Back when Tony Ortega, infamous Backpage defender of pimps, prostitution, and philandering, was exposed carrying on multiple affairs while married to different women, people were rightly disgusted by his behavior.
When it came to light he was ‘sexting’ (chatting explicitly online) with a close family friend we began to see he was no ordinary creep.
That Tony Ortega is a toxic individual who infects just about anything he touches no longer comes as a shock to most readers.
Backpage.com Bosses
We have spoken openly and frankly here on the blog about how Michael Lacey and James Larkin piggybacked off their then-failing newspaper Village Voice to launch an international sex trafficking syndicate with a global reach. They succeeded in their efforts far beyond what they’d imagined and today we are all the worse for it.
They knew, if exposed, Backpage would be nothing short of a nightmarish PR disaster. But it wasn’t until their hired philandering Editor-in-Chief, Tony Ortega, weaseled into the picture that a ‘pro-active’ game plan came into focus.
With the advent of the Internet, we now live in an age where so much of life is happening online. By the time the study of online sex trafficking began in a serious scholarly back in 2011, we were already seeing websites like Craigslist and, worst of them all, Backpage emerging as behemoths in online sex trade.
Although some of the ads on those sites were for what we might call “at-will” sex workers, researchers understood early that sex traffickers were flooding these platforms to advertise their (often under-age) victims against their will.
Tony Ortega and Leah Remini
If you ask Tony Ortega about child sex-trafficking in America, he’s likely to give you the same set of repeated lies he’s given so many media outlets before.
Consider this whopper Ortega offered up in a propaganda piece he wrote in defense of Backpage shortly before authorities stepped in to pull the plug on the entire criminal organization: “Underage prostitution… exists at a level that is nothing like what is being trumpeted [by] activists who want to put us out of business.
More than a year after his arrest on unrelated drug charges following a traffic stop by police man in Amarillo, TX was charged with human trafficking and has been sentenced to ten years in prison.
In March of 2018, Jirehn Lamarr Curtis Jr., 22, was stopped for a routine traffic violation. Though detained for an infraction of the driving laws, it was ‘traffic’ of a different sort which would ultimately lead to this Backpage pimp being put away for better than a decade.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is cracking down on the multi-billion dollar business of human trafficking in the U.S. The very same line of work Tony Ortega so proudly, if tone-deafly, defended as an ‘honest exchange between consenting people’. That characterization, like so much that comes out of the mouth of Tony Ortega, was a big fat lie.
Just two months ago, 1,700 people were arrested nationwide for committing child sex and exploitation crimes as part of a nationwide DOJ initiative called, “Operation Broken Heart”, the AP news service reports.
Terry Johnson III
For the briefest of moments Tony Ortega had the attention of the nation. It came in the midst of a flurry of allegations that his employers at Backpage knowingly turned a blind eye to the epidemic of child sex trafficking that was taking place on the online platform built for unscrupulous pimps to sell marginalized women for sex.
Tony Ortega used this spotlight, not to decry the injustice of coerced prostitution of the vulnerable but to attack the growing number justifiably outraged men, women, institutions and authorities who dared to call Backpage what it was — the largest illegal sex ring the world had ever seen, trading the lives of young women and underage girls to make a fast buck.
In the minds of many Backpage has become synonymous with sex trafficking. And yet, as we have attempted to demonstrate here on the blog, the crimes of this deplorable organization go far beyond selling children and vulnerable young women to online predators for sex.
This week, news emerged of a story involving a couple accused of murdering a man in Oklahoma.The couple had been lurking on Backpage-inspired prostitution sites in the weeks and even days leading up to his death.
Recently on the blog we took a long, hard look back at the timeline surrounding the rise and fall of Backpage.com. Today we’re turning back time to dive into a shocking example of exactly the sort of evil Backpage was up to during the years its own in-house propagandist, Tony Ortega, was so ferociously attacking any and all who would call for justice for the site’s countless victims.
Pictured bellow is Natalie, an innocent child with dreams of being a doctor before Backpage got its hooks into her — tearing her and her family apart.
