Tony Ortega Backpage Apologist
Yesterday we suggested that Tony Ortega, and his fellow band of henchmen, are long overdue to receive comeuppance for their misdeeds for aiding and abetting Backpage during the horrific run of its illicit human sex trafficking crime spree.
We reported to you how a federal grand jury issued yet another judgement against one of the same pimps Tony Ortega told us we were all “hysterically worrying’ worrying over.
If it is own thing we all know about the slimy executives of the Backpage sex trafficking syndicate, it is this: they will use every dirty, underhanded trick in the book to slither off the hook.
Maybe it’s a trick they learned from their pitchman, Tony Ortega. One thing is certain, however, this past week they were up to their old tricks again.
We all know the former Backpage executives Michael Lacey and James Larkin, together with their squad of already-indicted unethical employees stand accused of facilitating prostitution.
Today we return to the in-depth look we’ve been taking a look at a telling editorial published by CNN in the early days of Backpage, some six years before the sex trafficking platform’s federally-enforced shutdown.
We say ‘telling’ because it is simply remarkable to look back at contemporary reporting at the time Backpage began its rise and see that from the beginning, Tony Ortega’s shady work to help obscure Backpage’s true objective: to profit from the victimization of underage children by selling them to be sexually exploited by perverts online.
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.
It’s no secret Michael Lacey and James Larkin built on the backs of (let’s be generous here) ‘questionable’ motives and a couple of key legal loopholes.
With Section 230 as their weapon, they pushed their way into the court system. At first it seemed the side of law and decency was losing after the slimy Backpage duo won an early series of civil suits, successfully challenging anti-Backpage laws in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Washington State.
“They love to inflate the numbers by talking about children ‘at risk’ of exploitation.”
That was how Backpage boss Michael Lacey characterized the work of the experts at the Crimes Against Children Research Center on the subject of child sex trafficking. In that statement, Lacey highlights his callous indifference to suffering victims and blinding concern for his own self-interest. If there were any question about Larkin and Lacey’s desire to help authorities put out the fire Backpage started, let this quote serve as a reminder to their true state of mind on the subject.
It’s that time again! Time for your Backpage Sex Peddling trial update, brought to you by Tony Ortega and his criminally indicted bosses.
This week, we heard the first words Backpage.com co-founder and Tony Ortega’s former boss, Michael Lacey, offered about allegations he faces for running a prostitution ring and shady money laundering operation.
“Nonsense!” was all he said before his attorney added that his client had no further comment. Nonsense, as if to imply that all the lives he and the people who worked for him ruined and left discarded behind them were nothing but a joke to him.
Over the past decade or more, marketing for prostitution began to migrate to the Internet, as website operators have sought to enable buyers and sellers of sex to maintain their anonymity and minimize the risk of detection by law enforcement.
Named for the infamous “Back Page” of the Village Voice newspaper, Backpage.com became the primary destination for buying and selling illegal commercial sex online, accounting for 80 percent or more of all revenue from online commercial sex advertising in the United States.
This week a young woman who was sold for sex through ads placed on Backpage cleared a major legal hurdle when a Massachusetts Federal Court Judge allowed her civil suit despite the now familiar arguments from Backpage’s attorneys that it is not responsible for third party content (sex ads) placed on its website.
The suit involves a now 18-year-old woman who, as a minor, was sold for sex in Massachusetts and Florida through ads that were placed on Backpage.
When Tony Ortega “lost” his job as editor of the Village Voice in September 2012, it was more than a humiliating demotion. It was an unceremonious descent into obscurity, an involuntary downsizing to a laptop in a New York apartment, spinning stories and strangling truth on a little-read and virtually incomprehensible weblog.
Before being booted from the Village Voice, besides being known (and widely ridiculed within and without his own industry) for his obsession with writing biased and misleading stories about the Church of Scientology, Ortega was notorious as the poster boy for sex-trafficking ads.
