This past week we’ve been examining Tony Ortega’s response to the numerous instances of protest aimed at him for his participation in the Backpage child sex trafficking scheme he so ardently defended while on their payroll.
We’ve seen how angry protestors fed up with Ortega’s two-faced ‘human-trafficking-as-First-Amendment-right’ defense of Backpage flocked to his offices to make their opposition to him felt in numbers too great to ignore.
We’ve seen how students from Tony Ortega’s own college raised their voices in defiance of his dogged insistence on protecting online perverts from anti-sex slavery advocates campaigning against the Backpage’s business model which commodified the sexual abuse of minors.
The fight over whether or not Backpage dot com (formerly part of Village Voice Media) is responsible for the content of sex ads placed on its site by pimps and prostitutes and whether it is complicit in sex trafficking is over.
In a stunning reversal, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer admitted that, “the vast majority of these [Backpage] advertisements are, in fact, advertisements for prostitution services.”
According to Ferrer he was involved in a conspiracy “to create ‘moderation’ processes through which Backpage would remove terms and pictures that were particularly indicative of prostitution and then publish a revised version of the ad.
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.
