“If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”
The above quote could equally apply to the criminals behind the prostitution syndicate know as Backpage.
Last year when the ‘very much for-profit’ advertising website Backpage shuttered its adult ads section, it left in its way bewildered escorts, sex workers, and clients. Among those who were not quite as shocked by the dramatic turn of events which led to the federal authorities raiding and closing down the infamous child sex trafficking site were those of us who had long been watching from the sidelines waiting for the hammer of justice to fall upon the men responsible for selling children to creeps on the internet for sex.
Another lowlife pimp, this one known as “Cadillac Black”, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for trafficking two underage girls this week. It will come as no surprise to our regular readers to discover “Cadillac Black” used Backpage.com to advertise the young girls as prostitutes.
Christopher Hamlett, 26, also known as “Cadillac Black,” was found guilty of multiple counts of sex trafficking a minor, using a facility of interstate commerce to promote commercial sex and production of child pornography, following a trial in which the two underage victims and two adults testified that Hamlett was their “pimp,” records show.
Sex Trafficking in America, a new film from FRONTLINE, follows a detective and her unit at the Phoenix Police Department, which focuses on sex trafficking cases and child sexual exploitation. Since she began investigating sex trafficking cases in 2005, Detective Christi Decouflé has seen a shift toward traffickers using the internet as a marketing tool. So she and the rest of her colleagues — many of them women — have used the anonymity of the internet to launch a different type of undercover operation, one aimed at busting traffickers.
The role Tony Ortega played (and continues to play by remaining silent) supporting the notorious Backpage website is no secret to frequent readers of this blog, but the seismic ripple effect in the wake of the Federal raid which seized more than 12 million dollars from those associated with the underage sex-for-hire platform is something few could have predicted.
This week it was announced that human trafficking has become such a danger in California that it will be now be part of the curriculum at seven local school districts when then San Diego County District Attorney’s Office made public it will spend $3 million to fund The San Diego Trafficking Prevention Collective to provide education about human trafficking to more than 237,000 students.
The vast majority of women who are raped or sexually assaulted do not report the crime to police, as surveys in light of allegations facing Supreme Court hopeful Brett Kavanaugh suggests. Tragically, this is so because in many cases because the victims have little confidence that their attacker will ever be brought to justice.
Once recent poll found that 1 out of 6 women have experienced some form of harassment, while 35 percent have been sexually assaulted.
In our last post we referenced the bipartisan support that lead to The U.S. Senate’s condemnation of Backpage and its vocal supports when it voted overwhelmingly in February to close an Internet law loophole that has shielded Backpage from liability when they ran ads for minors being offered as prostitutes.
The law this amends, the Communications Decency Act of 1996, was intended to foster an open Internet free of threats of lawsuits for content some might dislike.
For as much as we’ve talked about the dangers of Tony Ortega’s hate-blog and the work of his former employers at the sleazy sex selling site, Backpage, it could be helpful to take a moment to set each in its proper context.
For example, Tony Ortega’s ‘angry troll on the internet’ routine generates so little actual revenue that it really must be considered more hobby than ‘job’. For all the time Ortega seems to fritter away over his pet obsession, he must be making embarrassingly little money from it – what’s more embarrassing is that he is living off of his wife, Arielle Silverstein, salary.
The more one examines Tony Ortega’s involvement as Editor-in-Chief of his former rag, the Village Voice, and how he defended their attempts to make money off of sex trafficking the sicker one gets.
We know have incontrovertible proof in the form of first-hand, corroborated accounts (as described in affidavits to the Court by victims and witnesses alike) that it involved child sex slaves. This disturbing fact is something which Ortega has continuously downplayed, in a desperate attempt to minimize it away.
Florida Abolitionist, Inc. is a non-profit organization in Orlando, Florida with a mission to combat and end human trafficking and other forms of modern day human slavery. It provides direct services to trafficked adults and children.
In a new lawsuit, Florida Abolitionist has filed against the men behind Backpage, it alleges Backpage knowingly participated in, and facilitated, sex trafficking. By doing so Backpage has increased the number of trafficked adults and children that Florida Abolitionist treats.
By the time the Feds shutdown Tony Ortega’s former employers’s Backpage.com, it was largest source of online human sex trafficking in the United States.This chilling fact, seemingly the one subject upon which Tony Ortega is conspicuously silent, is not disputed.