In last week’s article we saw Tony Ortega up to his old tricks, attempting to spin the numerous critiques Backpage was receiving for its widespread sex trafficking as the work of “feminists, religious zealots, and bureaucrats”.
It’s clear in Tony Ortega’s desperate editorial that he knows he’s cornered. The only defense he knows how to make is to attempt to bully those he sees him for what he truly is. And so he flails about, firing off gross mischaracterizations (another Ortega hallmark!
In news breaking yesterday, it’s being reported that sentencing has been postponed until July 2020 for two Backpage.com managers convicted in cases that accuse the site of turning a blind eye to the rampant sex trafficking their online classified platform facilitated. Prosecutors intend to clearly demonstrate through key witnesses and damning internal company emails and chats that the top bosses at Backpage were aware that young women and girls as young as 8 were being sold for sex on their site.
We reported about the ugly story of another Backpage ‘monster’, Erin Graham from Madison Wisconsin. In our last article we highlighted the manipulation common among both the pimps who used the site and the crime bosses who ran it.
For example, Graham would regularly tell his girlfriend, Patience Moore, to act as a sort of mother figure for the victim, known only as ‘Cindi’ who testified he would beat Moore, and have her call them on the phone to beg them to come back.
What should be clear to anyone paying attention to the barrage of Backpage stories the media has been running with lately is that sex trafficking (of the sort Backpage’s diabolical co-creators Lacey and Larkin popularized, and shameless toady Tony Ortega defended publicly) is a heartless crime.
And indeed when a man from Madison WI was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison last Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge James Peterson called the accused to account for exactly that: the “heartless crime” of sex trafficking three women and attempting to traffic another.
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.
Today’s story about a Bronx man should come with a warning. If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time you probably understand by now that stories about Backpage have a way of constantly outdoing themselves. Each true account of its victims seems more depraved than the last.
Today’s story is no different. In what we hope to see as an increasingly popular trend in sentencing, the Bronx Backpage pimp could face life in prison after being convicted of sex trafficking girls as young as 8 years old and kidnapping, among other charges, according to federal prosecutors.
Backpage may be dead but like something out of a bad horror movie, it continues to terrorize from beyond the grave.
A man accused of running a prostitution ring out of two spas in Billings, Montana will admit one charge and see three others dropped as part of a plea deal.
Scott Donald Petrie will admit to a single count of transportation of a person with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
We’ve spent a good deal of time looking at the history of the government’s case against Backpage. It’s been something of tsunami of information as seen from from our 10,000 foot view of the sordid story of the rise and fall of Backpage. Today we dive back into the gritty details left in its horrific aftermath.
We’ve seen how the government plans on prosecuting its case against Larkin and Lacey. One of the key elements in the State’s argument against the two human traffickers will be the stories of the victims.
For all the forward movement we have seen in the government’s coming case against the Backpage it is important to remember that while the horrific duo Michael Lacey and James Larkin and their team of villainous propagandists like Tony Ortega have had their dark dreams of building a platform to cash in on the selling of underage girls and desperate women for sex thwarted, the battle is not yet over. But its lines are now clearly defined.
“ The people I work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com.” – Tony Ortega In a just world, the seizure of Backpage by the Feds in 2017 should have been the knock-out blow to online sex trafficking. Instead, the endless game of whack-a-mole continues as we await upcoming court hearings on the matter.
A month after Fosta-Sesta (the Backpage-inspired law designed to thwart online sex-traffickers) passed, ads for commercial sex over the Internet plummeted 82 percent, according to TellFinder, a data analytics tool originally built by the Defense Department.
Two weeks after Fosta-Sesta passed, Carl Ferrer appeared in a closed federal courtroom in Phoenix. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to facilitate prostitution and launder money, surrendered Backpage and its assets, and promised to cooperate with federal authorities.
A day later, the Feds nailed Michael Lacey and James Larkin in Phoenix, charging them and five other Backpagers under long-existing criminal statutes. As many legal experts pointed out, the move suggested that the government never needed Fosta-Sesta to prosecute the pair; the president had yet to even sign it into law by the time the hammer fell.
