant in this scheme, unlike the many nameless victims Backpage took advantage of as it generated hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising profits.
Today another story came across our desks, demonstrating yet again how the pimp pyramid model Backpage set up (and which Tony Ortega worked so hard to propagate) was used to intimidate, bully and victimize those women and young children it profited off of.
Among Tony Ortega’s many demonstrable lies, one whopper he invented to help clear infamous sex-trafficking hub Backpage must surely rank somewhere near the top — the lie of course, was that Backpage existed solely for consenting adults to find each other.
Yeah, right!
Even someone as shortsighted and narrow-minded as Tony Ortega could not have been foolish enough to think anyone would fall for that one. Still, that didn’t stop Ortega from trying to sell it to the public.
By this point, readers of this blog have seen countless examples of Tony Ortega and his friends engaging in hate crimes ranging from casual bigotry of online hate speech to the dark and violent activities of some of the shadier creeps Tony Ortega pals around with.
Individuals like Paul Haggis who stands credibly accused of rape on a number of occasions.
There must be something that draws Tony Ortega to guys like this.
Recently we left off with an open question, echoing what many readers of this blog have been asking us here lately: “ Why isn’t Tony Ortega in jail yet?” Especially seeing as Tony Ortega, speaking as the public-facing element of Backpage, went on at length describing the so-called “careful process” used Backpage in its attempt to sanitize the ads.
And yet, it this exact process as laid out by Tony Ortega in his 2011 article seems to be the exact evidence which was used to charge and convict Tony’s boss at Village Voice Media, Carl Ferrer,
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.
Tony Ortega is a fake news monger who, under no circumstances should be trusted. The same goes for the shady individuals he chooses to associate with. Here on the blog we’ve discussed a number of Tony Ortega’s known accomplices, all whom have demonstrated themselves time and again to be at best unreliable and unethical, at worst dangerously comprised.
It’s with that in mind that we turn our attention this week once more to Tony Ortega’s “ethically compromised” wife, Arielle Irena Silverstein.
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’.
