“Please come home,” they begged her.
“I can’t come home,” she replied.
That’s because she was being beaten and raped daily at the hands of the pimp who promoted her as a “weekend special” on Backpage.
The notorious site Backpage.com was a $600 million racket that allowed buyers to purchase a seventh-grade girl as easily as ordering a pizza. Nearly three-quarters of online child sex trafficking flowed through the criminal hub until the FBI shut it down in 2018.
And now a new Freedom video exposé rips the mask off the chief enabler of Backpage’s exploitation of children: Tony Ortega.
Even as evidence mounted, Ortega worked to dismiss and distort the abuse.
A self-described “unemployed blogger on the fringes of the internet,” Ortega rose to infamy as The Village Voice’s editor-in-chief. The publication’s parent company, Village Voice Media, owned and operated Backpage.
“Part of my job when I was at the Voice,” he said, “was to try to get that legendary newspaper to think of itself more as a digital enterprise.”
And when that enterprise came under fire, Ortega sprang to its defense.
Backpage’s “attack dog,” as The New York Times dubbed him, lashed out at activists and investigative journalists, growled at accusations that Backpage was involved in wrongdoing and whined that the freedom of speech rights of traffickers were being trampled upon by those fighting to protect kids.
And even as evidence mounted, Ortega worked to dismiss and distort the abuse.
His own words make it plain. He dismissed child sexual slavery as a “mass panic,” “national fantasy” and “small problem.” And he lashed out at those exposing what he called a “nonexistent epidemic.”
“Underage prostitution,” Ortega wrote, “is nothing like what is being trumpeted.”
The site’s founders, whom Ortega crowed were “smart enough to start Backpage,” were criminally charged. One committed suicide before trial, and the other, along with two Backpage executives, was convicted on November 16, 2023.
But it was Ortega who greased the wheels of the infernal machine.
US Senator Claire McCaskill described the selling of sex with children as “the definition of evil.”
That evil was nurtured, shielded and facilitated by one man.
There was never any doubt: Tony Ortega was a child sex trafficking enabler for Backpage.
And this disturbing video, in his own words and images, is the proof of Ortega’s true legacy—as the man condoning the sale of untold women and girls into sexual slavery.
