Arielle Silverstein and Tony Ortega
With all the talk in the news recently about whistleblowers, we thought this might be a perfect time to remind our readers about how Arielle Silverstein, Tony Ortega’s most recent wife, took it upon herself to try and quash an internal inquiry headed by United Nation’s whistleblower Peter Gallo, who had instigated a formal investigation of her organization over the matter at the time.
It all began in 2015 with allegations that certain U.
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.
Frequent readers of this blog will know by now the sordid unprofessional history of Tony Ortega. Between 2011 and July 2012, Tony Ortega, then Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice, launched a biased oppo-research campaign on organizations and individuals who attempted to report on sex trafficking in the United States.
Clearly Ortega was tasked by his employers, James Larking and Michael Lacey, to do damage control against the numerous accusations being levied against Backpage.
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.
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.
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.
