Online industries have been in a lot of hot water lately: hate speech, financial scams, undermined elections and — thanks to sites like Backpage — sex trafficking.
Up to now tech companies have largely avoided legal consequences, owing to a landmark 1996 law which protects them from lawsuits.
Today that federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, finds itself facing a brand new threat: Annie McAdams, a personal-injury lawyer in Houston.
To put it simply, the aftermath of the world’s largest child-sex ring, Backpage, has been ugly. While some of the online pimps Tony Ortega once defended as ‘expressing their First Amendment rights’ have been brought to justice for illegally trafficking exploited women and underage girls, many remain at large.
The wake of Backpage’s demise left a lot of information for investigators, however. Much of this information has come in the form of the personal stories related to authorities by the surviving victims of Backpage.
The rise and fall of the Village Voice reads like a Greek tragedy. Having long been a stalwart of strong writing and interesting points of view, it went from being an American icon to a national disgrace in a matter of a few short weeks following Tony Ortega being installed as Editor-in-Chief. It was around this time that New Times Media became “Village Voice Media,” and the Sith lords at its helm, James Larkin and Michael Lacy, felt they had free reign to exploit the seamiest possible underbelly of American media: online prostitution, and, in particular, the underage sex trade market.
By this point there are few brazen enough to argue away the corrupting influence Backpage had on every element of society it touched — from the marginalized who were its victims to the online predators from all walks of life who took advantage of the despicable illegal sex trade platform. Tony Ortega is about the only one we could think of with that unique mix of arrogance, ignorance and lack of any discernible ethical system who might take up the challenge but as we have previously noted Tony Ortega remains strangely silent on the topic he once fought so hard to defend.
The spotlight we’ve been focusing on the final days of Tony Ortega at the Village Voice has brought a lot of shady business to light. With the benefit of 20⁄20 vision the reckless criminality of Backpage and the cavalcade of villains like Tony Ortega it gave rise to, are only too obvious today. But all of this got us wondering what people were saying about the events surrounding Backpage as they were unfolding.
Questions have been pouring into the blog recently about updates to the court case against the owners of Backpage, James Larkin and Michael Lacey, set for next spring. We here do our best to bring you all the late breaking news around the illegal sex trafficking scheme Tony Ortega long shilled for, knowing full well countless children were daily being victimized to advance Backpage’s bottom line.
Recently, those of us eager to see Ortega and his bosses brought to justice received a welcomed bit of good news when the trial judge in the Lacey and Larkin case ruled that the First Amendment does not shieldthe corrupt newspapermen behind the operation from prosecution for their former ownership of Backpage despite their furtive attempts to muddy the waters by unloading the toxic company as federal authorities began zeroing in their illicit conspiracy.
Look back over the regrettable career of Tony Ortega and you will find it is littered with trashy, fabricated stories aimed chiefly toward uneducated readers of free alt weekly newspapers and online gossip blogs.
Tony Ortega’s inventions have ranged from fake stories about fake people, to wackadoo claims designed to smear and defame. It’s all in a day’s work for Tony Ortega and his #PayAttentionToME journalism.
As an amateur blogger, Tony Ortega never really had a talent for writing articles himself.
“W_hat the hell is this guy doing running theVillage Voice?__”_That was a question on everyone’s lips the day Tony Ortega took over the role as Editor-in-Chief at the Village Voice. To see Tony Ortega stalking the same halls as Sidney Schanberg, Nat Hentoff, Robert Christegau, Jules Feiffer, and a lot of other eminent names in American letters, must have seemed at the time like a cruel joke.
Long gone were the Pulitzer, Guggenheim and the NEA prize winners who built The Village Voice name; by the time they wheeled Tony Ortega into his office the whole publication was on a countdown to implosion.
By the time James Larkin and Michael Lacey, the infamous child pimp runners of the Village Voice, finally kicked Tony Ortega to the curb it was already too late. The damage had been done and the bulk of their crimes were soon become a matter of public record.
One might be tempted to think that Tony Ortega dodged a bullet by getting fired from the Backpage’s illicit sex empire before the Feds shut it down, disappearing into the anonymity of an obscure suburban life.
