Mike Rinder and Tony Ortega
The more you look at Tony Ortega’s actual “professional” history, his sketchy economic connections, and his highly suspicious shilling on behalf of the notorious Backpage sex ring, the more difficult it becomes to wrap your head around why Tony Ortega is not yet behind bars.
Ortega’s fellow tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist Mike Rinder, has been known to casually dismiss Ortega’s relationship to Backpage by offering a list of excuses as long as your arm, usually filled with such gems as ‘Tony was a simple newspaper editor for the Village Voice,’ and ‘he had nothing whatsoever to do with the advertising side,’ or our favorite — ‘Tony knew next to nothing!
Christopher Dupuy
Yesterday we examined the latest Backpage case out of Texas in which victims, unbeknownst to themselves, found their pictures and private information in sex ads on Backpage.
We saw last time how one of the women, Amy, was in disbelief when she was alerted to the advertisement on the Backpage website.
Amy quickly changed her phone number and then contacted the police. When she was asked to identify a possible suspect, the only person who came to mind was the appellant in the case, Christopher Dupuy.
It’s been a while since we’ve received any update on the numerous Backpage sex trafficking cases working their way through the courts at the moment but all that ended when an official opinion filed by the State of Texas crossed our desks recently. This case is particularly terrifying as it shows the true nature of the business Tony Ortega worked to prop up with his phony “we stand on our First Amendment Rights” schtick.
In years since Tony Ortega began first harassing Scientologists, at times using underhanded and illegal means to do so, he has been very tight lipped about exactly how often he ignores state and federal laws in his pursuit of his blatantly false stories.
Since the Backpage scandal started to unravel, and the level of lawlessness of his co-worker co-conspirators began to be revealed to the public, Tony Ortega has never once exposed any act that would put his child-sex selling bosses (James Larkin and Michael Lacey) into criminal jeopardy.
Back in the day, Tony Ortega was nothing but a small time, no name tabloid writer. In countless ways, very little has changed over the intervening years. Especially as far as name recognition goes. The only difference is he now calls himself “unemployed blogger on the fringes of the internet.”
Still, during his time as a small-time hack writer Tony Ortega took a lot of actions which, to this day, he has never really talked about.
Arielle Silverstein
For years, Arielle Silverstein’s United Nations salary has supported not only the vengeful campaigns of vilification we’ve been examining on this blog but those of her husband, the chronically unemployed blogger, Tony Ortega. And just like his other half, readers of this blog know Tony Ortega is driven by bigotry and hate.
While working at The Village Voice, Ortega served as a principal apologist of the sex trafficking website Backpage.
Tony Ortega is a fake news monger who, under no circumstances should be trusted. The same goes for the shady individuals he chooses to associate with. Here on the blog we’ve discussed a number of Tony Ortega’s known accomplices, all whom have demonstrated themselves time and again to be at best unreliable and unethical, at worst dangerously comprised.
It’s with that in mind that we turn our attention this week once more to Tony Ortega’s “ethically compromised” wife, Arielle Irena Silverstein.
Sometimes in the mad onrush of history we default into a sort of complacent read of events. Much of the shock of ‘breaking news’ at the time is lost on us as years pass and the calamitous impact of ‘events as they happen’ is dulled. This week we’re going to try something a little different here at the blog. We’re going to be jumping back in time as it were, to examine the contemporaneous reporting surrounding Tony Ortega and the part he played for the Backpage organization.
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.
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.
We informed our readers about the vile practice of ‘grooming’, which we defined as the process of developed dependence in order to lead someone into sex trafficking.
We argued that the sex pimping sites like Backpage, and even far less popular sites like Tony Ortega’s regrettable basement blog, incorporate a lot of these same tactics in order to generate a learned helplessness that makes them easy targets for pimps, online predators, and other Internet lowlifes.
Today we’d thought we might take a page from Tony Ortega’s playbook and offer up some real examples of things he might want to consider apologizing for before hyperventilating over his own invented outrage. Here are just a few:
Arielle Silverstein aka Bozuri.
Did Arielle Silverstein ever apologized to the members of the religions she viciously attacked while working for for United Nations?
Faking a story about rapes then when caught, doubling down on the lie.
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.
Following our recent post exposing Tony Ortega’s servile defense of Backpage we’ve been getting all kinds of questions about public outrage at the time. As always here at the blog, we’re here to help.
As one angry reader of the Village Voice, Strider01, observed in the wake of Tony Ortega’s truly idiotic ‘arguments’:
That [the Village Voice] thinks its readers will overlook this implies a disrespect for the intelligence of any one who can see how much Village Voice Media has to benefit (in term of its bottom line!
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.
