Aaron Drumheller
Fresh developments on the story we first reported to you in our last post in which we laid out the damning ways in which the rising Backpage body count draws a straight line to the criminal bosses who ran the show and the sycophantic lap Tony Ortega who helped them.
Previously we reported to you about a Virginia man who had been sentenced last week to 40 years in federal prison for robbing and killing people he’d connected with using the ‘escort’ section of Backpage – the very section which Tony Ortega insisted you’d be crazy to believe was anything less than impeccably legitimate.
Aaron Drumheller
Ortega continues his petulant silence on the subject as further evidence of Backpage’s bloody history continues to surface.
We’ve been saying this for so long now it’s starting to sound like a broken record. But then, Tony Ortega is not an individual known for having a varied history of creativity. He is, as the saying goes, a one track pony. And, disturbingly, much of his track seems to revolve around the ‘sex-for-cash with at-risk women and underage girls’ portal known as Backpage.
Tony Ortega Backpage Apologist
Yesterday we suggested that Tony Ortega, and his fellow band of henchmen, are long overdue to receive comeuppance for their misdeeds for aiding and abetting Backpage during the horrific run of its illicit human sex trafficking crime spree.
We reported to you how a federal grand jury issued yet another judgement against one of the same pimps Tony Ortega told us we were all “hysterically worrying’ worrying over.
Tony Ortega Backpage Apologist
The more we read about Tony Ortega, the more urgent we feel about authorities stepping in to do something. We felt this way when we first learned about the crackpot theories he was peddling to trashy alt publications.
And while we don’t wish to underplay the seriousness of Tony Ortega’s famously toxic relationship with telling the truth – as we’ve been seeing over the years – it’s the company Ortega keeps that has us wondering if it isn’t time for law enforcement to do something about it.
If it is own thing we all know about the slimy executives of the Backpage sex trafficking syndicate, it is this: they will use every dirty, underhanded trick in the book to slither off the hook.
Maybe it’s a trick they learned from their pitchman, Tony Ortega. One thing is certain, however, this past week they were up to their old tricks again.
We all know the former Backpage executives Michael Lacey and James Larkin, together with their squad of already-indicted unethical employees stand accused of facilitating prostitution.
The people of Texas have spoken and spoken loudly. Tony Ortega and his kind are no longer welcome in their communities. Dallas may have once been the national headquarters for Backpage, the illicit website Tony Ortega proudly shilled for, but my how things have changed in the past few years!
Amateur “hack journalist” and professional sell-out Tony Ortega once sang Backpage’s praises from coast to coast, trying to gloss over the inescapable fact that women and underage girls were daily being sold for sex.
Arielle Silverstein aka Bozuri
As if we needed further proof that attitudes like the ones espoused by Tony Ortega and his ghoulish wife Arielle Silverstein (also known as Bozuri in the Anonymous circles) toward faith drive negativity more than ethnicity or nationality, a recent survey confirms it.
The two-year study of diversity by the Woolf Institute in the UK concludes that most people are tolerant of those from different ethnic or national backgrounds, but many have negative attitudes based on religion.
The United States saw the passage of Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), a bill that held websites criminally responsible for facilitating all forms of illegal sex trafficking, and which shuttered a host of platforms used by pimps and prostitutes alike to advertise their sexual services. Since that time, the law has had a huge impact on sex traffickers profit margins, not to mention the “social acceptance” of their shady business.
If you buy the lies Tony Ortega has advanced during his stint as the mouth piece for the human sex trafficking website Backpage, odds are you are under the delusion that prostitution is merely an economic choice or a victimless crime.
To listen to Tony Ortega you’d think being trafficked for the sex trade was an exercise of your constitutionally protected rights as an American. In reality, however, it’s all a glossy cover for something far deeper and darker.
The clock is counting down to what some are calling the trial of the century, namely the federal case against Backpage pimp kingpins Michael Lacey and James Larkin, et al.
Slated to begin in the summer of 2021, speculation is running rampant as to just how much jail time these kingpins will find themselves facing when all is said and done.
One question we have been wondering here at the blog is, in addition to substantial jail time whether or not the judge will also mete out meaningful financial recompense for the many victims harmed by the actions and attitudes of the Backpage sex trafficking empire.
