Tony Ortega
In our last post we were looking at a number of victims of the Backpage human sex trafficking scheme which hypocritical blowhards like Tony Ortega long championed as defenders of free speech.
And yet, as we have seen, the sort of ‘free speech’ Tony Ortega’s Backpage cronies trafficked in came at a devastating cost for its victims
Sometime in or around the summer of 2012, a young girl referred to in the indictment of the Backpage crime family as “Victim 6” was sold for sex, through the use of Backpage ads, in Arizona.
The Backpage syndicate behind bars
On May 15, 2015, a Company B employee posing as a Backpage employee sent an email to an apparent prostitute. The subject line was “ _Offering Free Advertisement from Backpage.com_” and the text of the email sought to persuade the prostitute to “ upgrade your ad with sponsor placement or automatic repost.”
In response, the prostitute wrote back that she had “ _managed to activate my ad and could buy credits as well.
Section 230 was originally meant to be not only a shield for internet service pro-viders but also a sword against illicit content, allowing platforms to take down content like pornography without being held liable for doing so.
Tony Ortega knew this, and yet still worked to convince the world Backpage was doing nothing wrong. He wanted you to believe that Backpage was doing all it could to ‘aggressively protect’ those they were selling for sex by using a proprie-tary algorithm to identify and red-flag ads posted to their the Backpage personals section.
If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, chances are you’ve seen us discuss a bit of federal legislation passed more than 20 years ago called Section 230. Given our examination this week of the latest sex trafficking lawsuit to rock the social media world, we thought we’d offer a quick refresher to remind us all exactly how sites like Backpage and Twitter have so long gotten off scott-free whenever they are exposed trafficking in sexually explicit material involving children.
Previous we here at the blog reported to our readers on the absolutely nightmarish saga of a Backpage pimp from Houston Texas named David Mearis who received the largest sentence we’ve yet seen in connection with the human sex trafficking scam Tony Ortega advocated on behalf of for years.
We noted at the time just how many similarities there were between the low level pimps like Mearis and the predatory pimps higher up the corporate chain and wondered aloud if these same judgements might also be applied to the pimps running the show.
Jose Torres
It’s easy sometimes to feel helpless. Especially, in light of the all the horror Tony Ortega’s bosses at Backpage were able to unleash in the few years their human trafficking operation was cashing in on selling women and young children for sex, leaving a path of human misery in their wake.
Today, however, the FBI is asking for your help in bringing justice to one Backpage pimp. His name is Jose Torres and for years he was running his own version of Backpage scam.
Yet another bombshell case against Tony Ortega’s former employer, the infamous sex trafficking website Backpage comes to light this week.
This case involves an unnamed plaintiff known only as ‘K.R.’ She claims that Backpage directly violated the Code of Alabama §13A-6-151, and makes claims for violation of Alabama’s human trafficking statute, outrage, negligence and wantonness, and unjust enrichment against Backpage.
In early 2013, K.R. turned seventeen (17) years old. Around that time, she ran away from her home in Meridian, Lauderdale County, Mississippi with very little money.
