Is Backpage Going to Open Again

Iii years after the well-nigh popular place to advertise "adult services" was seized by the U.Southward. authorities, its founders volition stand trial Wednesday in an Arizona courtroom, in a case that could take lasting repercussions for the hereafter of online sexual practice work.

The defendants, alt-weekly titans Michael Lacey and James Larkin, claim their website, Backpage.com, was a utopia for gratuitous expression, a place where "unpopular" voice communication was immune to flourish and thrive. Only the U.S. Department of Justice contends information technology was likewise a identify where women and girls were sexual activity trafficked against their will, with Lacey and Larkin's knowledge.

Whom the approximate sides with will determine whether Lacey and Larkin are locked away for decades, and whether online sex work—and mayhap online expression, in general—volition ever look the same again.

"Sexual activity workers are the canary in the coal mine," said Savannah Sly, a longtime sexual practice worker and advocate from Seattle. "And the general public better pay attention to what happens with Backpage."

Michael Lacey testifies earlier the U.Southward. Senate in 2017.

U.S. Senate

Until their homes were raided and their avails seized, Larkin and Lacey were, in many regards, an internet success story. After founding the Phoenix New Times equally pugnacious higher journalists, the pair went on to purchase more than 17 local magazines beyond the United States, amassing the largest concatenation of alt-weeklies in the country. Just as print revenues started to fade, they had the idea to digitize the classified ads in the back of their papers and put them on a website: Backpage.com.

While Backpage took ads for anything from cars to trading cards, the bulk of its revenue came from then-called "developed" ads, which offered services the government argues were lightly coded euphemisms for prostitution. (Amidst the offerings were ads for an "extremely horny sexy newbie" and a "dark Asian bombshell with a nice & tight haul," according to an indictment.) The idea proved hugely profitable: The site went from earning $26 million in 2010 to more than $134 meg in 2014. By 2015, it had reportedly earned its owners more than $500 million.

Only while the earnings piled up, and then did the horror stories: women and girls allegedly held against their will and trafficked past pimps, friends, or family members using Backpage as a marketing tool. (One adult female said she was raped more than 1,000 times later beingness advertised on the site as a teenage runaway.) Backpage became a white whale for ambitious young prosecutors looking to prove their chops, and for politicians hoping to muster goodwill in an election year. Three states passed laws specifically intended to take the website down; 51 state attorneys general signed onto a alphabetic character accusing the site of beingness a "hub" for human trafficking. Dozens of declared victims filed civil suits. None of it stuck.

Backpage's founders wrestled themselves out of these legal battles with the winning combination of a well-funded legal team and a 1996 federal law: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that website owners cannot be held liable for what users post on their platforms. In 2016, when authorities in Texas and California raided the website'due south Dallas headquarters and charged the founders with "pimping" and "pimping conspiracy," a Superior Courtroom judge dismissed the charges, explicitly citing Section 230. When then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris filed new charges confronting the founders that same month, a judge dismissed them over again.

The only legal challenge that seemed to stick was a 2012 conform by three Washington women who claimed they were trafficked via Backpage when they were as young every bit 13 years old. The state Supreme Court ruled that the case could go forward, and Backpage eventually settled. At the aforementioned time, notwithstanding, the founders unwittingly avoided criminal prosecution in the same land—in function thanks to their own cooperation with authorities.

And so-Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, middle, was among the Washington officials who condemned Backpage in 2012.

Mayor McGinn/Wikimedia Commons

According to documents published by Reason, federal prosecutors in the Western District of Washington reviewed more than than 100,000 documents and interviewed more than a dozen witnesses in 2012 in an endeavour to bring a case against Backpage, simply failed to find a smoking gun. In fact, co-ordinate to a memo written by two banana U.S. attorneys at the fourth dimension, local FBI agents establish the company "remarkably responsive to police force enforcement requests" and said the site "often takes proactive steps to assistance in investigations."

