No, the above headline isn’t in reference to Tony Ortega (though you could be forgiven for thinking so, given his history of faking identities online and helping to coverup sex trafficking crimes.)
This story involves an entirely different scumbag charged with human trafficking and the online promotion of underage sex workers. While Tony Ortega could certainly be credibly accused of the latter, as of the writing of this blog post no official charges have been filed identifying him as a human trafficker under U.
What a rocky year it has been for Tony Ortega and his sex trafficking pals over at Backpage. In some respects it’s almost difficult to fathom that a year has passed since the CEO of classified ads website Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, pleaded guilty to federal charges and the site was permanently shut down.
In the meantime, we’ve seen how scores of pimps and accomplices have been taken down and served stiff prison sentences.
People have been talking a lot lately about Tony Ortega and his infamous defense of the Backpage, since the story is once again making headlines as the federal government moves ahead with its case against the people behind it.
Tony Ortega asserts that the classified section was never a platform for selling sex, but a new report from law enforcement is clearly demonstrating this to be yet another of his lies.
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.
Once a champion of backpage.com’s “anything goes” policy towards underage sex trafficking, Tony Ortega seems curiously mum on the topic since federal authorities — including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, five other federal agencies, and four state agencies — raided the site permanently forcing its closure.
Could it be that Ortega is laying low to avoid suspicion? Does he fear indictment for the role he played in not only advocating in defense of but for helping to actively foster Backpage’s child prostitution agenda by providing it a platform during his tenure as its Editor-in-Chief?
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.
Former Village Voice editor, Tony Ortega, went down in New York history as the man who hammered the final nails into the coffin of the once venerable alternative weekly.
And, as the man who used “junk science” from vested interest groups to make the sex trafficking of underage girls something much less than the national epidemic it is. All in defense of the sex ads on the Village Voice Media classified ad website Backpage dot com, the platform that props up the Phoenix-based company.
