In what is to surely be felt as yet another blow to the pimps of the Backpage empire —and their spineless toadies like Tony Ortega – the U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich who will be presiding at trial, announced she will not be stepping away from the criminal case charging Backpage executives with facilitating prostitution.
As we’ve previously reported, attorneys for James Larkin, who along with Michael Lacey previously ran the alternative weekly Phoenix New Times and Backpage child sex trafficking website, filed a motion in September demanding Brnovich recuse herself because of official statements decrying sex trafficking made by her husband, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
By any measurement 2020 has been a year filled with disasters. From the out-of-control forest faires in the western half of the United States to the raging fires of anti-religious hatred fueled by those like Tony Ortega.
And, let’s be honest here, in many ways Tony Ortega is to tolerance online what a lit cigarette intentionally thrown from a car is to field of tall dry grass. After all, the hoped-for results of both are usually the same — to burn it all to the ground.
In an interview with a popular women’s magazine, an actress explained how she has been working as an undercover FBI agent fighting against child sex trafficking on sites like Backpage.
During her time undercover the star participated in half a dozen child-sex stings around the world as an unpaid volunteer.
She explained her involvement to help the FBI fight child sex traffickers like Backpage by saying that good people are the only ones who will do anything about it.
Poetic Justice for Sex Trafficking Profiteers
Backpage, the human sex trafficking website Tony Ortega worked so hard to legitimate and normalize, may be gone but its dark reverberations are still felt in communities everywhere.
That said, it’s not often that good news comes out of the sickening world of sex trafficking, where tens of thousands of children and young women are sold for sex each night across the country. So when we here at the blog find news worth celebrating, we share it with you.
For all our discussion of the tremendous damage the child-sex selling web site Backpage which Tony Ortega staunchly defended and even bragged about, ours was hardly the only country ravaged by its lustful greed. Over the weekend an overseas reader sent in a reminder that his country, Australia, was also ruthlessly victimized by the mob-like business model Ortega promoted.
These are the facts Tony Ortega won’t ever tell you.
Official records show hundreds of Australian women were tricked, coerced and otherwise threateningly pressured into selling themselves via paid advertisements on one of the many international portals connected to the Backpage website.
Tony Ortega
It’s no secret that Tony Ortega lives to attack people online. Not all people, of course, as evidenced by his strange preoccupation with actively defending and excusing the behavior of known child predators.
Today we uncover yet another example of this clearly worrying fascination with defending those who would sexually abuse children.
Early in his career, long before his pathological obsession with a religion, Tony Ortega was listlessly casting about for ‘easy marks’ upon whom he might vent his impotent rage.
Raymond Rodio III
Tony Ortega’s title as world’s most repugnant basement-dweller may be in jeopardy after news broke recently of a Long Island man being sentenced to 9 1⁄2 years in prison for running a Backpage-driven human sex trafficking ring out of his parents’ basement.
District Attorney Tim Sini said 49-year-old Raymond Rodio III would find his victims by posting ads on Backpage, the now infamous child sex trafficking site Tony Ortega once proudly shilled for.
In the world of ligation there are no shortage of dirty tricks for those unscrupulous enough to employ them. This seems to be the case especially when those charged with a crime understand how weak their legal defense is and, more importantly, just how guilty they are of the charges before them. This certainly seems to be the case in the upcoming Backpage trial, about which we have discussed much over the past few months.
We began a fact-checking investigation into the contemporary reporting surrounding the Backpage take down and comparing it to the biased, skewed, and highly propagandistic myths Tony Ortega had long been publishing about the notorious child sex trafficking platform. To put it mildly, the facts of the Backpage case do not square with the perverse hagiography Tony Ortega was trying his damnedest to sell his readers in the pages of the Village Voice tabloid.
Lots of ink has been spilled the past couple of days in the fallout of the recent presidential debate. No small portion of the discussion has centered around of the need for fact checkers to verify information being broadcast to public by those in positions of assumed authority.
Indeed, being that ‘fact-checking’ is something we take very seriously here at the blog, this caused us to prick up our ears.