"At the starting time of this investigation, it was predictable that we would find bear witness of candid discussions among [Backpage] principals about the use of the site for juvenile prostitution which could be used as admissions of criminal conduct," the attorneys wrote in a 2013 update to the memo. "Information technology was likewise anticipated that we would find numerous instances where Backpage learned that a site user was a juvenile prostitute and Backpage callously continued to post advertisements for her. To date, the investigation has revealed neither."

Later on more a decade of success, Larkin and Lacey's luck somewhen ran out. The U.South. Senate, which had been investigating Backpage for years, successfully subpoenaed millions of pages of internal documents and published them in a highly damaging study in 2017. Amongst the documents were internal emails that the government claims show Backpage employees intentionally removed words from advertisements that suggested prostitution—and even more damningly, kid prostitution—and published them anyway, getting rid of the bear witness merely non the crime. In response to the report, Backpage pulled its adult advertising section, blaring the word "censored" across the folio.

A piffling over a year later, in a 61-page indictment that pulled heavily from the Senate investigation, the U.Southward. Department of Justice hit Lacey, Larkin, and five other Backpage employees with 93 counts, including several kinds of money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution. Federal authorities raided Lacey'southward home and arrested Larkin on the Phoenix drome tarmac; they too seized the website and most of the founders' other avails. Larkin and Lacey have been on house arrest ever since.

James Larkin, Backpage co-founder.

CaptainKangaroo666/Wikimedia Commons

Supporters point out that the founders and other employees were never charged with trafficking—well-nigh of the charges stem from the 1960s-era Travel Deed, which prohibits businesses from conducting illegal activity like gambling and prostitution beyond country lines. But the indictment also provided documents that strongly suggest employees of Backpage had seen, and in some cases, removed, show of underage girls being advertised on their site. In one particularly jarring example, prosecutors allege that an employee shared a list of words to be "filtered" from advertisements earlier publication, which included terms like "lolita," "immature," and "high schoolhouse."

Attorneys for Larkin and Lacey fence that they were just publishing advertisements for escort and massage services, as alt-weeklies take washed since their inception. They claim this is a Kickoff Subpoena example, and that requiring Backpage to reject ads just suggestive of prostitution would be an illegal infringement on free spoken communication—an odorous idea to the founders of a mud-slinging independent journalism empire.

In a typically swashbuckling statement released earlier the trial, Larkin and Lacey decried the prosecution as an "epic government overreach and an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and liberty of voice communication" and claimed they were being held "vicariously responsible for the criminal acts of others."

"The culprits here are not publishers and editors, or the executives of an interactive website," they wrote. "Rather, they are cocky-serving politicians with historical vendettas and overzealous prosecutors who placed their own ambition above the safety and welfare of women."

They added: "Taking down Backpage was more than of import to these people than doing the hard work of making women and marginalized communities safer."

Sex Workers and their supporters rallied in Minnesota in 2016 to protestation a law enforcement crackdown on Backpage.com.

Fibonacci Blue/Wikimedia Commons

Similar the trials of so many adult website owners—Jeffrey Hurant of RentBoy and Eric Omuro of myRedBook amid them—the prosecution of Larkin and Lacey could have been a fleeting headline; a mere notch in the belt of aggressive DOJ prosecutors. But in the days after their arrest, something happened in Washington that brought the plight of online sexual activity workers to national attention: President Trump signed into law FOSTA/SESTA, a law that cut into the heart of Section 230 and made online publishers responsible for whatsoever ads on their sites promoting prostitution.

In a statement celebrating the signing of the bill, Firm sponsor Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), claimed it would bring "solace to survivors," and requite law enforcement "new tools" with which to "scissure downward on this scourge confronting humanity." Sex workers warned that information technology would have the opposite result, pushing them off the internet and onto the streets, where they had fewer protections and less control over who they saw and when. Ceremonious liberties groups including the ACLU, Electronic Borderland Foundation, and Heart for Republic and Engineering all came out confronting information technology.

In the weeks after its passage, FOSTA/SESTA felled non only Backpage, but other developed advertising sites similar Massage Republic and Cityvibe, and even the Craigslist personal ads section. The touch was tangible: A survey from the sex worker advancement group Hacking/Hustling found 33.8 percent of respondents reported an increment in violence from clients subsequently the police force was signed, and 72.5 percent reported they were facing increased financial insecurity. Advocates related stories of sex workers who were thrust into the artillery of pimps in order to find work, or back into abusive relationships for desire of somewhere to stay.

