Backpage Executives Sent to Prison While Attack Dog Tony Ortega Bites His Tongue
With the gavel finally down in U.S. v. Michael Lacey, the sordid saga of Backpage.com’s sex trafficking empire nears its conclusion.
Blogger Tony Ortega’s former boss and colleagues, Michael Lacey, Scott Spear and John “Jed” Brunst, were sentenced to prison and given fines for their part in the former sex trafficking outfit, Backpage.com; confederates Dan Hyer and Carl Ferrer are on the calendar for sentencing.
Lacey, co-founder of Backpage.com, was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $3 million. Spear, former executive vice president of Backpage, and Brunst, former chief financial officer, were each sentenced to 10 years in prison, with Brunst also ordered to pay a $50,000 fine.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) secured $215 million in seized assets from Backpage in the settlement of a civil suit. Those funds will be used to provide restitution and support services for victims of trafficking who were exploited through the platform.
“This settlement agreement marks a significant milestone in a criminal case involving the sexual exploitation and trafficking of countless women and children,” said United States Attorney Martin Estrada. “The nine-figure dollar amount forfeited in this case will allow for victims to recover and show that individuals who profit from such exploitation and trafficking risk both prison time and financial ruin.”
This is a milestone of justice for some, but not all. Tony Ortega, one of Lacey’s lackeys and defenders, has remained silent on the trial and incarceration of his former boss and colleagues.
Ortega started working for Lacey and the late Jim Larkin at their chain of alt-weeklies, becoming their self-described “merciless mercenary.” Backpage was their tent pole, propping up the rest of their Village Voice Media conglomerate with their dirty money. Ortega said about his bosses, “The people I work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com.”
Ortega was later made editor of The Village Voice and used the platform to shield Backpage from criticism. When Backpage faced scrutiny, Ortega became its attack dog. In 2011, Ortega published an article dismissing a campaign against child sex exploitation as “fatuous and silly,” and called a U.S. congressional hearing on the matter “absurdist theater.”
“The First Amendment was shouted down in the name of children,” Ortega spewed. “Having run off Craigslist, [the] reformers, the devout and the government-funded have turned their guns upon Village Voice Media…. It is true that Village Voice Media has a stake in this discussion. But the facts speak for themselves.”
But the facts were revealed by a 2017 congressional investigation that members of Backpage’s staff did engage in “sanitizing” its ads, including removing references like “Daddy’s Little Girl,” “fresh” and “Lolita” to mask prostitution and enable the abuses—minors as young as 12 pimped, other victims beaten and murdered. Ortega even referred to the child sex trafficking crisis as a “national fantasy.”
Ortega targeted Backpage’s critics, chiefly the Church of Scientology, writing 465 rabid diatribes about the Church in just two years. By 2012, his rantings drew too much attention to Backpage’s crimes and he was fired.
Though Ortega worked for Lacey and Larkin for many years, he has evaded criminal charges over his role in Backpage. To this day, he has never denounced Backpage, his former bosses or colleagues, nor has he apologized to the victims.
Instead, Tony Ortega remains the unrepentant propagandist of Backpage’s sex-trafficking empire—his silence an enduring insult to the victims whose plight he mocked and whose pain he profited from.
