With the advent of the Internet, we now live in an age where so much of life is happening online. By the time the study of online sex trafficking began in a serious scholarly back in 2011, we were already seeing websites like Craigslist and, worst of them all, Backpage emerging as behemoths in online sex trade.
Although some of the ads on those sites were for what we might call “at-will” sex workers, researchers understood early that sex traffickers were flooding these platforms to advertise their (often under-age) victims against their will.
Tony Ortega and Leah Remini
If you ask Tony Ortega about child sex-trafficking in America, he’s likely to give you the same set of repeated lies he’s given so many media outlets before.
Consider this whopper Ortega offered up in a propaganda piece he wrote in defense of Backpage shortly before authorities stepped in to pull the plug on the entire criminal organization: “Underage prostitution… exists at a level that is nothing like what is being trumpeted [by] activists who want to put us out of business.
More than a year after his arrest on unrelated drug charges following a traffic stop by police man in Amarillo, TX was charged with human trafficking and has been sentenced to ten years in prison.
In March of 2018, Jirehn Lamarr Curtis Jr., 22, was stopped for a routine traffic violation. Though detained for an infraction of the driving laws, it was ‘traffic’ of a different sort which would ultimately lead to this Backpage pimp being put away for better than a decade.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is cracking down on the multi-billion dollar business of human trafficking in the U.S. The very same line of work Tony Ortega so proudly, if tone-deafly, defended as an ‘honest exchange between consenting people’. That characterization, like so much that comes out of the mouth of Tony Ortega, was a big fat lie.
Just two months ago, 1,700 people were arrested nationwide for committing child sex and exploitation crimes as part of a nationwide DOJ initiative called, “Operation Broken Heart”, the AP news service reports.
We have seen how Backpage had used litigation tactics by manipulating legal loops to keep from itself from facing the music.
Most courts had had no choice but to grant them temporary victories because of the unduly broad language of the Section 230 loophole.
But following the subpoena blitz we previously reported on, Portman and his colleagues on Capitol Hill had what they considered incontrovertible evidence in the way of Backpage’s own internal communication.
It’s no secret Michael Lacey and James Larkin built on the backs of (let’s be generous here) ‘questionable’ motives and a couple of key legal loopholes.
With Section 230 as their weapon, they pushed their way into the court system. At first it seemed the side of law and decency was losing after the slimy Backpage duo won an early series of civil suits, successfully challenging anti-Backpage laws in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Washington State.
“They love to inflate the numbers by talking about children ‘at risk’ of exploitation.”
That was how Backpage boss Michael Lacey characterized the work of the experts at the Crimes Against Children Research Center on the subject of child sex trafficking. In that statement, Lacey highlights his callous indifference to suffering victims and blinding concern for his own self-interest. If there were any question about Larkin and Lacey’s desire to help authorities put out the fire Backpage started, let this quote serve as a reminder to their true state of mind on the subject.
Backpage was already getting into hot water. A girl in Missouri had sued the site in mid-September of 2009, alleging that she’d been pimped out at the age of 14 and that Backpage had willfully “failed to investigate for fear of what it would learn.” In the official police report she explained that the site’s operators “had a strong suspicion” she was underage. Ultimately, a federal magistrate dismissed her case. The situation was tragic, the judge said, but Backpage was protected under Section 230.
The Communications Decency Act was a law conceived, as the name suggests, to rid the web of vice.
The new act was proposed in 1995 by Senator J. James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat who’d watched with growing alarm as “the worst, most vile, most perverse pornography” spread online. He was particularly concerned about what all this obscenity might do to America’s children.
Although Exon repeatedly described the legislation as “streamlined,” the Department of Justice warned that its indecency provisions were unconstitutionally broad.
Last week we took an insider’s look at two sex peddlers behind the online trafficking empire known as Backpage.
Today we continue our deep dive into the perverse path Backpage blazed without a thought to the host of victims it would leave in its wake to become the undisputed worldwide heavy-weight champion of human sex trafficking.
James Larkin had decided early on in his partnership with Michael Lacey that the fasted way to set their scheme in motion was to concentrate maximum effort on expanding their advertising market, specifically through increasingly risqué sex ads in the site’s personal’s section.
