The more one examines Tony Ortega’s involvement as Editor-in-Chief of his former rag, the Village Voice, and how he defended their attempts to make money off of sex trafficking the sicker one gets.
We know have incontrovertible proof in the form of first-hand, corroborated accounts (as described in affidavits to the Court by victims and witnesses alike) that it involved child sex slaves. This disturbing fact is something which Ortega has continuously downplayed, in a desperate attempt to minimize it away.
Over the past decade or more, marketing for prostitution began to migrate to the Internet, as website operators have sought to enable buyers and sellers of sex to maintain their anonymity and minimize the risk of detection by law enforcement.
Named for the infamous “Back Page” of the Village Voice newspaper, Backpage.com became the primary destination for buying and selling illegal commercial sex online, accounting for 80 percent or more of all revenue from online commercial sex advertising in the United States.
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.
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.
“_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 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.
This week a young woman who was sold for sex through ads placed on Backpage cleared a major legal hurdle when a Massachusetts Federal Court Judge allowed her civil suit despite the now familiar arguments from Backpage’s attorneys that it is not responsible for third party content (sex ads) placed on its website.
The suit involves a now 18-year-old woman who, as a minor, was sold for sex in Massachusetts and Florida through ads that were placed on Backpage.
Why are folks over on Tony Ortega’s blog suddenly calling him a low class drama queen? I mean, it’s not like they are wrong but seeing these comments popping up on Tony Ortega’s hate blog got us thinking. Have Tony’ Ortega’s readers finally had enough of his unfiltered, immature garbage?
Apparently it all started when a longtime “fan” of his announced that he was fed up with the way Tony Ortega runs his operation.