It all happened back when Ortega found himself subpoenaed to testify after he attempted to smear a man named Bruce McMahan in a hit-piece story for the Village Voice entitled “Memo to Bruce McMahan”. In classic Tony Ortega style, the ‘story’ was replete with half-truths, manufactured stories and outright lies. It was this ham-fisted attempt at written defamation which found him once more embroiled in another ethics scandal, the kind which seem to follow him around like flies after a garbage truck.
“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. Those same numbers had already inspired terrified politicians, who let loose hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade to prohibitionists bent on ending the world’s oldest profession. The Craigslist beat-down was absurdist theater. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security hearing on “Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking” culminated with the humbled attorneys from Craigslist announcing that they would close down their adult classified business.
“The sad truth is that it’s happening in every city in America.”
The above quote comes from Kara Smith, a senior targeting analyst with DeliverFund, an organization dedicated to busting sex trafficking operations across the country and, as it happens, Backpage’s biggest nightmare.
The group, comprised of former CIA, NSA, special forces, and various police agencies, exists with the express purpose of collaborating with law enforcement to bring down bad-faith operators like Backpage.
Arielle Silverstein and Tony Ortega
With all the talk in the news recently about whistleblowers, we thought this might be a perfect time to remind our readers about how Arielle Silverstein, Tony Ortega’s most recent wife, took it upon herself to try and quash an internal inquiry headed by United Nation’s whistleblower Peter Gallo, who had instigated a formal investigation of her organization over the matter at the time.
It all began in 2015 with allegations that certain U.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase coined by the Roman poet Juvenal. It is literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?” but more commonly is used to mean “Who watches the ones we’ve put in charge of keeping watch?”
Today many in Milwaukee, Wisconsin are asking that same question as news broke this past weekend of a pair of women in that city, Samaria Williams and Kendra Bay, who are accused of child sex trafficking using Backpage.
The April 2018 press release that was issued by the Department of Justice regarding Backpage.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Backpage’s Co-founder and CEO, As Well As Several Backpage-Related Corporate Entities, Enter Guilty Pleas Earlier this week, the Justice Department announced the seizure of Backpage . com, the Internet’s leading forum for prostitution ads, including ads depicting the prostitution of children, and the unsealing of a 93-count federal indictment against seven Backpage principals.
Tony Ortega Backpage.com Apologist
As we observed during our look back at the seriously suspect history of Tony Ortega’s ‘career’ as a propagandist for hire for the syndicate behind the child sex trafficking website Backpage, the truth is far stranger than any fiction Ortega has ever invented.
During his tenure at the Village Voice, Ortega was the most public-facing of the small army of apologists Backpage put on the payroll in an attempt to spin the fact they were selling children and vulnerable women on the margins on society for profit.
In the article Tony Ortega: Betrayal we started by examining the role Tony Ortega played in helping tank the Village Voice. Though the paper was failing financially, it’s clear on its face that their decision to install Tony Ortega as Editor-In-Chief was the nail in its coffin.
Tony Ortega desperately wants people to believe he was only responsible for the editorial side of the business, that the part he played in the _Village Voice_’s ruin was wholly disconnected from its advertising woes.
Tony Ortega
It was early in the spring of 2007 when the Village Voice made a huge miscalculation. That was when they installed Tony Ortega as Editor-in-Chief of the alt-weekly rag. The entire paper would fold shortly thereafter — coming as a surprise to absolutely no one familiar with Tony Ortega’s work.
Of course the paper had been struggling financially well before Tony Ortega was put in charge, but few in the industry would dispute that anything could have hastened its demise faster.
Just when you think there are no new depths of depravity to plumb, Backpage proves once more there is no bar to low for it to sink.
In a story that reads like the sort of poorly written fiction one might find on Tony Ortega’s crackpot blog, it was reported over the weekend that a U.S. Border Patrol agent was arrested on an outstanding sex trafficking charge this past Friday.
This has been an interesting month for Tony Ortega-watchers. From the isolated confines of his homemade blog, what started out as a story of an angry old man furiously scribbling his hateful rhetoric as a hobby has morphed over the years into that of an angry unemployed man, furiously scribbling his hateful rhetoric as substitute for having a career at this point.
This month Tony has treated his readers to some blistering exposés.
