Carl Ferrer, Michael Lacey and James Larkin
By 2008, if not earlier, Michal Lacey and James Larkin were aware that the overwhelming majority of the website’s “adult” ads involved prostitution. Nevertheless, they made a financial decision to continue displaying those ads.
The Backpage and its underlings also sought to sanitize the ads by editing them — that is, by removing terms and pictures that were particularly indicative of prostitution and then publishing a revised version of the ad.
In our last post we saw how the origins of the Backpage scheme were born out of the perceived threat to Village Voice Media’s business model made by Craigslist, which had just launched a ‘free classified ads’ section to their website. In response to this potential economic threat, Michael Lacey, James Larkin and Carl Ferrer created the entity known as Backpage
In 2010, however, Craiglist chose to shut down its “adult” section due to the prevalence of ads for prostitution and other illegal services.
Tony Ortega at the New Times
Michael Lacey and James Larkin are the founders of the Phoenix New Times, an alternative newspaper based in Arizona. It was here they came to know Tony Ortega, the man who was to become their public mouthpiece, corporate lapdog, and most bullish defender of their self described “right” to sell women and underage girls for sex via their online platform.
But how did these two cyber pimps come to control Backpage, the notorious online brothel at the center of the largest human trafficking bust ever made by authorities?
Tony Ortega
Last week a copy of the recently unsealed Grand Jury indictment found its way to our desks here at the blog. As we make our way through the document this week, we will be sharing with our readers a number of the more spectacular highlights which, as we’ve seen so far, are making a very damning case against Backpage.
So far we seen how many of the ads published on Backpage depicted children who were victims of sex trafficking.
This past week, for the first time in a public foru, we began to unpack and analyze the text of the official Grand Jury indictment of Backpage. We started by looking at the key players named in the complaint. Today, we turn our attention to the specific charges levied against these Backpage defendants.
The charging document explains in detail how Lacey, Larkin et al. utilized a variety of strategies to make it appear that the prostitution ads appearing on Backpage are actually ads for “escort” services, “adult” companionship, dating, or other lawful activities.
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.
In our last post we reported to you about recent news out of San Diego of yet another Backpage pimp standing trial for the part he played in trafficking underage children via the online sex slavery platform devised and created by Tony Ortega’s former bosses.
Though it’s been nearly four years since the crimes committed by Jonathan Madison — the pimp at the heart of our last post — justice has finally caught up to him.
Tony Ortega
As the court date set to decide the fates of Tony Ortega’s Backpage bosses draws closer, Backpage-related sex trafficking cases continue to pile up.
With the benefit of hindsight it is now beyond all doubt to right minded people that Tony Ortega was outright lying as he worked to downplay the severity of the human trafficking problem in America and obscure the roll his employers played in profiting from it.
Tony Ortega
During its time in operation, there were few who would argue Backpage was anything other than a den of rampant criminality and lawlessness on a scale the country had never seen before. Indeed, among its more infamous crimes were well documented histories of sex slavery, child trafficking, and murder — much of which we have examined at here on the blog.
By virtue of Backpage’s practically non-existent screening process — the same one Tony Ortega assured us was made up of “hundreds of staff” dedicated to keeping juveniles off the site — criminal behavior like this was made possible.
Tony Ortega
We’ve written a lot here on the blog about the article Tony Ortega published in the Village Voice attempting to smear New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof after his in-depth exposé the Backpage sex trafficking syndicate. Like many media watchers we don’t hold a very high opinion of Tony Ortega’s so-called ‘reporting’ and we hold an even lower opinion of his ethical standards.
But sometimes the most damning indictments don’t come from outside observers, they come from your own readers.
We’ve been reporting over the past few days on the blistering condemnation Tony Ortega was hit by (from his own readers!) following his rabid, specious, and poorly articulated attack on New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof.
Operating from his position as Editor-At-Large for the Village Voice, Tony was responsible for making the public defense of Backpage in the midst of the scandal surrounding their now-infamous human sex trafficking ring. In this capacity, it was Ortega’s role to amplify the noise surrounding the issue.
Click to enlarge
In our last installment we began to make the case that Tony Ortega’s role as Editor-At-Large at the Village Voice made him the final word on what was published in that paper concerning the defense of Backpage. As we concluded then, the words he published he bears responsibility for, whether he was the original author or not.
It seems that Tony Ortega’s readership agreed with us, as was evidenced by the outrage in the form of angry letters addressed to Ortega after he had the gall to publish an unhinged attack on Nicholas Kristof.
Just when you think the seemingly endless legacy of filth Backpage has produced over the years couldn’t possibly get any more grotesque, a story like today’s pops up in the headlines.
Tony Ortega
As with so many stories that seem to circle the spectacularly corrupt orbit of Tony Ortega, this one started with a with an unscrupulous operator who used his position to victimize others much in the way Tony, ever the opportunistic hustler, built his so-called career — using and abusing others for his own gain.
The abundance of evidence pointing toward Backpage as a hotbed for criminality ranging from sexual child abuse to murder is at this point — now almost 3 years since federal authorities raided and shuttered the organization —beyond contradiction.
Tony Ortega
Not that you’d ever hear such an admission from Tony Ortega, who operated largely in secret at the behest of the highest echelons of Backpage boardroom executives to push the fraudulent idea that the corporation was doing all it could to keep its platform free from such crime.
Tony Ortega
There are not many who would disagree with the notion that Tony Ortega has changed journalism for the worse. Of course he was not the first tabloid hack to try and cash in on selling lies for personal profit and a perceived measure of ‘clout’ from his fellow conspiracy theorists in the blogosphere, but he was among the more brazen failures in his endeavors.
Ortega’s former employers at Backpage, too, changed the world for the worse.
Tony Ortega
In recent posts we’ve been examining how Backpage blatantly abused the system set in place by federal laws regarding human trafficking broadly and the victimization of children in related online sex trafficking more specifically. And throughout it all we’ve been witness to Tony Ortega’s indifference to so much human suffering.
Lost in the shuffle of this continuing conversation, however, are the voices of brave elected officials who stood up to would-be bullies like Tony Ortega.
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.
As we here at the blog were first to anticipate earlier this week, the initial shockwaves surrounding the recent lawsuit filed against Twitter for not removing sexually explicit content depicting a minor are suddenly beginning to be felt within the legal world.
Call it the lesson no one learned from Backpage, namely: that corporate media companies — no matter who they are — must be held accountable for illicit content posted on their platforms.
Tony Ortega
More information following our reporting on the developing bombshell Twitter child sex trafficking case we first told our readers about yesterday.
Indeed, the more we learn about the particulars of this case the clearer and more alarming we see the criminal pattern between the exploitation of minors on the Twitter platform and what was done to victimize the underage youth during Tony Ortega’s deceitful tenure as craven outspoken mouthpiece for the corporate pimps of Backpage.