As we come to a close in this close-up examination of the official code of ethical conduct for journalists, we note (unsurprisingly!) that so-called ‘tabloid journalists’ like Tony Ortega have had a demonstrably poor showing when brought face-to-face with these professional standards.
Today we reach the fourth and final of the major ethical principles as articulated by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) on the journalistic imperative to be accountable and transparent in all reporting.
It seems strange now to think there was ever a time when Tony Ortega wasn’t cowardly hiding in his basement, refusing to breathe a word about his love for Backpage. Only a few short years ago, you practically couldn’t get him to shut up on the subject.
Tony Ortega would often use words like “freedom”, “smart” and “brave” to laud the Backpage business empire he was once employed by.
These days when Backpage gets mentioned the words you hear are more likely to be, “slavery”, “sex trafficking” and “underage”.
Backpage Bosses
Ever since we ran our story on Kamala Harris, Twitter has been going wild retelling the sordid history of Backpage; specifically, how the notorious human trafficking and solicitation site was a target of Kamala Harris’s back when she was the attorney general of California.
So far we haven’t seen too much in the way of Tony Ortega’s name popping for work he did to advance Backpage’s pro-trafficking stance, but in revisiting the history of Backpage Twitter users are getting a much-needed education on the topic.
We’ve written at length about the measure of responsibility Tony Ortega shares for his role in helping to legitimate the black market sex trade Backpage engaged in. In fact, questions about the level of Tony Ortega’s involvement in the Backpage child sex trafficking ring are the ones we most regularly get asked here at the blog.
We would point out, of course, there are no shortage of other scandals Tony Ortega has been related to in one form or another over the years.
It’s no secret Tony Ortega was a staunch defender of the special privileges and freedoms of billion dollar corporations back when he was on the Backpage payroll. Freedoms like that of selling children to predators online for a cut of the profit were, after all, the sole reason Backpage was founded in the first place.
We’ve seen how Tony Ortega attempted to sell this arrangement to the public by insisting the platform existed in order to allow ‘two consenting adults to find each other.
The pandemic of social ills Tony Ortega’s good friends over at Backpage unleashed on the nation have been an ongoing horror story. The trail of broken lives and destroyed families Backpage left in its wake remain the most enduring legacy of what Tony Ortega wanted us all to believe was nothing more than the last great bastion of First Amendment freedoms.
It was, as so much else that comes from the mouth of Tony Ortega, a lie.
Few people would ever mistake Tony Ortega for Heidi Fleiss, the so-called Hollywood Madam whose upscale prostitution ring based in Los Angeles, California ensnared a number of high profile personalities.
While Tony Ortega did work to promote Backpage, at times with the rabid ferocity of a dyspeptic junkyard dog, many of those who became mixed up in the Backpage scheme to sell underage girls and marginalized women for profit were nameless, faceless pimps living in the shadows of society.
Tony Ortega
With court cases being delayed and investigations temporarily stayed amid the global pandemic, encouraging updates about Backpage prosecutions have been few and far between.
Until now.
On Tuesday July 28th, two men who pleaded guilty to trafficking an underage girl as part of a prostitution ring that operated in the Washington, D.C., area were sentenced to federal prison.
Elvis Pichardo Hernandez was sentenced to 13 years behind bars. Jose David Reyes-Gonzalez was sentenced to 14 years.
Normally when we think of Tony Ortega phrases like ‘Backpage.com apologist’, or ‘child sex trafficking enabler’, or ‘fake journalist’ spring to mind. But the list of wrongs Tony Ortega has perpetrated and/or promoted doesn’t end there.
One has only to look at the myriad cases stemming from the Backpage debacle to see that Tony Ortega has more guilt to bear than helping to legitimize the selling of minors and young women for sex with online perverts.
As we’ve been hearing first hand about the true toll exacted upon the victims of Tony Ortega’s insidious Backpage lies, we’ve found the cost is measured in long-lingering pain and and the enduring suffering of whole families and entire communities.
Tony Ortega tried hard to sway public sentiment in favor of his sex trafficking pals at Backpage and by so doing showed the true nature of his deeply immoral character. He wanted to see Backpage continue to make money hand over fist, and he didn’t care how many lives would be ruined in the process.
