On the evening of Thursday May 10, 2012, the television news station CNN ran an expose on Backpage that emphasized “how young some of these girls look”. During the course of the program, the cable news channel said out loud what the rest of us had long understood as they deemed the website “ _a hub for the sex trade._”
We’ve covered elsewhere Tony Ortega’s unhinged response, striking out with rabid personal attacks against the host of the show, but the story of what was going on behind the scenes has been largely untold… until now.
In our last post we reported to you about recent news out of San Diego of yet another Backpage pimp standing trial for the part he played in trafficking underage children via the online sex slavery platform devised and created by Tony Ortega’s former bosses.
Though it’s been nearly four years since the crimes committed by Jonathan Madison — the pimp at the heart of our last post — justice has finally caught up to him.
It has been a tumultuous week for the pro-human sex trafficking camp. Tony Ortega may no longer be the cheerleader he once was for the vile exploitation of women and underage girls during his days as a talking head for the Backpage crime syndicate, but as we’ve reported to our readers previously the dark reverberations of his disgusting rhetoric continues to infect the thinking of a dangerous number of new online enterprises.
Terrific news announced Friday, as Mastercard and Visa have vowed to join the fight against those using Tony Ortega’s rehashed pro-sex trafficking rhetoric.
The two largest credit card companies in America have made it abundantly clear that the old arguments Tony Ortega used to defend his child sex-trafficking pals over at Backpage are no longer fooling anyone and any hopes the pro-sex trafficking crowd had of gaining a foothold in the exploitative war against young women and girls is dead-on-arrival.
Aaron Drumheller
Ortega continues his petulant silence on the subject as further evidence of Backpage’s bloody history continues to surface.
We’ve been saying this for so long now it’s starting to sound like a broken record. But then, Tony Ortega is not an individual known for having a varied history of creativity. He is, as the saying goes, a one track pony. And, disturbingly, much of his track seems to revolve around the ‘sex-for-cash with at-risk women and underage girls’ portal known as Backpage.
Tony Ortega had sold his soul to Backpage and its illegal human trafficking trade. The series of articles he had been writing in the summer of 2011, attacking men and women brave enough to stand up against the Village Voice Media had all but confirmed it.
In our last article we saw how Tony Ortega had drawn a line in the sand, aligning himself with the flesh peddlers and the human slavers against the forces of freedom and justice.
Tony Ortega has been trying to separate himself from The Village Voice and its online whorehouse money-maker Backpage ever since he was unceremoniously fired and sent packing.
A numberof Village Voice insiders we’ve talked to from that time have echoed what we’d been hearing, namely that Tony Ortega was being paid hush money to walk away and never breathe a word of his involvement with the Backpage syndicate.
While Tony Ortega has kept his fat mouth shut about his intimate arrangement with the Backpage bosses in recent years, his own contemporaneous words while acting as the operation’s public mouthpiece paint an explicit picture.
In our last installment we saw how Tony Ortega has a history of lying and gaslighting his way through his professional life every bit as much as personal life.
We saw yesterday how Tony Ortega lied during a speech to students at his own former college, feigning innocence in the face of honest protest against Ortega for his role as a sex trafficking apologist.
It has been said before but bears repeating — such bare-faced public lies are by no means isolated incidences in the life of Tony Ortega.
Questions have been pouring into the blog recently about updates to the court case against the owners of Backpage, James Larkin and Michael Lacey, set for next spring. We here do our best to bring you all the late breaking news around the illegal sex trafficking scheme Tony Ortega long shilled for, knowing full well countless children were daily being victimized to advance Backpage’s bottom line.
Recently, those of us eager to see Ortega and his bosses brought to justice received a welcomed bit of good news when the trial judge in the Lacey and Larkin case ruled that the First Amendment does not shieldthe corrupt newspapermen behind the operation from prosecution for their former ownership of Backpage despite their furtive attempts to muddy the waters by unloading the toxic company as federal authorities began zeroing in their illicit conspiracy.
