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.
We’ve written at length about the measure of responsibility Tony Ortega shares for his role in helping to legitimate the black market sex trade Backpage engaged in. In fact, questions about the level of Tony Ortega’s involvement in the Backpage child sex trafficking ring are the ones we most regularly get asked here at the blog.
We would point out, of course, there are no shortage of other scandals Tony Ortega has been related to in one form or another over the years.
It’s no secret Tony Ortega was a staunch defender of the special privileges and freedoms of billion dollar corporations back when he was on the Backpage payroll. Freedoms like that of selling children to predators online for a cut of the profit were, after all, the sole reason Backpage was founded in the first place.
We’ve seen how Tony Ortega attempted to sell this arrangement to the public by insisting the platform existed in order to allow ‘two consenting adults to find each other.
The pandemic of social ills Tony Ortega’s good friends over at Backpage unleashed on the nation have been an ongoing horror story. The trail of broken lives and destroyed families Backpage left in its wake remain the most enduring legacy of what Tony Ortega wanted us all to believe was nothing more than the last great bastion of First Amendment freedoms.
It was, as so much else that comes from the mouth of Tony Ortega, a lie.
Few people would ever mistake Tony Ortega for Heidi Fleiss, the so-called Hollywood Madam whose upscale prostitution ring based in Los Angeles, California ensnared a number of high profile personalities.
While Tony Ortega did work to promote Backpage, at times with the rabid ferocity of a dyspeptic junkyard dog, many of those who became mixed up in the Backpage scheme to sell underage girls and marginalized women for profit were nameless, faceless pimps living in the shadows of society.
Last week we reported to you some heartening news out of the Washington, D.C., area regarding the successful prosecution of the last two pimps in what had been one of the lingering sex trafficking rings of the infamous Backpage era.
Friday, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced on its blog that, collectively, the six defendants in this Backpage scheme were sentenced on Tuesday in the Eastern District of Virginia to a combined 81 years in prison for their respective roles in the sex trafficking of both minor and adult victims across Northern Virginia and Maryland.
Tony Ortega
With court cases being delayed and investigations temporarily stayed amid the global pandemic, encouraging updates about Backpage prosecutions have been few and far between.
Until now.
On Tuesday July 28th, two men who pleaded guilty to trafficking an underage girl as part of a prostitution ring that operated in the Washington, D.C., area were sentenced to federal prison.
Elvis Pichardo Hernandez was sentenced to 13 years behind bars. Jose David Reyes-Gonzalez was sentenced to 14 years.
Normally when we think of Tony Ortega phrases like ‘Backpage.com apologist’, or ‘child sex trafficking enabler’, or ‘fake journalist’ spring to mind. But the list of wrongs Tony Ortega has perpetrated and/or promoted doesn’t end there.
One has only to look at the myriad cases stemming from the Backpage debacle to see that Tony Ortega has more guilt to bear than helping to legitimize the selling of minors and young women for sex with online perverts.
As we’ve been hearing first hand about the true toll exacted upon the victims of Tony Ortega’s insidious Backpage lies, we’ve found the cost is measured in long-lingering pain and and the enduring suffering of whole families and entire communities.
Tony Ortega tried hard to sway public sentiment in favor of his sex trafficking pals at Backpage and by so doing showed the true nature of his deeply immoral character. He wanted to see Backpage continue to make money hand over fist, and he didn’t care how many lives would be ruined in the process.
When we last left the heart breaking saga of the mother whose daughter was coerced into the dark and dangerous world of Backpage and its illicit sex trafficking trade we learned that after days of no communication the young girl finally returned home, telling her mother very little.
The mother, who has asked to remain anonymous, continues her story:
“I was told bits and pieces of her experience, that she had met a female via Facebook and this friend invited to her a party in the city and being 16, I suppose my daughter felt it was going to be cool to hang out with an older friend and go to a party in the city.
“ The phone rang and I jumped up to grab it, thinking it was the police. It was my daughter… Right away I began asking where are you? She responded by saying sorry for everything, mom.
