In the world of ligation there are no shortage of dirty tricks for those unscrupulous enough to employ them. This seems to be the case especially when those charged with a crime understand how weak their legal defense is and, more importantly, just how guilty they are of the charges before them. This certainly seems to be the case in the upcoming Backpage trial, about which we have discussed much over the past few months.
We began a fact-checking investigation into the contemporary reporting surrounding the Backpage take down and comparing it to the biased, skewed, and highly propagandistic myths Tony Ortega had long been publishing about the notorious child sex trafficking platform. To put it mildly, the facts of the Backpage case do not square with the perverse hagiography Tony Ortega was trying his damnedest to sell his readers in the pages of the Village Voice tabloid.
In Fact Checking Part I we began an exploration into exposing Tony Ortega’s many lies on the subject of the Backpage underage sex trafficking debacle with a frank and honest discussion of the need for vigilant fact checking.
While the vital necessity of verifying ‘truth claims’ made by real journalists remains an important concern, it is never more crucial than when it comes to unethical tabloid journalists like Tony Ortega.
Lots of ink has been spilled the past couple of days in the fallout of the recent presidential debate. No small portion of the discussion has centered around of the need for fact checkers to verify information being broadcast to public by those in positions of assumed authority.
Indeed, being that ‘fact-checking’ is something we take very seriously here at the blog, this caused us to prick up our ears.
As we come to a close in this close-up examination of the official code of ethical conduct for journalists, we note (unsurprisingly!) that so-called ‘tabloid journalists’ like Tony Ortega have had a demonstrably poor showing when brought face-to-face with these professional standards.
Today we reach the fourth and final of the major ethical principles as articulated by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) on the journalistic imperative to be accountable and transparent in all reporting.
Tony Ortega
Whenever we speak about the scourge of tabloid journalism, without fail reasonable and rational people inevitably raise the question, “Who spends their time reading tabloid garbage?” We, however, would like to pose our own question: How can dishonest, self-described tabloid “journalists” live with themselves?
As we’ve seen again and again, the answer is that tabloid hacks aren’t looking for the truth, they are only interested in a concocting a sleazy “story” that will attract eyeballs.
Passed in 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is a federal law designed to combat organized crime in the United States. It allows prosecution and civil penalties for racketeering activity performed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. Simply put, racketeering means engaging in an illegal scheme involving one or more of 35 offenses, including kidnapping, murder, bribery, arson and extortion.
G. Robert Blakey, a federal criminal law professor at Notre Dame University who helped draft racketeering laws across the nation, describes it this way:
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, odds are you’ve heard us refer to Tony Ortega as a hypocrite a few times. Indeed, when it comes to making a case against Ortega on these charges we’re spoiled for choice given the width and breadth of his double-dealing underhandedness.
For example, we’ve made much of the sham ‘defense’ Tony Ortega offered up in the hopes of swaying public sympathies to the Backpage sex trafficking profiteers he was infamously paid to shill for.
It seems strange now to think there was ever a time when Tony Ortega wasn’t cowardly hiding in his basement, refusing to breathe a word about his love for Backpage. Only a few short years ago, you practically couldn’t get him to shut up on the subject.
Tony Ortega would often use words like “freedom”, “smart” and “brave” to laud the Backpage business empire he was once employed by.
These days when Backpage gets mentioned the words you hear are more likely to be, “slavery”, “sex trafficking” and “underage”.
Backpage Bosses
Ever since we ran our story on Kamala Harris, Twitter has been going wild retelling the sordid history of Backpage; specifically, how the notorious human trafficking and solicitation site was a target of Kamala Harris’s back when she was the attorney general of California.
So far we haven’t seen too much in the way of Tony Ortega’s name popping for work he did to advance Backpage’s pro-trafficking stance, but in revisiting the history of Backpage Twitter users are getting a much-needed education on the topic.
Tony Ortega
Reporting on hacks like Tony Ortega can almost become something of an abstraction after a while. By this point, we are all well aware of what an arrogant, self-serving fabulist Tony Ortega is as ‘journalist’. Not being confronted daily by the actual words and ideas as expressed in Ortega’s unhinged blog screeds, however, one can easily lose sense of exactly how predictable his writing style is.
Today we’d thought we’d go back to the archives to remind us all of the caliber of unprofessionalism we are talking about when we discuss the so-called career of Tony Ortega.
Barry Schiff
If it’s one thing we believe in here at the blog, it’s that tougher sentencing for those who coerced, threatened or tricked young women and underage girls into participating in the Backpage sex trafficking ring should be the rule, rather than the exception.
Maybe that’s why this story we read over the weekend restored a measure of hope to us that Backpage pimps, and their editorializing apologists like Tony Ortega, are increasingly finding judges taking a zero tolerance approach when it comes to Backpage’s illegal sex trade.
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.