“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. Those same numbers had already inspired terrified politicians, who let loose hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade to prohibitionists bent on ending the world’s oldest profession. The Craigslist beat-down was absurdist theater. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security hearing on “Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking” culminated with the humbled attorneys from Craigslist announcing that they would close down their adult classified business.
Terry Johnson III
For the briefest of moments Tony Ortega had the attention of the nation. It came in the midst of a flurry of allegations that his employers at Backpage knowingly turned a blind eye to the epidemic of child sex trafficking that was taking place on the online platform built for unscrupulous pimps to sell marginalized women for sex.
Tony Ortega used this spotlight, not to decry the injustice of coerced prostitution of the vulnerable but to attack the growing number justifiably outraged men, women, institutions and authorities who dared to call Backpage what it was — the largest illegal sex ring the world had ever seen, trading the lives of young women and underage girls to make a fast buck.
We’ve previously reported that Tony Ortega has just cause to be worried about being legally implicated in the broad-sweeping net federal prosecutors are using to round up all those who played a part in the Backpage sex trafficking scandal. Today we find another reason for Tony Ortega to be concerned that justice will soon catch up to him.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has asked a federal judge to reconsider his decision to not order sanctions against the lawyers who represented Backpage.
In a recent blog post we examined the issue of what good Tony Ortega has brought into the world through his work. The answer is, not surprisingly: not much. There have been, however, consequences from his role supporting Backpage.
On Monday of this week Dr. Joseph P. Campbell Jr. presented on the use of technology in detecting human trafficking at the Alexander F. Carson lecture series hosted by A.O. Fox Hospital in New York.
Ortega has always sucked up to his bosses. From his early days as a hack journalist to his present incarnation as unemployed hack Twitterer, time has not changed Tony Ortega all that much.
At heart he is still the same disingenuous blowhard, content to ignore the human tragedy of child sex trafficking so long as someone was willing to pay him for it. In those final days of Backpage’s reign as the the world’s most reported-on sex scandal, Ortega would routinely go after reporters.
There is an old joke about a history professor who would attempt to show his students the good in every historic event they studied. One day a particularly provocative pupil attempted to stump the professor by raising his hand and asking, “What about Adolf Hitler?” The professor paused a moment and said, “Well there is one commendable thing to say about him, in those last days trapped in his bunker with the Allied forces closing in…”
This week’s case involving Backpage boss, Michael Lacey, and his prima donna request to have his ankle monitor removed in advance of his latest Hawaiian vacation highlights and underlines both the narcissism and lack of remorse the accused in this case have displayed at every turn.
While it is always distressing to see the moral depravity of Tony Ortega’s former colleagues, such examples of conduct can serve to remind us of the mentality behind the schemer’s Tony Ortega himself once praised as the guys ‘smart enough to create Backpage’.
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.
We’ve talked a lot about Tony Ortega and the role he played giving political cover to the human trafficking website Backpage. We’ve looked at the prostitution, the rape, the murder and the child exploitation made possible by those who helped and supported Backpage over the years.
Now yet another horror story has emerged showing just how disgusting Backpage (and the people behind it) truly is. This week a Maryland man was arrested by authorities for knowingly passing HIV to four women who he met on Backpage.
Earlier this week we reported that Dan Hyer, the sales and marketing director of Backpage.com plead guilty in Arizona federal court to conspiring to facilitate prostitution. He is the second Backpage executive to plead guilty so far, with at least another six others slated to go to trial in early 2020.
Recently we’ve been asked here for a quick recap of what brought us to where we are in this case.
In the lead up to the coming trial of Tony Ortega’s former bosses the rising myriad of convictions must be giving team Tony Ortega no shortage of sleepless nights.
In addition to the convictions we mentioned in our last report, another has just come across our desk. This time it’s a Wisconsin man who prosecutors say transported seven young women across state lines and forced them into prostitution using ads on Backpage.