… She was crying, I knew something was not right and became frightened. I told her tell me where you are, or I am calling the cops.
Her response was one I will never forget: she told me it’s going to be too late, I will likely be dead by then and nobody will find me.
Here at the blog we began our examination into the damaging lies Tony Ortega for so long spewed in order to protect and serve his Backpage masters, and just how damaging his intentional misrepresentation of the facts were in the lives of one family in particular.
Previously, in this harrowing story out of Canada we met a mother and her 16-year-old daughter who were about to discover that Backpage was anything but the bastion of “Freedom” Tony Ortega tried so badly to sell it as.
We’ve exposed the extent to which Tony Ortega was willing to go as former Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice in providing cover for his pimp pals at Backpage. We’ve seen Tony Ortega lie, misdirect, and purposefully muddy the waters in order to confuse the public about the Backpage human trafficking empire which victimized countless young women and underage girls.
For a while Tony Ortega’s dog and pony show seemed to be working.
Barely a week had passed since Tony Ortega wrote his poison pen piece attacking the validity of national child sex trafficking statistics, when Ortega lashed out again. This time the object of his unhinged rage was a human target.
Tony Ortega was going to use the opportunity to make his unconscionable defense of Backpage personal. And he didn’t care who he had to throw under the bus to do it.
In a year which has already seen its share of unprecedented twists, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Brnovich, has announced a new delay of what some have been calling the criminal case of the century — the trial of Michael Lacey and James Larkin.
Our readers will remember these two as the former pimp executives who oversaw a chain of alt weekly rags which included Phoenix New Times and the Village Voice of New York.
Tony Ortega had sold his soul to Backpage and its illegal human trafficking trade. The series of articles he had been writing in the summer of 2011, attacking men and women brave enough to stand up against the Village Voice Media had all but confirmed it.
In our last article we saw how Tony Ortega had drawn a line in the sand, aligning himself with the flesh peddlers and the human slavers against the forces of freedom and justice.
When we last looked in on Backpage, ads for underage “escorts” and “ exotic body-rubs” were providing millions in monthly profit for Village Voice Media, the company signing Tony Ortega’s paychecks.
Perhaps this is why Tony and his bosses were so desperate to change what was quickly becoming the national topic of conversation — the alarming fact that human sex trafficking was being supported by private corporations in the United States.
When last we saw the Village Voice, they had just received a letter of complaint signed by three dozen religious leaders making an urgent impassioned call for an end to Backpage.
This was, of course, merely the tip of an already mammoth iceberg.
More than fifty Attorneys General had sent Village Voice Media a similar letter some months earlier, demanding that Backpage demonstrate exactly how and to what extent it was working to prevent children from being bought and sold on its online marketplace, the way Tony Ortega had falsely declared it did.
This past week we’ve been examining Tony Ortega’s response to the numerous instances of protest aimed at him for his participation in the Backpage child sex trafficking scheme he so ardently defended while on their payroll.
We’ve seen how angry protestors fed up with Ortega’s two-faced ‘human-trafficking-as-First-Amendment-right’ defense of Backpage flocked to his offices to make their opposition to him felt in numbers too great to ignore.
We’ve seen how students from Tony Ortega’s own college raised their voices in defiance of his dogged insistence on protecting online perverts from anti-sex slavery advocates campaigning against the Backpage’s business model which commodified the sexual abuse of minors.
Tony Ortega has been trying to separate himself from The Village Voice and its online whorehouse money-maker Backpage ever since he was unceremoniously fired and sent packing.
A numberof Village Voice insiders we’ve talked to from that time have echoed what we’d been hearing, namely that Tony Ortega was being paid hush money to walk away and never breathe a word of his involvement with the Backpage syndicate.
While Tony Ortega has kept his fat mouth shut about his intimate arrangement with the Backpage bosses in recent years, his own contemporaneous words while acting as the operation’s public mouthpiece paint an explicit picture.
