On the evening of Thursday May 10, 2012, the television news station CNN ran an expose on Backpage that emphasized “how young some of these girls look”. During the course of the program, the cable news channel said out loud what the rest of us had long understood as they deemed the website “ a hub for the sex trade.”
We’ve covered elsewhere Tony Ortega’s unhinged response, striking out with rabid personal attacks against the host of the show, but the story of what was going on behind the scenes has been largely untold… until now.
For all our discussion of the tremendous damage the child-sex selling web site Backpage which Tony Ortega staunchly defended and even bragged about, ours was hardly the only country ravaged by its lustful greed. Over the weekend an overseas reader sent in a reminder that his country, Australia, was also ruthlessly victimized by the mob-like business model Ortega promoted.
These are the facts Tony Ortega won’t ever tell you.
The Internet has long been a marketplace for the sex trade, one where the now mercifully defunct website, Backpage was justly demonized as a hotbed for illegal activity, including child sex trafficking.
We’ve seen time and again how Tony Ortega and his pals defended Backpage, at times even picking very public fights bemoaning that their “constitutional rights” to sell women weren’t being respected.
We’ve also looked at the new crop of human trafficking sights which were seemingly inspired by Tony Ortega’s vile rhetoric surrounding the selling of children for sex for profit.
Backpage may be dead but like something out of a bad horror movie, it continues to terrorize from beyond the grave.
A man accused of running a prostitution ring out of two spas in Billings, Montana will admit one charge and see three others dropped as part of a plea deal.
Scott Donald Petrie will admit to a single count of transportation of a person with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
Yesterday we took a focused look at a recent Backpage judgment that underlines the reprehensible behavior of both the company and its would-be apologists like Backpage Chief Propagandist-At-Large Tony Ortega who defended its business model on the grounds that it was ‘freedom of speech’.
One of the true tragedies of yesterday’s appalling story of a child forced into sex trafficking was the length her captors were willing to go to in order to manipulate and lie to achieve their sordid ends.
