When we last left the heart breaking saga of the mother whose daughter was coerced into the dark and dangerous world of Backpage and its illicit sex trafficking trade we learned that after days of no communication the young girl finally returned home, telling her mother very little.
The mother, who has asked to remain anonymous, continues her story:
“I was told bits and pieces of her experience, that she had met a female via Facebook and this friend invited to her a party in the city and being 16, I suppose my daughter felt it was going to be cool to hang out with an older friend and go to a party in the city.
“ The phone rang and I jumped up to grab it, thinking it was the police. It was my daughter… Right away I began asking where are you? She responded by saying sorry for everything, mom.
… She was crying, I knew something was not right and became frightened. I told her tell me where you are, or I am calling the cops.
Her response was one I will never forget: she told me it’s going to be too late, I will likely be dead by then and nobody will find me.
Here at the blog we began our examination into the damaging lies Tony Ortega for so long spewed in order to protect and serve his Backpage masters, and just how damaging his intentional misrepresentation of the facts were in the lives of one family in particular.
Previously, in this harrowing story out of Canada we met a mother and her 16-year-old daughter who were about to discover that Backpage was anything but the bastion of “Freedom” Tony Ortega tried so badly to sell it as.
We’ve exposed the extent to which Tony Ortega was willing to go as former Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice in providing cover for his pimp pals at Backpage. We’ve seen Tony Ortega lie, misdirect, and purposefully muddy the waters in order to confuse the public about the Backpage human trafficking empire which victimized countless young women and underage girls.
For a while Tony Ortega’s dog and pony show seemed to be working.
Barely a week had passed since Tony Ortega wrote his poison pen piece attacking the validity of national child sex trafficking statistics, when Ortega lashed out again. This time the object of his unhinged rage was a human target.
Tony Ortega was going to use the opportunity to make his unconscionable defense of Backpage personal. And he didn’t care who he had to throw under the bus to do it.
Here at the blog we wrote to explain a little context behind just how Backpage was converted into a human trafficking and prostitution enterprise, with men like Tony Ortega doing much of the heavy lifting to sell the idea to the public.
For six years Tony Ortega lived off the money directly generated through sex trafficking, much of it from minors. Unlike so much of Ortega’s reporting, this story is not based on hearsay or slanderous gossip.
We have written about Tony Ortega and the economic incentive he had in maintaining the Backpage hierarchy of pimps controlling the victims they exploited. We suggested in that piece that Tony Ortega was a willing participant in this scheme, unlike the many nameless victims Backpage took advantage of as it generated hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising profits.
Today another story came across our desks, demonstrating yet again how the pimp pyramid model Backpage set up (and which Tony Ortega worked so hard to propagate) was used to intimidate, bully and victimize those women and young children it profited off of.
Among Tony Ortega’s many demonstrable lies, one whopper he invented to help clear infamous sex-trafficking hub Backpage must surely rank somewhere near the top — the lie of course, was that Backpage existed solely for consenting adults to find each other.
Yeah, right!
Even someone as shortsighted and narrow-minded as Tony Ortega could not have been foolish enough to think anyone would fall for that one. Still, that didn’t stop Ortega from trying to sell it to the public.
Time for a much needed update on the pending trial of the century, in which Backpage.com co-founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin will finally be called to account for the scores of sex trafficking crimes their platform made possible for so many years. The federal court trial is set for August 17 in Phoenix, Arizona.
The notorious masterminds behind Tony Ortega’s number one choice for underage sex slavery, Backpage.com, will be facing charges they knowingly published the ads and then laundered money from them.
We’ve been talking about the malicious practice of grooming, or preparing innocent victims for exploitation by unscrupulous operators, like Tony Ortega’s former bosses over at the notorious Backpage sex trafficking site.
We mentioned yesterday about an interesting case of a woman in Texas who survived her Backpage ordeal and is now taking the fight to the platforms that allowed, through their willful inaction and callous indifference, for the trafficking of countless women and children on their watch.
We informed our readers about the vile practice of ‘grooming’, which we defined as the process of developed dependence in order to lead someone into sex trafficking.
