Every one of the FBI’s 56 field offices across the US participated, with support from US attorneys’ offices nationwide and alongside the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section.
The lowlifes nabbed by Operation Relentless Justice included people you might see at the grocery or PTA.
The nearly 300 child sexual abuse offenders caught in Operation Relentless Justice will be charged with various crimes, including the production, distribution and possession of child sexual abuse material, online enticement and transportation of minors, and child sex trafficking.
That is precisely why federal authorities acted—because child sex trafficking is a major artery of the $236-billion-a-year human trafficking industry, one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises on Earth.
The lowlifes nabbed by Operation Relentless Justice included people you might see at the grocery or PTA—in Dallas, an airman and his wife charged with producing child sexual abuse material; in North Carolina, a police officer arrested for distributing child pornography; and in Virginia, a man accused of coercing a 14-year-old into creating explicit images of herself. The victim attempted suicide after he allegedly told her to kill herself.
These pedophiles and others found their prey the same way many of us shop on Amazon—online, through sites and platforms that facilitate and promote child porn and child sex trafficking.
Children are lured (hence the charge “online enticement”) into a web from which they cannot break free.
And for predators seeking access, victims and anonymity, the internet was a major driver of the 842 percent increase in human trafficking reports in the US between 2007 and 2017.
One of the biggest players in that boom was a sex trafficking site called Backpage.
After a 20-month inquiry, a 2017 Senate subcommittee report found that 73 percent of all child trafficking reports received by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children involved Backpage.
Backpage did not operate in the shadows alone. It operated with structure, strategy and intent. And, like any business, it needed promotion and marketing. The man they hired for the job was Tony Ortega, a paid propagandist with a history of attacking anyone who exposed pedophiles and sexual abuse. Over the years, Ortega mocked minors who were abducted and raped, fabricated hoaxes at their expense, and sneered at investigative journalists who uncovered exploitation, treating violence against children as material for jokes.
That contempt for victims made him the perfect choice for Backpage, whose bosses paid him to propagandize and defend the site, a job he did so zealously that The New York Times dubbed him Backpage’s “attack dog.” He downplayed sex trafficking as “a mass panic,” “national fantasy” and “small problem,” and ridiculed anyone who produced facts and figures that exposed the truth about what he called a “nonexistent epidemic of sexual slavery.”
While the Department of Justice was spearheading a nationwide initiative to combat child sexual abuse—marshaling the federal, state and local resources to nab predators using the internet to exploit children—Ortega was blocking the door, yelling, “Nothing to see here!” while his bosses inside traded in flesh.
“Underage prostitution,” he sniffed, “is nothing like what is being trumpeted.”
He’s right. It was far worse.
Backpage was, at the time, the world’s largest online marketplace for child sex trafficking. In 2018, it was shut down by the federal government.
Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey—the former boss whom Ortega praised as “smart enough to start Backpage”—was sentenced to five years in federal prison, while executives Scott Spear and John Brunst received 10 years each on money laundering and prostitution facilitation charges related to sexual exploitation.
Ortega, on the other hand, walked free.
He knew where his paychecks came from—that the roof over his head was funded by the buying, selling, raping and even murdering of children on Backpage.
And so did his chief enabler and wife, Arielle Silverstein. A senior official at the UN, Silverstein nevertheless specializes in advocating for the violation of human rights and is a key accomplice in her husband’s schemes. Dubbed by Ortega’s friend as the “power behind the throne,” she, too, shrilly defends the Backpage business model.
“Of course it’s about money,” she wrote. “But it doesn’t make it illegal or wrong.”
Those claims collide with the consensus of law enforcement: All 56 FBI offices, the FBI director and the US attorney general alike would disagree.
“All predators targeting the most vulnerable amongst us will be held accountable,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.
“We will not allow evil criminals who prey on children to evade justice,” said US Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Our prosecutors will ensure they receive severe punishments to match their horrific crimes.”
But what about the guy who enabled predators and abetted their sexual exploitation?
How does the man who greased the wheels of child sexual abuse walk away unscathed?
