Mike Rinder

Mike Rinder and Tony Ortega The more you look at Tony Ortega’s actual “professional” history, his sketchy economic connections, and his highly suspicious shilling on behalf of the notorious Backpage sex ring, the more difficult it becomes to wrap your head around why Tony Ortega is not yet behind bars. Ortega’s fellow tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist Mike Rinder, has been known to casually dismiss Ortega’s relationship to Backpage by offering a list of excuses as long as your arm, usually filled with such gems as ‘Tony was a simple newspaper editor for the Village Voice,’ and ‘he had nothing whatsoever to do with the advertising side,’ or our favorite — ‘Tony knew next to nothing!

Frequent readers of this blog will know by now the sordid unprofessional history of Tony Ortega. Between 2011 and July 2012, Tony Ortega, then Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice, launched a biased oppo-research campaign on organizations and individuals who attempted to report on sex trafficking in the United States. Clearly Ortega was tasked by his employers, James Larking and Michael Lacey, to do damage control against the numerous accusations being levied against Backpage.