Mike Rinder and Tony Ortega
The more you look at Tony Ortega’s actual “professional” history, his sketchy economic connections, and his highly suspicious shilling on behalf of the notorious Backpage sex ring, the more difficult it becomes to wrap your head around why Tony Ortega is not yet behind bars.
Ortega’s fellow tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist Mike Rinder, has been known to casually dismiss Ortega’s relationship to Backpage by offering a list of excuses as long as your arm, usually filled with such gems as ‘Tony was a simple newspaper editor for the Village Voice,’ and ‘he had nothing whatsoever to do with the advertising side,’ or our favorite — ‘Tony knew next to nothing!
Frequent readers of this blog will know by now the sordid unprofessional history of Tony Ortega. Between 2011 and July 2012, Tony Ortega, then Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice, launched a biased oppo-research campaign on organizations and individuals who attempted to report on sex trafficking in the United States.
Clearly Ortega was tasked by his employers, James Larking and Michael Lacey, to do damage control against the numerous accusations being levied against Backpage.
Harvey Weinstein’s downfall began when the first of his victims began to speak out. The Paul Haggis rape case began when the women he allegedly raped chose to come forward. The MeToo Movement itself only became a force for change as women found the courage to take a stand against their abusers.
Earlier this year in state district court in Harris County, Texas something similar began when a human trafficking survivor, Jane Doe #1, filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against Tony Ortega’s former Backpage employers and the Houston-area hotels and truck stops where she was allegedly exploited, according to her lawyers at Annie McAdams PC and Sico Hoelscher Harris & Braugh LLP.
Tony Ortega is perhaps the best example of hypocrisy and arrogance in modern “journalism”. Here is a man who for years falsely accused L Ron Hubbard and all Scientologists of endorsing and condoning pedophilia while he himself had made 90% of his paycheck off of Backpage sex traffic advertising, which led to horrific instances of child rape and murder.
If you look at Tony Ortega’s history (not the one he tries to present the outside world), his economic connections (he’s broke and unemployed), and his defense of the notorious BackPage.
As the MeToo movement has highlighted over the course of the past year, there is no shortage of rapists and serial abusers of women in Hollywood. A few short months ago it was revealed that Paul Haggis was accused of sexual misconduct by 4 different women; two of whom accuse him of rape.
Indeed, in December of last year Haggis became headline news when he was sued for allegedly raping film publicist Haleigh Breest in 2013 at his New York apartment after a movie premiere.