When Craigslist closed its “adult” section, Backpage became the go-to online spot for illegal sex listings. Its presence grew to be ubiquitous across the United States, making it the target of numerous law enforcement and attorneys general.
Despite Tony Ortega’s whining to contrary.
Despite his list of deceptive excuses as long as your arm.
Despite the loss of revenue to his friends, measured in the hundreds of millions.
Like all clear-thinking, compassionate citizens we hope to curtail the practice of underage sex trafficking and coercive sex slavery.
Today we return to the in-depth look we’ve been taking a look at a telling editorial published by CNN in the early days of Backpage, some six years before the sex trafficking platform’s federally-enforced shutdown.
We say ‘telling’ because it is simply remarkable to look back at contemporary reporting at the time Backpage began its rise and see that from the beginning, Tony Ortega’s shady work to help obscure Backpage’s true objective: to profit from the victimization of underage children by selling them to be sexually exploited by perverts online.
It’s been a tumultuous week here in the United States, with all signs pointing the fact that there are still many surprises to come in the days and weeks ahead.
It’s within this context that we share with you excerpts from the following article unexpectedly shared with us overnight by a reader of this blog who advocates on behalf of sex-trafficking victims.
Originally posted on the CNN website in June of 2012, the opinion piece —written almost 6 years(!
It’s not often we get truly exciting news from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) but today that is exactly what we have. Recently, the FCC made a stunning announcement that it would “clarify” the scope of the legal protections offered to internet platforms.
Put in laymen’s turns this means that the FCC will begin examining changing (read: narrowing) the safe harbor of legal immunity offered by Section 230 of the U.
In our last blog post we took a look back on the events of a single day four years ago which marked the beginning of the end for Backpage and the dime-store hype-men like Tony Ortega, paid to keep the public in the dark about the sex trafficking scheme they were running.
Zero hour began at first light on Oct 6 with the arrest of the Backpage Chief Executive Officer Carl Ferrer on a slew of felony charges from pimping minors to conspiracy.
Over the course of this week, we’ve been watching how the events over the course of a single day in October of 2016 would be the death knell for Backpage, signaling the end of its rampant under-age sex trafficking empire and the shameless cocoon of lies Tony Ortega spun in their defense.
Now that fateful Thursday was drawing to a close and the curtain was about to fall on the entire Backpage pimping syndicate.
Four years ago this month, way back in October of 2016, the wheels of justice began to turn for the pimps, sex traffickers and shameless conmen apologists behind the largest child sex ring this country has ever seen — Backpage.
In honor of this four year anniversary we thought today we might take a look back at the timeline that saw the beginning of the end for the criminals that for too long cheated the system, abused countless victims, and profited from the pain they caused to the tune of half a billion dollars.
It was not yet noon on October 6th 2016 when we last we looked in on the unraveling of Backpage. Its CEO, Carl Ferrer had been arrested. Backpage corporate offices in Texas and California were being scoured for evidence of sex trafficking, and officials were hauling it out by the box-load.
To say it was a bad day for Tony Ortega’s bosses would be the understatement of year. And, as we alluded to in our article recently, by the end of the day things would be even worse.
In what is to surely be felt as yet another blow to the pimps of the Backpage empire —and their spineless toadies like Tony Ortega – the U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich who will be presiding at trial, announced she will not be stepping away from the criminal case charging Backpage executives with facilitating prostitution.
As we’ve previously reported, attorneys for James Larkin, who along with Michael Lacey previously ran the alternative weekly Phoenix New Times and Backpage child sex trafficking website, filed a motion in September demanding Brnovich recuse herself because of official statements decrying sex trafficking made by her husband, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
By any measurement 2020 has been a year filled with disasters. From the out-of-control forest faires in the western half of the United States to the raging fires of anti-religious hatred fueled by those like Tony Ortega.
And, let’s be honest here, in many ways Tony Ortega is to tolerance online what a lit cigarette intentionally thrown from a car is to field of tall dry grass. After all, the hoped-for results of both are usually the same — to burn it all to the ground.
