Up until now we’ve seen a veritable parade of anonymous pimps, human traffickers, and the lowest of the low who would defend them. For the most they have been faceless unknowns. Shady drifters and lowlifes. But the dangerous reach of human trafficking extends beyond categories of wealth or class.
We have received news that a well-known Houston rapper has been convicted of trafficking underage girls for sex, according to a news release from the U.
This past week we helped break the story of what we hope will become a new trend in sentencing Backpage-related crimes: maximum sentencing.
Today, we received word of another encouraging development after it was announced Wednesday that prosecutors will be seeking life terms for two men in Fort Worth who pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit sex trafficking through force, fraud or coercion using Backpage.com as the platform for their criminality.
A few days ago, Steven M. D’Antuono, Acting Deputy Assistant Director for the Criminal Investigative Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation testified before before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee in Washington, D.C. on combating illicit financing by anonymous shell companies.
While statements before the Urban Affairs committee is generally beyond the scope of our humble blog, one subject discussed at Tuesday’s hearing certainly caught our eye. The Deputy Director’s statement began this way:
There has been no shortage of disheartening news for the bad-faith operators behind the infamous Backpage underage sex trafficking scheme vociferously advocated by Tony Ortega and other spineless lackies who stood up to defend the indefensible.
This past weekend news of a warrant application leaked to media outlets in Florida for the arrest of nine men in connection with pimping yet another underage girl for sex on Backpage.
The facts surrounding the case are as disgusting as you can imagine.
This week we have been looking at the staggering number of recent convictions surrounding women and young girls who have been trafficked for the explicit purpose of being sold for sex.
Backpage profited off of its scheme to sell pimps advertising to the tune of more than half a billion dollars during its years of operation. Indeed, it is hard to overstate just how vile and destructive Backpage has been to the lives of the women and girls it fed off for so long.
We knew from the beginning that tentacle reach Backpage’s shadowy human trafficking ring extended far and wide and yet the breadth of it’s vile influence across the nation continues to come as a shock to us as day by day new horror stories of real life people impacted by its depravity emerge.
At this point it is becoming hard to be shocked but somehow the sex-ring website Tony Ortega spent years of his shameful career cheerleading continues to find new horrifying lows.
When the story of the Backpage, owned and operated by Tony Ortega’s beloved former employers, is finally written it will be a harrowing tale. And it’s likely to come with an NC-17 rating.
The sordid legacy of the world’s one-time leading human trafficking website is not for the change of heart. Its stomach-turning history is one of continued victimization and the selling of underage girls for sex. That Tony Ortega would sellout whatever shred of professional credentials he had left to shill for Backpage may come as no surprise, but the mere fact that this enterprise was allowed to do business in an America is nothing short of a national disgrace.
When you read as much about the Backpage and its disgusting legacy of dehumanizing crime and shameless greed as we do here, it can be at times a little overwhelming.
The stories may be graphic, even obscene, in their details but we believe they are important to tell. With so much happening in the world right now it is tempting to ignore the vulnerable young women and girls who were trafficked by Backpage.
Recently on this blog we helped break the story of a former middle school teacher who admitted paying for sex with a 14-year-old girl trafficked on Backpage and his sentencing last week to 10 years in prison.
And last month we told you about a Wisconsin man who prosecutors say trafficked seven young women on Backpage, and now finds himself convicted of federal trafficking charges.
As of Tuesday of this week we can add another to this growing list of convictions.
Yesterday we took a focused look at a recent Backpage judgment that underlines the reprehensible behavior of both the company and its would-be apologists like Backpage Chief Propagandist-At-Large Tony Ortega who defended its business model on the grounds that it was ‘freedom of speech’.
One of the true tragedies of yesterday’s appalling story of a child forced into sex trafficking was the length her captors were willing to go to in order to manipulate and lie to achieve their sordid ends.