Even the federal government admitted that the police had unintended consequences. In a June 2021 report, the Government Accountability Function reported that the online sex trade had fragmented and moved largely overseas in the backwash of FOSTA/SESTA, making it harder to both track offenders and find victims. The FBI's ability to locate sex trafficking victims and perpetrators "significantly decreased post-obit the takedown of backpage.com," the report states. It adds: "According to FBI officials, this is largely because police force enforcement was familiar with backpage.com, and backpage.com was mostly responsive to legal requests for data."

Equally fourth dimension went on, the restrictions around online sexual activity work grew tighter and tighter. In May 2018, Reddit removed several sex piece of work word forums; in December of that year, Tumblr removed all explicit content from its site. Defenseless up in the firestorm, Backpage, and by default, Larkin and Lacey, became a symbol for the larger fight for sex workers' rights online.

Whether Larkin and Lacey want this condition is less articulate. Their pre-trial statement paints them every bit complimentary-oral communication warriors valiantly defending "offensive" and unpopular speech." Conspicuously missing from the argument, every bit journalist Melissa Gira Grant pointed out on Twitter, are the words "prostitution" or "sex work;" there is only a glancing reference to "adult advertising."

Kaytlin Bailey, a former sex activity worker and host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, says the longtime newspapermen are now telling the wrong story.

"I were in their shoes, the story I would exist telling is the story of the survival of their users," she said, referring to the sex workers who lost their source of income when the site was taken offline.

"They recall of themselves as costless voice communication warriors, and I think sexual practice workers think of themselves as in a fight for survival."

In the years leading up to the trial, Lacey and Larkin have lost some of their prominence. They are not being prosecuted under FOSTA/SESTA, and while their case may pose an interesting loophole to Department 230, it is not a straight challenge. The costless speech champions who rallied to their defence force during previous legal fights have issued no statements in accelerate of their criminal trial. And sex activity workers have other concerns to worry near: a global pandemic; the heavily criticized and hastily reversed decision to ban porn from OnlyFans.

Merely Alexandra Yelderman, a visiting assistant professor at the Academy of Notre Matriarch Law School, argues that the trial still holds serious significance—more and then than the criminal prosecutions of RentBoy, myRedBook, and other developed websites. While those sites merely advertised sex work, Yelderman said, Backpage advertised other services, such as housing, cars, and temporary jobs. And everyone should be concerned that the regime would jeopardize that kind of speech to go at the other stuff.

"What the Backpage takedown and prosecution is an example of is the government'south willingness to throw all sorts of speech under the jitney here, in gild to get at speech that—according to the indictment—facilities the crime of prostitution," she said.

"This is non a trafficking prosecution," she added. "This is a case where allegations that [the founders] facilitated prostitution were an impetus for the government to take aim at this entire swath of speech."

Later more than iii years, the trial volition first Wednesday in federal district court in Phoenix. Backpage's defence has already taken a serial of pre-trial blows; among them, the decision to let Judge Susan Brnovich stay on the instance, despite being married to an Arizona prosecutor who previously mounted an aggressive entrada confronting the site. Among the potential witnesses are Lacey and Larkin's quondam lieutenant, who took a plea bargain and flipped on them in 2018, and family members of women who died after being advertised on Backpage.

At least a few supporters volition as well be in the courthouse—the sex worker commonage Desiree Brotherhood has already said information technology volition be in omnipresence. And even Bailey, despite her hesitations, volition be watching it closely.

"We need guys similar the owners of Backpage," she said Monday. "We need folks that are willing to baby-sit the people that are engaging in survival work, that are doing things polite social club would rather they didn't. Because polite order has demonstrated that they're willing to see u.s. die rather than coexist with united states."

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Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/backpagecom-founders-michael-lacey-and-james-larkin-go-on-trial-over-sex-worker-ads

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