“W_hat the hell is this guy doing running theVillage Voice?__”_That was a question on everyone’s lips the day Tony Ortega took over the role as Editor-in-Chief at the Village Voice. To see Tony Ortega stalking the same halls as Sidney Schanberg, Nat Hentoff, Robert Christegau, Jules Feiffer, and a lot of other eminent names in American letters, must have seemed at the time like a cruel joke.
Long gone were the Pulitzer, Guggenheim and the NEA prize winners who built The Village Voice name; by the time they wheeled Tony Ortega into his office the whole publication was on a countdown to implosion.
By the time James Larkin and Michael Lacey, the infamous child pimp runners of the Village Voice, finally kicked Tony Ortega to the curb it was already too late. The damage had been done and the bulk of their crimes were soon become a matter of public record.
One might be tempted to think that Tony Ortega dodged a bullet by getting fired from the Backpage’s illicit sex empire before the Feds shut it down, disappearing into the anonymity of an obscure suburban life.
It all happened back when Ortega found himself subpoenaed to testify after he attempted to smear a man named Bruce McMahan in a hit-piece story for the Village Voice entitled “Memo to Bruce McMahan”. In classic Tony Ortega style, the ‘story’ was replete with half-truths, manufactured stories and outright lies. It was this ham-fisted attempt at written defamation which found him once more embroiled in another ethics scandal, the kind which seem to follow him around like flies after a garbage truck.
“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. Those same numbers had already inspired terrified politicians, who let loose hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade to prohibitionists bent on ending the world’s oldest profession. The Craigslist beat-down was absurdist theater. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security hearing on “Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking” culminated with the humbled attorneys from Craigslist announcing that they would close down their adult classified business.
“The sad truth is that it’s happening in every city in America.”
The above quote comes from Kara Smith, a senior targeting analyst with DeliverFund, an organization dedicated to busting sex trafficking operations across the country and, as it happens, Backpage’s biggest nightmare.
The group, comprised of former CIA, NSA, special forces, and various police agencies, exists with the express purpose of collaborating with law enforcement to bring down bad-faith operators like Backpage.
Arielle Silverstein and Tony Ortega
With all the talk in the news recently about whistleblowers, we thought this might be a perfect time to remind our readers about how Arielle Silverstein, Tony Ortega’s most recent wife, took it upon herself to try and quash an internal inquiry headed by United Nation’s whistleblower Peter Gallo, who had instigated a formal investigation of her organization over the matter at the time.
It all began in 2015 with allegations that certain U.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase coined by the Roman poet Juvenal. It is literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?” but more commonly is used to mean “Who watches the ones we’ve put in charge of keeping watch?”
Today many in Milwaukee, Wisconsin are asking that same question as news broke this past weekend of a pair of women in that city, Samaria Williams and Kendra Bay, who are accused of child sex trafficking using Backpage.
The April 2018 press release that was issued by the Department of Justice regarding Backpage.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Backpage’s Co-founder and CEO, As Well As Several Backpage-Related Corporate Entities, Enter Guilty Pleas Earlier this week, the Justice Department announced the seizure of Backpage . com, the Internet’s leading forum for prostitution ads, including ads depicting the prostitution of children, and the unsealing of a 93-count federal indictment against seven Backpage principals.
Tony Ortega Backpage.com Apologist
As we observed during our look back at the seriously suspect history of Tony Ortega’s ‘career’ as a propagandist for hire for the syndicate behind the child sex trafficking website Backpage, the truth is far stranger than any fiction Ortega has ever invented.
During his tenure at the Village Voice, Ortega was the most public-facing of the small army of apologists Backpage put on the payroll in an attempt to spin the fact they were selling children and vulnerable women on the margins on society for profit.
In the article Tony Ortega: Betrayal we started by examining the role Tony Ortega played in helping tank the Village Voice. Though the paper was failing financially, it’s clear on its face that their decision to install Tony Ortega as Editor-In-Chief was the nail in its coffin.
Tony Ortega desperately wants people to believe he was only responsible for the editorial side of the business, that the part he played in the _Village Voice_’s ruin was wholly disconnected from its advertising woes.