Arielle Silverstein and Tony Ortega
One of the questions we are often asked here in the midst of our reporting on the widening Backpage scandal is just how Backpage specifically and intentionally facilitated child sex trafficking.
While men like Tony Ortega have busied themselves devising elaborate defenses seeking to minimize and excuse Backpage’s role, their vile objective remains all too clear: this was from the beginning a cash for sex with vulnerable women and children.
“ I helped turn a weekly newspaper with a web site into a digital enterprise.”
– Tony Ortega, boasting to the New York Times Blog, September 14, 2012
We’ve been looking at various incidences of fallout following Ortega’s ‘help’ turning a failing weekly newspaper into a digital brothel enterprise, the likes of which the world has never seen.
In July 2011, at the height of Tony Ortega’s tenure as Editor-At-Large, the Village Voice was cashing in to the tune of roughly $30 million a year from Backpage’s prostitution ads.
Another week, another scandal tied to Backpage and its unscrupulous band of executives and sycophantic defenders.
Today we found a report on Decrypt that child prostitution site Backpage used multiple crypto currency exchanges to launder its cash. The site, which closed last year, moved hundreds of thousands worth of dark money through crypto exchanges.
The report states categorically:
“Backpage also furthered its money laundering efforts through the use of bitcoin processing companies.
Kamala Harris was the first charged the owners of Backpage.com with more than 10 counts of pimping.
Backpage.com, the infamous classified ad website, was notorious for hosting advertisements connected to sex trafficking. As has been discussed here and elsewhere, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 74 percent of all the reports related to child sex trafficking that the organization received were directly traceable to Backpage.com.
As attorney general, Harris made combating human trafficking a department priority.
We’ve previously reported that Tony Ortega has just cause to be worried about being legally implicated in the broad-sweeping net federal prosecutors are using to round up all those who played a part in the Backpage sex trafficking scandal. Today we find another reason for Tony Ortega to be concerned that justice will soon catch up to him.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has asked a federal judge to reconsider his decision to not order sanctions against the lawyers who represented Backpage.
More fall out today following the news we reported to you recently about the former Florida teacher who purchased a 14-year-old girl for sex via the now-seized website Backpage.com after it was announced that he would be sentenced to 10 years in prison.
According to the Gainesville Sun, report on the story Jeffrey Farrell Davis, 36, who taught at Oak View Middle School in Alachua County from 2010 to 2015, was sentenced Monday after he pleaded guilty to a child sex trafficking charge in March 2018.
“Far from a widespread and rapidly growing problem, this is, instead, a small problem that stays about the same size because its underlying causes… are not targeted with federal funds the way scaremongering is.”– Tony Ortega
The above is a now infamous quote made by Tony Ortega back when he was in the business of defending, and providing political cover for, sex trafficking. The sentiments behind his words may be best summarized as: ‘Take it from me, sex trafficking is no big deal and anyone who says otherwise is just trying to scare you.
In a recent blog post we examined the issue of what good Tony Ortega has brought into the world through his work. The answer is, not surprisingly: not much. There have been, however, consequences from his role supporting Backpage.
On Monday of this week Dr. Joseph P. Campbell Jr. presented on the use of technology in detecting human trafficking at the Alexander F. Carson lecture series hosted by A.O. Fox Hospital in New York.
Ortega has always sucked up to his bosses. From his early days as a hack journalist to his present incarnation as unemployed hack Twitterer, time has not changed Tony Ortega all that much.
At heart he is still the same disingenuous blowhard, content to ignore the human tragedy of child sex trafficking so long as someone was willing to pay him for it. In those final days of Backpage’s reign as the the world’s most reported-on sex scandal, Ortega would routinely go after reporters.
There is an old joke about a history professor who would attempt to show his students the good in every historic event they studied. One day a particularly provocative pupil attempted to stump the professor by raising his hand and asking, “What about Adolf Hitler?” The professor paused a moment and said, “Well there is one commendable thing to say about him, in those last days trapped in his bunker with the Allied forces closing in…”