That Backpage conspirators generated $135 million in revenue, the vast majority of which was generated from illegal ads for sex on the Backpage,is not disputed.
The facts above are not merely coincidental.
Recently we reported on the history making case filed against Tony Ortega’s ex-employers earlier this year in which a young girl allegedly suffered multiple rapes through the sex trafficking made possible by James Larkin’s and Michael Lacey’s Backpage platform.
We can now reveal that while that particular case remains groundbreaking, it isn’t the only one filed against Backpage. Across the nation those making claims of victimization at the hands of Backpage (and Tony Ortega’s propaganda on behalf of his employers) and their sex trafficking syndicate are rising up to seek legal retribution.
You can see it even in his “reporting” at his blog – more and more guest pieces, fewer original posts. Getting more and more nattery and bitter about Scientology beliefs (at least, his understanding of them) without any hope of reporting any kind of substantive, reality-based stories.
Maybe he’s given up? Maybe he’s distracted by the legal fall out caused by the explosion of his pet project sex-trafficking setup over at Backpage?
Tony Ortega is perhaps the best example of hypocrisy and arrogance in modern “journalism”. Here is a man who for years falsely accused L Ron Hubbard and all Scientologists of endorsing and condoning pedophilia while he himself had made 90% of his paycheck off of Backpage sex traffic advertising, which led to horrific instances of child rape and murder.
If you look at Tony Ortega’s history (not the one he tries to present the outside world), his economic connections (he’s broke and unemployed), and his defense of the notorious BackPage.
Back before the scandal surrounding the demise of the Village Voice, before Tony Ortega’s bosses, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, in Phoenix began destroying all the evidence they could that might implicate them in the global sex scandal spiraling so out of control lengthy prison sentences seemed the only plausible outcome… Back before all that, a secret deal was made. A deal between Tony Ortega and his bosses.
Tony Ortega was promised that if he could keep his mouth shut, he’d be rewarded with an executive assignment as chief editor at a far “more lucrative and prestigious” posting than the “lowly” Voice.
Finding a cash cow and squeezing it for all it’s worth has been a running theme in the life of Tony Ortega. We’ve discussed how as Editor of The Village Voice, Ortega would, with outspoken regularity, defend his right to pimp out underage sex workers in order to keep generating the ad revenue the Voice so desperately needed as it began failing under his tenure. We’ve discussed how, now over half a decade out of work, Ortega has been sponging off his wife, Arielle Silverstein, and possibly her parent’s fortune to continue his one-man obsessive crusade against Scientology.
Once a champion of backpage.com’s “anything goes” policy towards underage sex trafficking, Tony Ortega seems curiously mum on the topic since federal authorities — including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, five other federal agencies, and four state agencies — raided the site permanently forcing its closure.
Could it be that Ortega is laying low to avoid suspicion? Does he fear indictment for the role he played in not only advocating in defense of but for helping to actively foster Backpage’s child prostitution agenda by providing it a platform during his tenure as its Editor-in-Chief?
Tony Ortega was bent out of shape when the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” campaign went viral. He felt compelled (or perhaps ordered by his masters at Backpage dot com) to squash it. Ortega’s futile propaganda to suppress the campaign only proved his support of sex trafficking.
Ortega made it very clear where he stood when he wrote:
Congress hauled in Craigslist on September 15, 2010. There, feminists, religious zealots, the well-intentioned, law enforcement, and social-service bureaucrats pilloried the online classified business for peddling “100,000 to 300,000” underage prostitutes annually.
This week a young woman who was sold for sex through ads placed on Backpage cleared a major legal hurdle when a Massachusetts Federal Court Judge allowed her civil suit despite the now familiar arguments from Backpage’s attorneys that it is not responsible for third party content (sex ads) placed on its website.
The suit involves a now 18-year-old woman who, as a minor, was sold for sex in Massachusetts and Florida through ads that were placed on Backpage.
Sometime ago NPR did a short story on Backpage and how they are defending “Online And Anonymous: New Challenges To Prosecuting Sex Trafficking”
McDougall, legal counsel for Backpage did most of the talking for the company. She said, “shutting down the adult classifieds on Backpage would do more harm than good because the content would simply move to less cooperative sites.
What kind of insane excuse was that? If we don’t help the pimps out, someone else will?