Tony Ortega
It was early in the spring of 2007 when the Village Voice made a huge miscalculation. That was when they installed Tony Ortega as Editor-in-Chief of the alt-weekly rag. The entire paper would fold shortly thereafter — coming as a surprise to absolutely no one familiar with Tony Ortega’s work.
Of course the paper had been struggling financially well before Tony Ortega was put in charge, but few in the industry would dispute that anything could have hastened its demise faster.
Just when you think there are no new depths of depravity to plumb, Backpage proves once more there is no bar to low for it to sink.
In a story that reads like the sort of poorly written fiction one might find on Tony Ortega’s crackpot blog, it was reported over the weekend that a U.S. Border Patrol agent was arrested on an outstanding sex trafficking charge this past Friday.
This has been an interesting month for Tony Ortega-watchers. From the isolated confines of his homemade blog, what started out as a story of an angry old man furiously scribbling his hateful rhetoric as a hobby has morphed over the years into that of an angry unemployed man, furiously scribbling his hateful rhetoric as substitute for having a career at this point.
This month Tony has treated his readers to some blistering exposés.
Last week we first reported to you about a man in Boston who killed his young, elementary school teacher wife, and how the prosecution has been seeking to use his texting with Backpage prostitutes to establish a probable timeline of the murder.
While this isn’t the sort of Backpage story we typically cover on this blog the facts surrounding this case, and the legal precedent they may set, are of keen interest to those of us demanding a full an honest account of the myriad of crimes Backpage played a role in facilitating.
An explosive new murder case brewing in Boston, Massachusetts is shedding new light on the Backpage criminal empire today.
Cellphone records are being used by local and federal authorities as evidence in proceedings against a man from a sleepy suburb of the city who police say killed his young wife, a beloved elementary school teacher, in 2017.
These records show the suspect contacted the sex-peddling site Backpage according to the newly released legal filing.
Since we began covering the insidious history of Backpage we’ve been witness to an unprecedented barrage of lawsuits levied against pimps and those who enabled them.
While we continue to hold out hope that these lawsuits may yet extend further down the corporate chain to include the Backpage bottom-feeders like would-be propagandist Tony Ortega, for the moment it is joy enough seeing so many who participated in this child sex ring syndicate bring brought to justice.
There’s no shortage of bizarre stories surrounding Backpage (and we’re not just talking about the wholly fictional pro-Backpage propaganda Tony Ortega routinely pumped like raw sewage into the town aquifer.)
Today’s story is one of the stranger ones we’ve yet seen out of this ever-expanding Backpage sex syndicate scandal.
This week, sex trafficker Charles White was sentenced to 10 years in prison for trafficking two young women out of his home in Harlem, NY, which he’d dubbed “The White House”.
Recently we helped break the story of an unnamed young woman who was manipulatively coerced by a pimp into selling herself for sex with anonymous strangers on the Internet, filling Backpage’s coffers in the process.
As we’ve previously reported, sex trafficking is a growing problem and thriving business thanks in part to men like Tony Ortega who willingly took to his ad-hoc soapbox to defend the sort of inhuman callousness it takes to look the other way in the face of these crimes.
Another day of Backpage in the headlines, this time the news comes from the nation’s capitol where U.S. Attorney James Kennedy described in press conference today how 51-year-old Valentino Shine Sr. preyed upon and exploited women who were vulnerable and addicted to drugs. Kennedy says Shine used his knowledge as a recovering cocaine addict to target and control the women.
During the conference, Kennedy said:“At the urging of the defendant the victims advertised on backpage.
As rich as Backpage’s founders, Michael Lacey, James Larkin and Carl Ferrer became as a result of their disastrous foray into the world of online child sex-trafficking, the massive generation of cash selling children for sex was hardly limited to the fat cats at the top of the pyramid scheme.
News broke this week of woman going by the moniker “Madame Priscilla Belle” who stands accused of running a multimillion-dollar prostitution ring out of a home she dubbed the “premier Dungeon of Chicago.
