This week took a close look at Tony Ortega’s suspicious use of Twitter, the platform of choice for the unpublishable hate-critics of modern age. So far we’ve gotten a lot of great feed-back from our readers who it seems overwhelmingly agree that Ortega is a pathetic fraud desperate to position himself as the final word on all things Scientology.
Reassuringly, reading the passionate response from our readers it looks like he is failing in this attempt.
You can see it even in his “reporting” at his blog – more and more guest pieces, fewer original posts. Getting more and more nattery and bitter about Scientology beliefs (at least, his understanding of them) without any hope of reporting any kind of substantive, reality-based stories.
Maybe he’s given up? Maybe he’s distracted by the legal fall out caused by the explosion of his pet project sex-trafficking setup over at Backpage?
Since starting this blog scores of recommend reading and helpful links have been pouring in.
This week a particularly interesting youtube clip emerged, which corroborates a lot of what we’ve been covering the last few weeks — namely, compulsive liar Tony Ortega and his close ties to the seedy world of human sex trafficking.
This video overview of Tony Ortega exposes not only his links to the now infamous BackPage.com scandal but discusses how his paycheck at the Village Voice was sustained through their money-making efforts.
Tony Ortega is perhaps the best example of hypocrisy and arrogance in modern “journalism”. Here is a man who for years falsely accused L Ron Hubbard and all Scientologists of endorsing and condoning pedophilia while he himself had made 90% of his paycheck off of Backpage sex traffic advertising, which led to horrific instances of child rape and murder.
If you look at Tony Ortega’s history (not the one he tries to present the outside world), his economic connections (he’s broke and unemployed), and his defense of the notorious BackPage.
The Village Voice was having problems. The paper had just yet another round of layoffs as part of a nationwide cull by its parent company. Its future prospects were looking so dim, the Voice began to rely almost exclusively on sex and drug ads to stay solvent. It was so desperate for revenue that it had just filed a lawsuit against Time Out NY for using the phrase “Best in NYC.
Back before the scandal surrounding the demise of the Village Voice, before Tony Ortega’s bosses, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, in Phoenix began destroying all the evidence they could that might implicate them in the global sex scandal spiraling so out of control lengthy prison sentences seemed the only plausible outcome… Back before all that, a secret deal was made. A deal between Tony Ortega and his bosses.
Tony Ortega was promised that if he could keep his mouth shut, he’d be rewarded with an executive assignment as chief editor at a far “more lucrative and prestigious” posting than the “lowly” Voice.
As the MeToo movement has highlighted over the course of the past year, there is no shortage of rapists and serial abusers of women in Hollywood. A few short months ago it was revealed that Paul Haggis was accused of sexual misconduct by 4 different women; two of whom accuse him of rape.
Indeed, in December of last year Haggis became headline news when he was sued for allegedly raping film publicist Haleigh Breest in 2013 at his New York apartment after a movie premiere.
There is no shortage of fake news on the internet these days. It doesn’t take much to be a blogger willing to fill post after post with nothing but lies. But to be a blogger exposed as a liar on snopes.com, the internet’s gold standard for debunking and exposing deceit? Now that’s a whole different category of liar.
And guess who has his very own Snopespage? Why Tony Ortega, of course!
Arielle Silverstein, a performance evaluator for the United Nations—and wife of Tony Ortega—participated in deep-sixing an investigator of sex abuse against children by United Nations peacekeeping troops in North Africa, thus contributing to a cover-up of those crimes.
Those are allegations levied by U.N. whistleblower Peter Gallo, a former international investigator at the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services, who was part of a cadre of investigators and aid workers who sought to expose the abuse, but instead faced punishment for their efforts.
As reported in a piece earlier earlier this week during his tenure as Backpage apologist and attack dog, Tony Ortega attempted to to discredit his critics by smearing them in the pages of the Village Voice.
This is exactly what happened when Ashton Kutcher found himself in Ortega’s crosshairs for daring to speak up against the role Ortega was playing in pimping human trafficking.
The next victim of Ortega’s vitriol was to be reporter Amber Lyon at CNN for her exposé of child prostitution on the website who accused the network of “junk science” and “mass paranoia,” criticizing the broadcast as a “sensationalistic piece” that was “manipulative” and part of “a semi-religious crusade.
