Tony Ortega
Tony Ortega might have tried to sell Backpage to the public as a glorified dating site but the reality, as we’ve been seeing over the course of our investigation into the legal filings, was something far more nefarious.
The plain, undeniable truth is that they were selling women and children to perverts online for profit. Backpage watchers had long been sounding alarm bells about the criminal implications of its business model, now some on Backpage payroll were beginning to speak out in corroboration.
Carl Ferrer
Recently we wrote about a series of emails exchanged by Carl Ferrer and a woman described in court documents only as “P.R.” As illustrative as their carelessness recounted in our last post was, Backpage and its heartless attitude toward its victims didn’t stop there. And neither did the story of “P.R.”
On July 14, 2012, Carl Ferrer received another email from the same woman.
It stated: “ Would you please take the edit block off my ad.
Through our examination into Backpage’s fruitless and ultimately vain attempts to shirk the laws in their greed-driven crime spree to generate hundreds of millions in personal profit through the highly illegal human sex trafficking trade, we’ve come across what we believe to be evidence more than sufficient to prove the state’s case against its ringleaders.
Take for example, the example Backpage set it its early years. Between around September 2010 and October 2012, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer became aware that a particular Backpage customer, known as “P.
Tony Ortega
In our last post we saw how despite Backpage’s official denials, and Tony Ortega’s seemingly endless stream of mind-numbing propagandistic lies, public perception was beginning to change regarding the legitimacy and lawfulness of Backpage’s business practices. The truth about their human sex trafficking/prostitution ring was beginning to spread.
At first they attempted to mislead the public by saying they were merely providing a platform for interested singles to meet.
On the evening of Thursday May 10, 2012, the television news station CNN ran an expose on Backpage that emphasized “how young some of these girls look”. During the course of the program, the cable news channel said out loud what the rest of us had long understood as they deemed the website “ _a hub for the sex trade._”
We’ve covered elsewhere Tony Ortega’s unhinged response, striking out with rabid personal attacks against the host of the show, but the story of what was going on behind the scenes has been largely untold… until now.
Tony Ortega
Backpage’s deliberate attempt to feign ignorance concerning the wide range of sex crimes they were actively facilitating on their website is by this point, no longer up for debate for anyone willing to look at the evidence.
For those, however, who still may be on the fence about Backpage’s criminal negligence consider this episode from April 27, 2012 when a woman wrote an email to Backpage’s support department stating that her underage daughter had been kidnapped, drugged, and was being advertised as a prostitute against her will.
Tony Ortega
Recently we saw how Backpage turned a blind eye to a woman who had contacted them to report that one of the “escorts” depicted in their online ads was only 17 years old. Despite the fact that the woman had informed them that the juvenile had been attempting to recruit the complaining party’s daughter, who was only 15 years old.
Over these past few weeks we’ve been building the case that instances like this were not one time mistakes.
Big news for readers of the blog who are concerned by the ongoing scandal surrounding Backpage and those who knowingly and willingly conspired with them.
Last week we obtained a copy of the previously sealed, and as yet unpublished, Grand Jury charges in the case of the United States of America v. Michael Lacey, James Larkin et al. And, over the next days, we’ll be here to take our readers through the actual federal charges, every step of the way.
Barry Schiff
If it’s one thing we believe in here at the blog, it’s that tougher sentencing for those who coerced, threatened or tricked young women and underage girls into participating in the Backpage sex trafficking ring should be the rule, rather than the exception.
Maybe that’s why this story we read over the weekend restored a measure of hope to us that Backpage pimps, and their editorializing apologists like Tony Ortega, are increasingly finding judges taking a zero tolerance approach when it comes to Backpage’s illegal sex trade.
Tony Ortega has been complaining about Kamala Harris, probably at the behest of his former Backpage bosses, James Larkin and Michael Lacey.
As it happens, Kamala Harris’s political rise was propelled by a year-long, high-profile campaign against known sex traffickers like the bosses who oversaw Backpage. And the fact that she helped throw pimps and their enablers in jail for selling illicit sex with coerced women and victimized children can’t come as welcome news for sex-peddling apologists or conspiratorial corporate lapdogs like Tony Ortega.
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?
When Tony Ortega “lost” his job as editor of the Village Voice in September 2012, it was more than a humiliating demotion. It was an unceremonious descent into obscurity, an involuntary downsizing to a laptop in a New York apartment, spinning stories and strangling truth on a little-read and virtually incomprehensible weblog.
Before being booted from the Village Voice, besides being known (and widely ridiculed within and without his own industry) for his obsession with writing biased and misleading stories about the Church of Scientology, Ortega was notorious as the poster boy for sex-trafficking ads.
