Time for a much needed update on the pending trial of the century, in which Backpage.com co-founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin will finally be called to account for the scores of sex trafficking crimes their platform made possible for so many years. The federal court trial is set for August 17 in Phoenix, Arizona.
The notorious masterminds behind Tony Ortega’s number one choice for underage sex slavery, Backpage.com, will be facing charges they knowingly published the ads and then laundered money from them.
On the subject of Backpage tragedies, a heartbreaking story came across our desks this morning. This one was a bit of a departure for us as it deals with the grief and chaos inflicted on the families of those who were trafficked by Backpage.
This is the story of Jennifer Holleman, whose daughter was sold for sex by the Backpage crime family. She has spent more than four years speaking out against human trafficking.
Latesha Clay
We’ve gotten a lot of questions in the wake of a story we recently ran about Latesha Clay, the 15-year-old girl recently sentenced to a maximum of 20 years for getting caught up in the Backpage scam Tony Ortega for so long championed in his editorial pages.
This was yet another in the growing list of tragic Backpage stories, only this time the young girl in question was both manipulated anad manipulating others.
We’ve gotten a lot of questions about Tony Ortega’s unquestioned obsession with Scientology over the past few months. The focus of the majority of these questions tend to revolve around a now-familiar theme: if Tony Ortega’s bigotry and hatred are what drive him how can any of us believe a word he says? Our sentiments exactly.
Tony Ortega’s obsession with Scientology makes him an unreliable source at best, and a willful propagandist hell-bent on smearing, slandering and libeling anyone who he disagrees with at worst.
Tony Ortega, whose litany of ‘crimes by association’ we’ve been detailing here on the blog at some length, may not have dreamt up the Backpage sex trafficking schemebut without doubt he bears a measure of responsibility for the destruction left in its wake. He was, after all, the propagandist of not behind the coordinated attempt to blind the public to the myriad of crimes Backpage’s “Adult Section” gave rise to.
Tony Ortega
During a recent unhinged screed Tony Ortega, famous for his tone-deaf lack of self-awareness, referred to a woman in question as an a ‘apologist for Scientology’.
That’s just how laughably hypocritical Tony Ortega’s assessment is given that he is on the record in multiple articles and interviews defending the sex-trafficking scam Backpage put in place to earn hundreds of millions from the countless young women and underage girls they victimized during their reign of terror.
We’ve been talking about the malicious practice of grooming, or preparing innocent victims for exploitation by unscrupulous operators, like Tony Ortega’s former bosses over at the notorious Backpage sex trafficking site.
We mentioned yesterday about an interesting case of a woman in Texas who survived her Backpage ordeal and is now taking the fight to the platforms that allowed, through their willful inaction and callous indifference, for the trafficking of countless women and children on their watch.
By any reasonable accounting this has been a very bad year for James Larkin and Michael Lacey, the former capi di tutti i capi of the Backpage family — the largest online advertiser child sex trafficking the world had ever seen.
Despite the perfectly transparent attempts by the likes of Tony Ortega to deflect attention from their sordid enterprise and attack critics who dared to raise their voices in protest we have seen how, if anything, the furor has only increased as Backpage’s day in court draws closer.
Arielle Silverstein and Tony Ortega
When James Larkin and Michael Lacey, the pimp runners of the Village Voice Media, finally shoved their prostitution propagandist-in-chief Tony Ortega over the side of their sinking garbage barge in the most dishonorable discharge that rag of paper had ever seen, the cheers of a grateful nation were almost deafening. We, along with many literate Americans, believed we had seen the last him. After all, this was Tony Ortega’s umpteenth unceremonious firing.
It wasn’t that long ago that Backpage.com was considered something akin to the Walmart or Amazon of the sex industry, where people could find thousands of sex services listed on the classified ad website.
Previously we’ve told the story of how the site rocketed to popularity in 2010, around the time when Craigslist shut down its adult services section. When that happened, Backpage became the go-to for pervy creeps everywhere. (Any wonder a specimen like Tony Ortega would become the site’s most outspoken pitchman?
Recently here at the blog we took a deep dive into the timeline of the government’s case against Backpage and all the sordid twists and turns its heartless founders, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, attempted in order to throw authorities off their trail.
Today a reader of this blog alerted to us a ‘response’ of sorts by Backpage’s chief propagandist, the ever-slippery Tony “Backpage Pimp” Ortega. What is fascinating about this editorial supplement, written by Ortega himself in his capacity as Village Voice Editor-At-Large shortly before he was fired, is the sheer number of lies and untruths he manages to pack into his skewed, contemporaneous account of events.
