Carl Ferrer Recently we wrote about a series of emails exchanged by Carl Ferrer and a woman described in court documents only as “P.R.” As illustrative as their carelessness recounted in our last post was, Backpage and its heartless attitude toward its victims didn’t stop there. And neither did the story of “P.R.” On July 14, 2012, Carl Ferrer received another email from the same woman. It stated: “ Would you please take the edit block off my ad.

Through our examination into Backpage’s fruitless and ultimately vain attempts to shirk the laws in their greed-driven crime spree to generate hundreds of millions in personal profit through the highly illegal human sex trafficking trade, we’ve come across what we believe to be evidence more than sufficient to prove the state’s case against its ringleaders. Take for example, the example Backpage set it its early years. Between around September 2010 and October 2012, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer became aware that a particular Backpage customer, known as “P.

Tony Ortega In our last post we saw how despite Backpage’s official denials, and Tony Ortega’s seemingly endless stream of mind-numbing propagandistic lies, public perception was beginning to change regarding the legitimacy and lawfulness of Backpage’s business practices. The truth about their human sex trafficking/prostitution ring was beginning to spread. At first they attempted to mislead the public by saying they were merely providing a platform for interested singles to meet.

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.

Tony Ortega Backpage’s deliberate attempt to feign ignorance concerning the wide range of sex crimes they were actively facilitating on their website is by this point, no longer up for debate for anyone willing to look at the evidence. For those, however, who still may be on the fence about Backpage’s criminal negligence consider this episode from April 27, 2012 when a woman wrote an email to Backpage’s support department stating that her underage daughter had been kidnapped, drugged, and was being advertised as a prostitute against her will.

Tony Ortega Recently we saw how Backpage turned a blind eye to a woman who had contacted them to report that one of the “escorts” depicted in their online ads was only 17 years old. Despite the fact that the woman had informed them that the juvenile had been attempting to recruit the complaining party’s daughter, who was only 15 years old. Over these past few weeks we’ve been building the case that instances like this were not one time mistakes.

Tony Ortega We have seen how Backpage, despite a full awareness that they were breaking state and federal laws by engaging in for-profit human sex trafficking, attempted to deceive both the public and federal authorities. Evidence of this knowledge is in no short supply as the criminals behind the Backpage scam were sloppy when it came to covering up their tracks. Meanwhile, Tony Ortega was working furiously behind the scenes to muddy the waters with his public facing propaganda.

Tony ortega Back when Tony Ortega was shooting off his mouth in praise of Backpage, one of his favorite lies seems to have been what we’ve come to know as the ‘myth of Backpage self-moderation. Tony Ortega falsely claimed that Backpage took ‘proactive’ steps to root out instances of illicit prostitution and child sex trafficking. The reality is nothing could have been further from the truth. Throughout the course of our ongoing investigation here at the blog, we have come to the conclusion that the corporate heads of the Backpage organization and their complicit co-conspirators like Tony Ortega had full knowledge that there so-called ‘moderation’ was only a publicity stunt designed to provide political cover against the growing concerns many Americans and their elected leaders were beginning to raise about the legitimacy of the Backpage business model.

Tony Ortega By this point we believe we have firmly established that Backpage clearly understood that Tony Ortega’s fraudulent defense of their child sex trafficking practice was nothing but lies. That being said, however, we would be remiss if we didn’t offer our readers a look into the vast amount of evidence federal prosecutors have been quietly amassing as Michael Lacey, James Larkin and Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer prepare for what will no doubt be the human trafficking trial of the century.

Carl Ferrer, Michael Lacey and James Larkin When we last looked in to the ongoing saga of the Backpage crime syndicate we saw how by the end of that summer of 2011 the chief conspirators of the online sex trafficking ring, Michael Lacey, James Larkin and Carl Ferrer together with problematically unethical enablers like Tony Ortega, had repeatedly lied about and obscured the true aims of the Backpage business model.