As of this writing both Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin are out on million-dollar bonds, secured by real estate the government eventually hopes to own when it wins its case against Backpage. The bulk of the charges against them fittingly fall under the Travel Act, a law designed by Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department to target organized crime. According to the indictment, Lacey, Larkin, and their underlings like Tony Ortega not only turned a blind eye to prostitution and child sexual trafficking but, driven by greed, actively worked to abet it.
As readers familiar with the sordid saga of Tony Ortega’s “Free Speech Champions” might recall from our earlier reporting, Backpage, the platform that brought the federal government down on Michael Lacey and James Larkin’s heads, itself wasn’t much to look at. It was little more than a bare-bones interface wrapped in knock-off Facebook blue. From the beginning it was similar to Craigslist in both form and function. Even its name was something of a callback to the old days of print publishing, when classified ads (especially racier ads for topless bars, escort services, and other sexually oriented businesses) filled the final pages of alt-weeklies.
In Michael Lacey’s younger and more vulnerable years, his father gave him this advice:
“Whenever someone pokes a finger in your chest, you grab that finger and you break it off at the knuckle.”
Lacey had grown up in the 1950’s as a bright, bookish boy. His father, a sailor turned enforcer for a New York construction union, had little use for his son’s intellectual gifts. If Lacey lost a fight at school, he says, his dad “came home and beat me again.
Tony Ortega
We first brought you the story about the explosive rise in one state’s sex trafficking charges as Backpage was at the height of its vile powers. Today we continue our examination of Florida, in light of the recent headlines in which a young woman of 19 was kidnapped and forced into a life of Backpage prostitution in Boynton Beach.
Stalwart defender of Backpage’s heinous practices, Tony Ortega, once bragged about his bosses when he said, “ The people I work for were smart enough to start Backpage.
Marco Orego
Recently we received a question from a reader who mentioned a terrifying story about a man facing a life sentence for the role he played in prostituting a young girl using Backpage in 2017.
The reader asked if we might take a closer look at what is happening in Florida with regards to Backpage sex trafficking and what we discovered concerned us deeply.
More than 20 million people are subjected to forced labor every year, and 22% (4.
We here have spent more than our fair share of time reading about the Backpage. The sickening familiarity of the countless stories of those victimized by this soulless corporation willing to sell children to sex pests for cold, hard cash never ceases to appall us.
Tony Ortega might celebrate the Backpage as a “First Amendment Rights” champion but, like so many of Ortega’s ‘opinions’, the lie at the center of his thinking is only too clear for anyone with sense enough to see past the dog and pony show of his wholly manufactured, self-righteousness.
We previously informed our readers of the precedent-setting move made by the authorities in the state of Delaware after they summarily invalidated the business licenses of four companies who had worked to support Backpage in its quest to sexually traffic as many children as it could to boost its bottom line.
More background has come to light on this encouraging new ‘zero policy’ towards those who aid and abet blatantly criminal organizations like Backpage.
In what some in the legal world are calling ‘a sign of things to come’ the Delaware state Attorney General’s Office issued a truly inspiring judgment the other day when they took the as-yet unprecedented step of revoking the right of four companies linked to Backpage from doing business as legal entities.
The loss of their LCC certification was made possible through legislation enacted last year that permitted the state Department of Justice to ask the court to cancel certificates of formations due to abuse or misuse of its limited liability company powers, privileges or existence.
We first reported to you last week about a 32 year federal prison conviction for the man who trafficked 16-year-old Desiree Robinson of Chicago. The girl was subsequently murdered by a man she had been sold to on Backpage. While the actual murder awaits trial for the part he played in destroying the innocent girl’s life, we now receive news of another important sentence connected with this tragedy — one that may yet have implications well beyond this single case.
Joseph Hazley
We are only too aware here at the blog just how dark the vast majority of any story involving mention of Backpage or its number one fanboy, Tony Ortega, can be. We know just how overwhelming the details of these stories can be.
But since the Federal Authorities shut down Backpage, the site Tony Ortega once lauded as the best thing since sliced bread, its reign as the undisputed leader in child sex trafficking has been ended.
