With Tony Ortega’s Lie Exposed, Backpage’s Dangerous Shell Game Continued

Tony Ortega

Thus far in our exploration of the official court documents surrounding the pending Backpage human sex trafficking trial we have found nothing to support to false pretense made by Tony Ortega and his fellow conspirators on the Backpage payroll that knew nothing about what was going on.

On the contrary, it seems the exact opposite is true.

In fact, the charging document itself attests to the fact that Dan Hyer, Anderw PADILLA, and other Backpage defendants periodically received a “Google alert” when articles discussing Backpage appeared in the news. Many of the news articles identified in these alerts discuss instances in which prostitutes who had been advertised on Backpage were kidnapped, raped, or murdered.

As we have perviously reported, on January 2017, after conducting a lengthy investigation, the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations (“Subcommittee”) issued a 50-page report entitled “ Backpage.com’s Knowing Facilitation of Online Sex Trafficking.“

This report concluded, among other things, that virtually all of Backpage’s “adult” ads are actually solicitations for illegal prostitution services. The report states as much plainly,  saying:

“Backpage has maintained a practice of altering ads before publication by deleting words, phrases, and images indicative of criminality, including child sex trafficking Those practices served to sanitize the content of innumerable advertisements for illegal transactions-even as Backpage represented to the public and the courts that it merely hosted content others had created.”

In the wake of this damning report, it seemed clear that Tony Ortega’s bogus defense that Backpage was a merely a useful website dedicated to helping innocent lonely hearts ‘consensually find each other’ was completely and thoroughly repudiated.

With Tony Ortega’s lie exposed for all the world to see, Backpage needed a new strategy.

It was then, in response to the Subcommittee’s report, that Backpage purported to shut down the “adult” section of its website, proudly boasting that their new proactive initiatives were put in place to combat the illegality rampant on their site.

This, of course, was nothing more another of their lies.

The reality is Backpage looks no steps to stop what was going on. They merely reshuffled the prostitution and underage sex trafficking ads and migrated them to other sections of the website, where they remain to this day.