Tony Ortega One of the major themes we’ve been looking at recently is the extent to which Backpage and the various accessories to its multiple crimes, like Tony Ortega, intentionally chose to ignore the red flags Backpage’s illicit activities were raising. We noted yesterday that the lack of willingness by of many of these individuals — like Tony Ortega, his accomplices and others around him — to speak honestly about these issues is truly disturbing, especially in light of the litany of examples of the conspiracy of silence Backpage was engaged in.

Some things are just so blindingly obvious it makes you wonder why they’re not constantly in the headlines of every major paper in the nation. Happily, this hasn’t been the case for Backpage scandal, which was and remains, very much in the headlines across the country. And yet there are elements of what many view as the “Backpage criminal conspiracy” which are just as shocking as the human trafficking and sex-for-cash scheme launched by Michael Lacey and James Larkin.

Tony Ortega We’ve learned a lot so far over the course of our examination into the continued duplicity Backpage was engaged in as Tony Ortega took to the pages of the Village Voice in a vain attempt to spin public sentiment in favor of his sex trafficking bosses. One of the things we’ve been noticing in the official court documents however, is exactly how brazen the Backpage conspiracists were in all this.

Andrew Padilla On April 5, 2011, Andrew Padilla sent an email whose recipients included Joye Vaught and the supervisor of Backpage’s Indian moderation team. True to Backpage’s abysmal moderation standards the email was entitled “relaxed image standards”. It included, as an attachment, a document that displayed a series of 30 nude and partially-nude photographs. Next to each picture was an instruction as to whether it should be approved or disapproved by a moderator.

Tony Ortega As we’ve been going over recently released court documents surrounding the coming Backpage trail a clear pattern is emerging. Contrary to all the lies Tony Ortega was busy selling to the public, Backpage had full knowledge of what they were doing and were actively engaged in a massive company-wide cover-up. For example, on February 16, 2011, Andrew Padilla sent a separate email discussing whether several terms should remain on Backpage’s “filtered terms” list.

As we continue our examination of court documents recently obtained concerning the upcoming trial of James Larkin and Michael Lacey, the criminal masterminds federal prosecutors are convinced spearheaded the Backpage human sex trafficking scheme, the evidence of their clear and willful lawbreaking becomes increasingly hard to explain away. We doubt even Backpage’s most infamous lapdog propagandist, Tony Ortega, could spin a web of lies to cover over the facts we’re discovering as we pour over these documents.

Andrew Padilla On January 13, 2011, Dan Hyer and Andrew Padilla received an email summarizing instructions that had been provided to members of Backpage’s technical staff. It explained that the technical staff had been instructed “ not to display the moderation log” in a particular section of Backpage’s database. You may find yourself wondering why a business as innocent as Tony Ortega tried to make us all believe it was would send such a message to its staff?

On October 27, 2010, Dan Hyer sent an internal email stating that Backpage was “editing 70 to 80%” of the ads it received from customers. In other words, through Hyer, Backpage’s Sales and Marketing Director, the company directly acknowledged that a large proportion of the ads originally submitted by Backpage’s own customers contained text and pictures that were indicative of prostitution and that Backpage was still choosing to publish those ads after editing them.

Andrew Padilla On October 16, 2010, Andrew Padilla sent an email to a large group of Backpage employees (including Dan Hyer and Joe Vaught). The email had two attachments that provided guidance on how to “moderate” ads. The first was a Powerpoint presentation that displayed a series of 38 nude and partially-nude photographs, some of which depicted graphic sex acts. Next to each picture was an instruction as to whether it should be approved or disapproved by a Backpage moderator.

Tony Ortega If you’ve ever wondered just how much effort Backpage put into its ‘performative compliance with the law’ when it came to the thorough ‘self moderation’ Tony Ortega assured us all was taking place, wonder no more. Court documents reveal that on September 1, 2010, Andrew Padilla sent an email to Dan Heyer and Carl Ferrer stating that customers who engaged in “extreme and repeat” violations of Backpage’s posting rules would have their ads deleted and be banned from the website.