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(!
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.
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.
In an interview with a popular women’s magazine, an actress explained how she has been working as an undercover FBI agent fighting against child sex trafficking on sites like Backpage.
During her time undercover the star participated in half a dozen child-sex stings around the world as an unpaid volunteer.
She explained her involvement to help the FBI fight child sex traffickers like Backpage by saying that good people are the only ones who will do anything about it.
Poetic Justice for Sex Trafficking Profiteers
Backpage, the human sex trafficking website Tony Ortega worked so hard to legitimate and normalize, may be gone but its dark reverberations are still felt in communities everywhere.
That said, it’s not often that good news comes out of the sickening world of sex trafficking, where tens of thousands of children and young women are sold for sex each night across the country. So when we here at the blog find news worth celebrating, we share it with you.
For all our discussion of the tremendous damage the child-sex selling web site Backpage which Tony Ortega staunchly defended and even bragged about, ours was hardly the only country ravaged by its lustful greed. Over the weekend an overseas reader sent in a reminder that his country, Australia, was also ruthlessly victimized by the mob-like business model Ortega promoted.
These are the facts Tony Ortega won’t ever tell you.
Official records show hundreds of Australian women were tricked, coerced and otherwise threateningly pressured into selling themselves via paid advertisements on one of the many international portals connected to the Backpage website.
Passed in 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is a federal law designed to combat organized crime in the United States. It allows prosecution and civil penalties for racketeering activity performed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. Simply put, racketeering means engaging in an illegal scheme involving one or more of 35 offenses, including kidnapping, murder, bribery, arson and extortion.
G. Robert Blakey, a federal criminal law professor at Notre Dame University who helped draft racketeering laws across the nation, describes it this way:
Backpage Bosses
Ever since we ran our story on Kamala Harris, Twitter has been going wild retelling the sordid history of Backpage; specifically, how the notorious human trafficking and solicitation site was a target of Kamala Harris’s back when she was the attorney general of California.
So far we haven’t seen too much in the way of Tony Ortega’s name popping for work he did to advance Backpage’s pro-trafficking stance, but in revisiting the history of Backpage Twitter users are getting a much-needed education on the topic.
Jose Torres
It’s easy sometimes to feel helpless. Especially, in light of the all the horror Tony Ortega’s bosses at Backpage were able to unleash in the few years their human trafficking operation was cashing in on selling women and young children for sex, leaving a path of human misery in their wake.
Today, however, the FBI is asking for your help in bringing justice to one Backpage pimp. His name is Jose Torres and for years he was running his own version of Backpage scam.
Barry Schiff
If it’s one thing we believe in here at the blog, it’s that tougher sentencing for those who coerced, threatened or tricked young women and underage girls into participating in the Backpage sex trafficking ring should be the rule, rather than the exception.
Maybe that’s why this story we read over the weekend restored a measure of hope to us that Backpage pimps, and their editorializing apologists like Tony Ortega, are increasingly finding judges taking a zero tolerance approach when it comes to Backpage’s illegal sex trade.
Tony Ortega has been complaining about Kamala Harris, probably at the behest of his former Backpage bosses, James Larkin and Michael Lacey.
As it happens, Kamala Harris’s political rise was propelled by a year-long, high-profile campaign against known sex traffickers like the bosses who oversaw Backpage. And the fact that she helped throw pimps and their enablers in jail for selling illicit sex with coerced women and victimized children can’t come as welcome news for sex-peddling apologists or conspiratorial corporate lapdogs like Tony Ortega.
We’ve written at length about the measure of responsibility Tony Ortega shares for his role in helping to legitimate the black market sex trade Backpage engaged in. In fact, questions about the level of Tony Ortega’s involvement in the Backpage child sex trafficking ring are the ones we most regularly get asked here at the blog.
We would point out, of course, there are no shortage of other scandals Tony Ortega has been related to in one form or another over the years.
Last week we reported to you some heartening news out of the Washington, D.C., area regarding the successful prosecution of the last two pimps in what had been one of the lingering sex trafficking rings of the infamous Backpage era.
Friday, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced on its blog that, collectively, the six defendants in this Backpage scheme were sentenced on Tuesday in the Eastern District of Virginia to a combined 81 years in prison for their respective roles in the sex trafficking of both minor and adult victims across Northern Virginia and Maryland.
Tony Ortega
With court cases being delayed and investigations temporarily stayed amid the global pandemic, encouraging updates about Backpage prosecutions have been few and far between.
Until now.
On Tuesday July 28th, two men who pleaded guilty to trafficking an underage girl as part of a prostitution ring that operated in the Washington, D.C., area were sentenced to federal prison.
Elvis Pichardo Hernandez was sentenced to 13 years behind bars. Jose David Reyes-Gonzalez was sentenced to 14 years.
As we’ve been hearing first hand about the true toll exacted upon the victims of Tony Ortega’s insidious Backpage lies, we’ve found the cost is measured in long-lingering pain and and the enduring suffering of whole families and entire communities.
Tony Ortega tried hard to sway public sentiment in favor of his sex trafficking pals at Backpage and by so doing showed the true nature of his deeply immoral character. He wanted to see Backpage continue to make money hand over fist, and he didn’t care how many lives would be ruined in the process.
When we last left the heart breaking saga of the mother whose daughter was coerced into the dark and dangerous world of Backpage and its illicit sex trafficking trade we learned that after days of no communication the young girl finally returned home, telling her mother very little.
The mother, who has asked to remain anonymous, continues her story:
“I was told bits and pieces of her experience, that she had met a female via Facebook and this friend invited to her a party in the city and being 16, I suppose my daughter felt it was going to be cool to hang out with an older friend and go to a party in the city.
“ The phone rang and I jumped up to grab it, thinking it was the police. It was my daughter… Right away I began asking where are you? She responded by saying sorry for everything, mom.
… She was crying, I knew something was not right and became frightened. I told her tell me where you are, or I am calling the cops.
Her response was one I will never forget: she told me it’s going to be too late, I will likely be dead by then and nobody will find me.
Here at the blog we began our examination into the damaging lies Tony Ortega for so long spewed in order to protect and serve his Backpage masters, and just how damaging his intentional misrepresentation of the facts were in the lives of one family in particular.
Previously, in this harrowing story out of Canada we met a mother and her 16-year-old daughter who were about to discover that Backpage was anything but the bastion of “Freedom” Tony Ortega tried so badly to sell it as.
