In a year which has already seen its share of unprecedented twists, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Brnovich, has announced a new delay of what some have been calling the criminal case of the century — the trial of Michael Lacey and James Larkin.
Our readers will remember these two as the former pimp executives who oversaw a chain of alt weekly rags which included Phoenix New Times and the Village Voice of New York.
Having read enough of the first-hand, personal stories of underage girls who were “groomed”, often over substantial periods of time, we here at the blog have gained something of an understanding of the dark seductive power used by pimps to lure their victims into service.
We have commented in the past how this process resembles Backpage itself, making its army of pimps and sex traffickers dependent over time on the platform, by virtue of its ease of use and its flagrant willingness to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of vulnerable women and children.
“ The people I work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com.” – Tony Ortega In a just world, the seizure of Backpage by the Feds in 2017 should have been the knock-out blow to online sex trafficking. Instead, the endless game of whack-a-mole continues as we await upcoming court hearings on the matter.
A month after Fosta-Sesta (the Backpage-inspired law designed to thwart online sex-traffickers) passed, ads for commercial sex over the Internet plummeted 82 percent, according to TellFinder, a data analytics tool originally built by the Defense Department.
