Backpage’s revolting “Adult Services” section, which pimps used to advertise the “wares” of their often underaged, trafficked girls—some as young as 14—earned Lacey and his partner, James Larkin, a lot of loot indeed.
In 2018, the feds, driven by controversy over the notorious site, seized and shut down Backpage after the classified ad service had netted a staggering $500 million over its 14 years of existence.
Larkin committed suicide just before the beginning of his Arizona trial, thus avoiding the prison term which almost certainly awaited him.
What kind of lunatic would support—and act as an apologist for—the monsters behind this?
Lacey was convicted of one charge, with dozens of others dismissed, while about 30 charges remain outstanding. (The government could still force a trial over those.)
The government wanted a 20-year sentence. Lacey got off with just five. It was the next best thing to a “not guilty” verdict—a piece of cake, a walk in the park for the notorious panderer-in-print.
But that light slap on the wrist was still too much to swallow for Reason magazine star writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who authored a raving screed blasting the federal government and what she called the “First Amendment” implications of the sentencing.
In a recent article entitled “How the Feds Destroyed Backpage.com and Its Founders,” Brown excoriates the government for prosecuting the sex trafficking site.
She called the trial and sentence “a story of how far government agents will go to punish people who defy them, and a playbook for authorities intent on wresting more control over online speech of all sorts.”
“It’s pretty clear [Lacey and Larkin] were used—as scapegoats,” she wrote, “as allegedly villainous foils to hero politicians, as a way to sell papers or get clicks.”
Reason even made and released a documentary about the case, “Classified: The War on Backpage.com,” very much in favor of the sex trafficking empire execs.
Is she kidding? “Scapegoats”? “Allegedly villainous foils”?
We’re talking about the owners and enablers of the largest online brothel in the world, partly “staffed” by underaged victims of sexual exploitation.
Why would Brown do this?
Well, for one thing, she recognizes the opportunity to play on the voyeuristic impulses of readers by delivering lurid details about Backpage’s sex marketplace. Brown also received something every reporter wants: virtually exclusive access to hot sources. After all, this was a big story. Brown was invited into Lacey’s Paradise Valley, Arizona, home, bragging: “They still weren’t talking to much press, but they had invited me out to spend a few days interviewing them.”
Of course they did. They were guaranteed to see articles sympathetic to their case while they endeavored to shelter their trafficking business behind “First Amendment” protections.
But the indictment against Backpage included testimony about 17 victims, helpless children as young as 14, forced into a life of slavery by vicious pimps who demanded they sexually service violent rapists. One young girl was forced to do in-calls at hotels, while another, named “Nadia,” was stabbed to death.
One teenage girl was forced to perform sex acts at gunpoint, choked until she had seizures and gang-raped.
What kind of lunatic would support—and act as an apologist for—the monsters behind this? How would you even sleep at night after you did?
Doesn’t Brown hear the agonized screams of the innocents in her dreams?
While she and others speak for Backpage, who speaks for the innocents?
Apparently not. Apparently she feels sorry for the multimillionaires who made their big bucks from child sexual exploitation—wicked men who got filthy rich enabling a sex trafficking system that destroyed children’s innocence and their lives.
To be clear: Larkin and Lacey are complicit in every rape, every murder, every forced sex act and every missing child, and they pretty much got away with it. They weaseled out—Larkin by suicide and Lacey by legal chicanery—while a host of disgusting apologists like Brown propped up their despicable enterprise.
Anti-Scientologist Tony Ortega was another notorious enabler. According to a recent memoir by anti-trafficking advocate Andrea Powell, Ortega served as CFO of Backpage, and vehemently defended the sex trafficking institution, earning him the title of Backpage’s “attack dog” in The New York Times. As a well-paid Backpage defender, Ortega called sex trafficking a “mass panic,” a “national fantasy” and a “small problem,” as well as a “nonexistent epidemic of sexual slavery.”
Then there is Stephen Lemons, a pro-Lacey journalist who, throughout the trial, defended Brown’s editorial garbage, writing on his website: “Reason, however, has never wavered in recognizing the case for what it is: a perverse combination of the Salem Witch Trials, the Scopes Monkey Trial and the McMartin pre-school trial all wrapped into one.”
There’s a sickness out there, folks, in anyone who can, in any way, defend or excuse what these men did, especially those who do the defending for filthy lucre. They are not to be forgiven for their complicity.
Powell, then executive director of FAIR Girls, a nonprofit that assists survivors of human trafficking through education and empowerment, said, “After an investigation lasting over 21 months, a Senate subcommittee published a scathing report finding that classified ads website Backpage.com knowingly facilitated online child sex trafficking on the ‘adult’ section of its website.
“These findings are no surprise to FAIR Girls, where approximately 90 percent of the young women and girls we serve—some as young as 14—were sold by their traffickers on Backpage.”
So while Brown gushed out paroxysms of melodramatic dismay over how the mean old federal government was torturing her favorite interview subjects, human rights, ethics and decency of any kind took a backseat.
While she and others speak for Backpage, who speaks for the innocents?
For Lacey, it’s now karma time—payback time—for all those damaged lives and all that savaged innocence. It’s time to lose some of that big money made off the backs of suffering children, victimized by peddling, uncaring pimps who took out ads on Backpage.
In the end, the system eventually worked. Some small measure of justice was done. Lacey, sitting in his prison cell, has at least gotten a fraction of what was coming to him.
But we all know it’s a lot less than he deserved.
As for the enablers and apologists, even if no prison sentence awaits them, they still have to live behind the bars of their conscience.
