Political Gumbo: Enough With the Sex Trafficking Ads

I’ve been following a story that kind of relates to journalism that hasn’t gotten a lot of play, ironically, in the press.

And it hits really close to home for me.

Michael Lacey, the former longtime editor and founder of the Phoenix alternative weekly, the Phoenix New Times, which expanded into 17 alternative weekly newspapers known as Village Voice Media, and several others, are accused in U.S. District Court of knowingly allowing people to use the website to exchange sex for money.

We’re talking about a 100-count indictment of facilitating prostitution, money laundering and conspiracy charges.

Backpage.com was the online classifieds site owned by Village Voice Media that ran ads, that were really advertising sex for sale according to prosecutors.
His partner in publishing, Jim Larkin, killed himself in August just days ahead of the federal trial.

The first trial ended in a mistrial several years ago.

But earlier this week, the former CEO of the now-defunct site may have been implicated his former colleagues in federal court.

“They were prostitution ads,” Carl Ferrer testified Tuesday afternoon, according to Courthouse News. “We wanted (customers) that would respond to prostitutes. The Johns.”
Lacey and Larkin got out of the newspaper game in 2013.

But they didn’t get out of Backpage, which authorities say generated $500 million in prostitution-related revenue from its inception in 2004 until 2018, when it was shut down by the government.

In 2011 former Village Voice Media Editor-in-Chief, Tony Ortega said the site had come “under attack” because a small number of the ads were placed by underage users who violated the site’s terms of use.

According to investigators, FAIR Girls, a Washington, D.C., social service organization dedicated to preventing the exploitation of girls worldwide with empowerment and education, it wasn’t just a “small number.”

Virtually all of their clients in 2012 —including some as young as eleven—had at some point been sold through Backpage.com, according to a quote given to NBC News.

Ortega and Village Voice parted ways in 2012.

Ortega has not been indicted.

Here’s where it hits close to home.

During a 2006 article I wrote while working as the city reporter at the Pasadena Weekly on sex trafficking, then-Police Chief Bernard Melekian gave me the following quote when asked about the ads in the PW for “massage parlors.”

“They’re always a point of concern,” Melekian said. “We follow up on them fairly regularly. I have always been surprised that the Weekly underwrites the exploitation of women…”

After taking that quote to my boss Kevin Uhrich we were told there were plans to do away with those ads.

But they never went away.

Hell, they may have even increased.

I spoke to Kevin about it several times after that, and nothing ever happened.

Editorial couldn’t really do much about it since it was an advertising function and editorial and advertising, well that’s church and state.

Truth to tell, I don’t pick up the publication anymore.

After inquiring with one person who still writes for the PW, and took a look at a recent issue, there were no massage ads in the publication.

That’s great news, I hope they are gone for good.

It is long past time for alternative weekly newspapers to stop carrying those ads.

Many newspaper execs have long hid behind the same positions the PW’s management authorized to use in my story in 2006:

“The paper’s top management has long been vexed by the need to be responsible citizens and at the same time generate revenue. The result has been an effort to cast a wary eye on such customers, tone down the sexual content of those placements, and plans for doing away with such ads altogether.”

Yeah, I wrote it after we took Melekian’s quote to management, but looking back – that wasn’t even close to true.

They wanted the cash.

Respect to the cops for monitoring those ads and often busting the folks who ran the illicit places.

But I wish all involved at my former place of employment had done the right thing.

Some places appear to have done exactly that.

Craigslist allegedly shut down its personals in 2018 after Congress passed a bill on trafficking.

“Seven years ago, the people I work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com, a competitor to Craigslist,” Ortega wrote in 2011 according to the Daily Beast. “What happens when two adults find each other through Backpage.com? I couldn’t tell you … [It] exists solely so that people can freely express themselves—sometimes in ways that make other people uncomfortable. We’re First Amendment extremists that way. Always have been.”

The responsibility of any newspaper, online and otherwise is to do the right thing and that’s deal in truth.

Of course I believe in the First Amendment, but all of our rights end where the rights of others begin.

Simply put, the First is not something to hide behind while others are forced into sex trafficking.