“_We made a decision some time ago that the only way we’d continue to stay in this game was to focus not on the same old political essay writing but on original reporting, surprising our readers by not being predictable, and by doing our best to piss off everyone — right, left, and center.”_Tony Ortega Editor-in-Chief, Village Voice
When Backpage had its domain seized by Federal authorities recently it may have appeared to be a sudden unexpected twist nobody saw coming.
Tony Ortega at the time of his expulsion from Savannna High School
Tony Ortega has long, sordid history as an internet troll attacking Scientology even as he worked to defend The Village Voice’s Backpage.com, the now infamous sex trafficking platform he supported during his time as editor.
It may not come as much of a surprise to learn that this pattern of behavior Ortega has displayed in recent years was very much a hallmark of his youth as well.
Finding a cash cow and squeezing it for all it’s worth has been a running theme in the life of Tony Ortega. We’ve discussed how as Editor of The Village Voice, Ortega would, with outspoken regularity, defend his right to pimp out underage sex workers in order to keep generating the ad revenue the Voice so desperately needed as it began failing under his tenure. We’ve discussed how, now over half a decade out of work, Ortega has been sponging off his wife, Arielle Silverstein, and possibly her parent’s fortune to continue his one-man obsessive crusade against Scientology.
Micheal Wolf is a name you’ve probably heard in the wake of his explosive exposé on the current American president, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump Whitehouse”. However, years before Wolf would become a household name for the role he played in laying bare corruption at the highest level, he was focusing his attention on another corruption scandal. This time concerning Tony Ortega and the part he played in defending the sex trafficking being run under the auspice’s of The Village Voice’s Backpage dot com.
The fight over whether or not Backpage dot com (formerly part of Village Voice Media) is responsible for the content of sex ads placed on its site by pimps and prostitutes and whether it is complicit in sex trafficking is over.
In a stunning reversal, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer admitted that, “the vast majority of these [Backpage] advertisements are, in fact, advertisements for prostitution services.”
According to Ferrer he was involved in a conspiracy “to create ‘moderation’ processes through which Backpage would remove terms and pictures that were particularly indicative of prostitution and then publish a revised version of the ad.
Once a champion of backpage.com’s “anything goes” policy towards underage sex trafficking, Tony Ortega seems curiously mum on the topic since federal authorities — including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, five other federal agencies, and four state agencies — raided the site permanently forcing its closure.
Could it be that Ortega is laying low to avoid suspicion? Does he fear indictment for the role he played in not only advocating in defense of but for helping to actively foster Backpage’s child prostitution agenda by providing it a platform during his tenure as its Editor-in-Chief?
Tony Ortega is accountable for his support, defense and marketing of Backpage dot com.
Nicholas Kristof once wrote in response to the Village Voices (under Tony Ortega leadership) attacks against anyone exposing Backpage dot com.
“I’ve been an admirer of Village Voice over the years, including its great reporting on police abuses. But it’s really sad to see Village Voice Media become a major player in sex trafficking, and to see it use its journalists as attack dogs for those who threaten its corporate interests.
When you are done reading the following New York Times article you know where Tony Ortega six figures salary came from.
Backpage CEO Pleads Guilty to Laundering Money Using Cryptocurrencies
Tony Ortega’s “journalistic” career began with The Phoenix New Times in the mid 90’s when the company’s then flagship paper, The New Times, became part of the Village Voice Media merger in 2005.
After a four-year stint as staff writer, Ortega wrote for The New Times Los Angeles for three years before returning to become Associate Editor of The Phoenix New Times. Following this, he became managing editor of The New Times-owned The Pitch, in Kansas City, where he worked from 2003-2005 before leaving to become editor of the New Times Broward-Palm Beach.
Tony Ortega was bent out of shape when the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” campaign went viral. He felt compelled (or perhaps ordered by his masters at Backpage dot com) to squash it. Ortega’s futile propaganda to suppress the campaign only proved his support of sex trafficking.
Ortega made it very clear where he stood when he wrote:
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.
