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.
“Seven years ago, the people I [Tony Ortega] work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com, a competitor to Craigslist. While other newspapers were doing little more than publicly condemning Newmark for the way Craigslist has, for years, eaten into their classified ads revenue, we decided to fight back. That’s just how we operate.” – (The people Tony Ortega worked for were Michael Lacey and James Larkin).
“Backpage.com has since inherited some of the adult business that left Craigslist.
Repercussions from the recent pressure being put on Backpage and its conspiratorial enablers like Tony Ortega continue to be felt across the country.
Just this week in Florida, a woman was sentenced to life in prison for prostituting a 14-year-old female runaway by setting the girl up in a motel room and creating a profile for the child on backpage.com.
The woman in question, 35 year old Katilia Brekeysha Seymour, was convicted of human trafficking following her arrest more than two years ago in Pinellas County.
Our last post discussed how Backpage attempted to characterize itself as ‘Sheriff of the Internet’, much in the way the proverbial fox would guard a henhouse.
They tried to create relationships with various law enforcement agencies in what amounted to nothing more than a PR strategy which sought to control the narrative around its involvement as the country’s largest platform for sex trafficking. In short, they weren’t content to skirt the existing system of law enforcement in place to guard against its practices, they wanted to rig the system to make themselves look like the good guys.
In or around 2010, as the Backpage began to emerge as a significant presence in the online sex advertising business, they developed a plan to minimize the attention devoted to its activities by the public and by law enforcement agencies, particularly concerning advertising of children on its website.
Defendants undertook to forge seemingly cooperative relationships with many law enforcement agencies and to convey the impression that they were actively and successfully engaged in efforts to identify and report child sex trafficking victims and otherwise “partnering” with law enforcement to minimize the risk of exploitation of children on the website.
We wrote previously as Editor-At-Large Tony Ortega from 2007 to 2012 oversaw the sleazy Backpage’s “posting rules” and “content requirements.” But Ortega went further by publicly attacking anyone in the press who raised questions about the Backpage’s roll as the country’s leading sex trafficking platform, referring to reports of rising rates of underage prostitution as “bogus information”.
“The actual data behind this ‘epidemic’ is wanting in the extreme,” Ortega wrote, following an “investigative” article, paid by revenues directly acquired by Backpage’s advertising sex for money scheme.
Tony Ortega is perhaps the best example of hypocrisy and arrogance in modern “journalism”. Here is a man who for years falsely accused L Ron Hubbard and all Scientologists of endorsing and condoning pedophilia while he himself had made 90% of his paycheck off of Backpage sex traffic advertising, which led to horrific instances of child rape and murder.
If you look at Tony Ortega’s history (not the one he tries to present the outside world), his economic connections (he’s broke and unemployed), and his defense of the notorious BackPage.
This week a young woman who was sold for sex through ads placed on Backpage cleared a major legal hurdle when a Massachusetts Federal Court Judge allowed her civil suit despite the now familiar arguments from Backpage’s attorneys that it is not responsible for third party content (sex ads) placed on its website.
The suit involves a now 18-year-old woman who, as a minor, was sold for sex in Massachusetts and Florida through ads that were placed on Backpage.
