Simon Ho-On
We’ve been looking a lot lately at the vast number of cases working their way through the courts in virtually every state in the nation. It’s worthwhile remembering, however, that the damage done by Backpage — the child sex trafficking website Tony Ortega stood on many a soapbox to defend — spread across the globe.
Today we learned of a shocking story out of Canada. Its details, while particularly gruesome and inarguably evil, should be published here and elsewhere if for no other reason than to shine a light on the true depravity of the site Tony Ortega stridently insisted was merely exercising its right to ‘freedom of speech’ by hosting scores of advertisements selling minors for sexual use.
We mentioned in a previous post how Backpage’s nefarious influence transcends borders and nationalities. We went into detail about the criminal cases going on in Canada because, though the specifics are often unsettling it remains vitally important that we not lose sight of the horrific consequences ofBackpage’s international human trafficking ring. We believe these stories, as shocking and distasteful as they are, reveal the truth behind the lie Tony Ortega worked so desperately to convince the public of.
As expected, the fallout from the recent bombshell documentary by PBS’s Frontline we first reported on last week is already beginning.
Over the weekend the Columbia Police Department in Missouri completed a suspiciously hasty review of allegations raised by the newly released documentary that the agency protected a notorious Backpage pimp in exchange for information. The review claims no wrongdoing was found.
In response, producers of the series exposing Backpage pimps said the investigation was purposely flawed to achieve those findings and the agency had no intention of uncovering the issues raised in the film.
As a functional definition, an ideologue is a person who never questions the underlying assumptions of the ideology that he has adopted as his own.
An ideologue is so certain of this adopted ideology and the rightness of his own worldview that he can sneer contemptuously at people, believing himself to be superior to those he views as his ideological foes.
To call this an intellectually lazy way to go through life would be an understatement.
Sex Trafficking in America, a new film from FRONTLINE, follows a detective and her unit at the Phoenix Police Department, which focuses on sex trafficking cases and child sexual exploitation. Since she began investigating sex trafficking cases in 2005, Detective Christi Decouflé has seen a shift toward traffickers using the internet as a marketing tool. So she and the rest of her colleagues — many of them women — have used the anonymity of the internet to launch a different type of undercover operation, one aimed at busting traffickers.
Despite Tony Ortega’s best efforts at defending Backpage, no one (not even Ortega) can make an argument that sex trafficking is positive.
We often get asked here on the blog about sex trafficking and exactly how Backpage and its defenders like Tony Ortega sought to profit of this despicable practice. Today we thought it might be beneficial to step back and more carefully define the charges we here, ( not to mention the Federal government) put to the people behind the Backpage sex ring.
Yesterday we started by taking a closer look just what it is we mean by ‘sex-trafficking’ as it pertains to the disgusting and sinister platform created by Backpage and defended by lowlife yes-men like Tony Ortega.
When peeling away the onion on this vast and complex web of criminality Backpage made possible, we find layer upon layer revealing all manner of atrocities: the prominence of drugs, dissociation, PTSD, background of child sexual or physical abuse, lack of safe housing, death threats including threatening family members or friends, Stockholm Syndrome, violence from pimps and sex buyers, fear, lack of control, manipulation, brainwashing, unspeakable trauma, and more.
Federal prosecutors are seeking a 40-year prison sentence for a Chicago pimp convicted of sex trafficking an underage girl allegedly killed by a client, saying he used the bodies of the vulnerable young girls he recruited “like his personal ATM machine.”
Prosecutors wrote in a court filing Tuesday demanding the particularly harsh sentence:
“Sex trafficking is a repugnant, vile, and dangerous business. Victims have the most intimate parts of their bodies rented for use by strangers.
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.
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.
Tony Ortega Backpage Apologist
This past week we hinted at new evidence in the strange case of debauched Backpage impresario Michael Lacey’s request to a federal judge to have his ankle monitor removed to accommodate his upcoming Hawaiian vacation.
To more fully explain this, it’s helpful to take a look back at the turn of events which lead to Backpage becoming largest platform ever devised for the sexual trafficking of human beings.