We argued that the sex pimping sites like Backpage, and even far less popular sites like Tony Ortega’s regrettable basement blog, incorporate a lot of these same tactics in order to generate a learned helplessness that makes them easy targets for pimps, online predators, and other Internet lowlifes.
By any reasonable accounting this has been a very bad year for James Larkin and Michael Lacey, the former capi di tutti i capi of the Backpage family — the largest online advertiser child sex trafficking the world had ever seen.
Despite the perfectly transparent attempts by the likes of Tony Ortega to deflect attention from their sordid enterprise and attack critics who dared to raise their voices in protest we have seen how, if anything, the furor has only increased as Backpage’s day in court draws closer.
The other day we were first to break the story to our readers of a pending tv series based on an article about Backpage which went viral. Today we received news of a similar type story – another damning article dealing with the underage sex trafficking mill and the human vermin like Tony Ortega who worked to normalize it. It too, went viral. Instead of getting a series order from a high profile production company, however, this one led to an arrest so sordid and dark it could be a David Fincher film.
It’s not often we follow entertainment news here on the blog but today something came across the transom that we just couldn’t ignore.
Last year Christine Biederman, who spends her time as a lawyer and part time investigative reporter based out of Dallas, Texas, wrote an incredibly damning exposé on the Backpage empire and the story of its (still-unfolding) child sex trafficking trial.
The piece sent shockwaves through the journalism world not just for its succinct 10,000 foot view of the entire sordid affair, but also for the incredible access she was granted to the two criminal masterminds (if one can use that word) behind the scheme, Michael Lacey and James Larkin.
“I helped turn a weekly newspaper with a website into a digital enterprise.” – Tony Ortega
The above quote came from Tony Ortega while, with his typical braggadocios self-importance, hw was spouting off to the New York Times on just what an important player he was in the empire Backpage built.
With all the legal scrutiny which has fallen on those associated with the infamous child sex selling operation it’s little wonder that Tony Ortega has tamped down the full-throated praise he used to offer to anyone foolish enough to ask his opinion on the topic.
“We’re being told that there’s a widespread, growing and out-of-control problem to fear in our country. And it has a catchy name: ‘trafficking. The actual data behind this ‘epidemic’ is wanting in the extreme. It involves guesses by activist professors, junk science by nonprofit groups trying to extract money from Congress…” – Tony Ortega
We can think of a great number of people who disagree with Tony Ortega on the above quote which represents just one of his numerous propagandistic untruths on the subject.
“ I really just want people to understand that nobody, unless they’ve lived this life, can honestly fathom the amount of pain and trauma that comes from Backpage. I suffer every day because of the things that happened to me years ago.”
The above quote comes from a woman Melanie Thompson who says she was exploited for years starting at age 12 by a sex trafficker who used what Tony Ortega once routinely referred to as a bastion of First Amendment Rights, Backpage.
“Harvey Weinstein is on trial. Jeffery Epstein is no longer with us,” she said. “Dr. Larry Nassar is in prison and on one is selling children on Backpage.com. I know we as a community have done what we needed to do but I know there is more to do.”
These were the words Kathleen Winn, executive director of the sexual exploitation-fighting Project 25/ VAST, spoke to an assembly recently in Arizona to combat the threat of child sex trafficking the men behind Backpage inflicted upon the country before the syndicate was raided by authorities in 2018.
It’s interesting sometimes to note how with the trial against the crime syndicate that ran Backpage once more in the headlines, other folks have started refocusing their examination of the problem as well. Take for example the Justice Department, which just held a “summit” on Tuesday of this week, where officials touted convictions of a record 526 defendants in trafficking cases including Backpage.com.
While we’ve celebrated ourselves here on the blog the government’s having taken down the infamous sex ring Tony Ortega brazenly shilled for during his tenure as its chief propagandist, we know only too well that more needs to be done to curtail the global practice of sex trafficking.
It wasn’t that long ago that Backpage.com was considered something akin to the Walmart or Amazon of the sex industry, where people could find thousands of sex services listed on the classified ad website.
Previously we’ve told the story of how the site rocketed to popularity in 2010, around the time when Craigslist shut down its adult services section. When that happened, Backpage became the go-to for pervy creeps everywhere. (Any wonder a specimen like Tony Ortega would become the site’s most outspoken pitchman?
