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.
When Tony Ortega was on the payroll of Michael Lacey and James Larkin he touted Backpage’s process of screening personal ads for illegal content. This is the same process that the Subcommittee criticized at page 17 of its report as serving “to sanitize the content of innumerable advertisements for illegal transactions—even as Backpage represented to the public and the courts that it merely hosted content created by others.”
What was Ortega covering up?
