Today we are taking a quick moment to update our readers about some of the more recent events surrounding the upcoming trial of the key players in the Backpage sex trafficking syndicate.
Only days ago a federal appeals court on rejected a request by the former operators of Backpage, James Larkin and Michael Lacey, to prevent a judge from presiding over their trial because of statements made by the judge’s husband, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, about the now-shuttered classified ad site.
Online industries have been in a lot of hot water lately: hate speech, financial scams, undermined elections and — thanks to sites like Backpage — sex trafficking.
Up to now tech companies have largely avoided legal consequences, owing to a landmark 1996 law which protects them from lawsuits.
Today that federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, finds itself facing a brand new threat: Annie McAdams, a personal-injury lawyer in Houston.
Tony Ortega Backpage.com Apologist
As we observed during our look back at the seriously suspect history of Tony Ortega’s ‘career’ as a propagandist for hire for the syndicate behind the child sex trafficking website Backpage, the truth is far stranger than any fiction Ortega has ever invented.
During his tenure at the Village Voice, Ortega was the most public-facing of the small army of apologists Backpage put on the payroll in an attempt to spin the fact they were selling children and vulnerable women on the margins on society for profit.
As rich as Backpage’s founders, Michael Lacey, James Larkin and Carl Ferrer became as a result of their disastrous foray into the world of online child sex-trafficking, the massive generation of cash selling children for sex was hardly limited to the fat cats at the top of the pyramid scheme.
News broke this week of woman going by the moniker “Madame Priscilla Belle” who stands accused of running a multimillion-dollar prostitution ring out of a home she dubbed the “premier Dungeon of Chicago.
Tony Ortega and Karen De La Carriere
With the death of the mysterious sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein so much in the news this past week, one seemingly minor question continues to confound news sources. Who was financing Epstein’s lifestyle? With no job to speak of, no sources of income, no vast inheritance from a long-forgotten aunt, many in the media are asking, “where did the money come from?”
We talk about sex traffickers here on the blog quite a bit, and we couldn’t help noticing some interesting parallels between the notoriously reclusive Epstein and Tony Ortega.
