“Like cattle owners brand their cattle, he wanted to brand me in a way that I would never forget,” she said.
The target of her greatest anger was Backpage.com where her pimp advertised her for sale. After a brutal beating that left her with a broken jaw and ribs, she finally escaped and went to the police.
Kristoff waged a full-on editorial war against Backpage.com for several years, with hard-hitting article after article indicting the website for the trafficking of powerless minors, trapping them in lives of involuntary prostitution.
“You can’t buy a child at Wal-Mart, can you,” she said at the time. “No, but you can buy me on Backpage.”
“For a website like Backpage to make $22 million (per year) off our backs, it’s like going back to slave times.”
Kristoff waged a full-on editorial war against Backpage.com for several years, with hard-hitting article after article indicting the website for the trafficking of powerless minors, trapping them in lives of involuntary prostitution.
Girls were advertised on Backpage and “meetings” booked with clients in various cities.
Alissa was “sold” to a string of pimps, several times, for $10,000 each. For them, she was an investment, not a human being.
Village Voice Media, owner of the Backpage site, is estimated to have earned $500 million in the 14 years of the site’s existence before it was shut down by the federal government in 2018.
In a 2023 trial in Phoenix, one of the former owners of Backpage.com, Michael Lacey, and two former executives, were convicted of various counts of money laundering and facilitation of prostitution, and await sentencing.
Kristof was a hero in the battle against Backpage. There were also, of course, villains, including Tony Ortega who was editor of “The Village Voice” from 2007 until he was fired in 2012. Backpage/Ortega struck back at Kristof, claiming that he had his facts on Alissa wrong.
It was a victory of sorts for Kristof, who wrote in 2014: “If prostitution of children is illegal, why is it that we allow an estimated 100,000 underage girls and boys to be sold for sex in America each year—many on a single American website, Backpage.com?”
He also wrote, “We should all be able to agree that children shouldn’t be peddled like pizzas.”
Backpage.com, he wrote, “accounts for about 70 percent of prostitution ads.”
Kristof wrote about another girl he called Brianna who was “turned out” by a pimp at the age of 12. She was locked up and beaten, and advertised on Backpage because, she said, her pimp “felt that Backpage made him the most money.”
Another girl he called “Baby Face” was trafficked through Backpage at the age of 13. She was brutalized, forced to “service” five to nine customers each day, and finally escaped when she was sent to an apartment where her next “customer” was waiting. Instead, she banged on random doors until a tenant let her in and called 911.
Kristof was a hero in the battle against Backpage. There were also, of course, villains, including Tony Ortega who was editor of The Village Voice from 2007 until he was fired in 2012.
Backpage/Ortega struck back at Kristof, claiming that he had his facts on Alissa wrong. However, The Observer writer Kat Stoeffel wrote that Kristof had confirmed that Alissa had, indeed, been trafficked on Backpage.com when she was 16.
“[I]t’s really sad to see Village Voice Media became a major player in sex trafficking,” wrote Kristof in March 2012, “and to see it use its journalists [referring to Ortega who was ‘Village Voice’ editor at this time] as attack dogs for those who threaten its corporate interests.”
Stoeffel wrote, “The article about Mr. Kristof is unbylined but was reported, at least in part, by Voice editor-in-chief Tony Ortega. Mr. Ortega did not return Off the Record’s request for comment.”
Of course he didn’t respond. Backpage profits paid Ortega’s salary and kept the Voice afloat, making him a paid enabler and facilitator of the pimps who used Backpage.com to traffic children.
“[I]t’s really sad to see Village Voice Media became a major player in sex trafficking,” wrote Kristof in March 2012, “and to see it use its journalists [referring to Ortega who was Village Voice editor at this time] as attack dogs for those who threaten its corporate interests.”
Ortega even blamed the pimp’s victims for their plight:
“Recently we’ve come under attack because a small number of those ads involve underage users who violate our terms of use.”
He bragged: “The people I work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com.”
Ortega wrote: “The First Amendment was shouted down in the name of children. Having run off Craigslist [a website that stopped running sex ads under pressure], reformers, the devout, and the government-funded have turned their guns upon Village Voice Media.”
Ortega turned his guns on Scientology when the Church vocally objected to his support of Backpage.com. He wrote 465 anti-Scientology blogs before he was fired for drawing too much unwanted attention to Backpage.
Eventually, protesters and government officials got on board, agreeing with Kristof’s urging “Isn’t it time to stop?”
Some 51 state attorneys general wrote to Backpage, pressing them to cease enabling the marketing of underage victims. Sen. Dianne Feinstein wrote that a Senate report on Backpage.com “shows need to crack down on sex traffickers online.”
But Ortega continued with his rants: “The whole point of Backpage.com is that we aren’t involved after two consenting adults find each other through the community bulletin board,” adding that Backpage “exists solely so that people can freely express themselves, sometimes in ways that make other people uncomfortable.”
In the end, Tony Ortega and his ilk lost out. The pimps who used Backpage lost out. Backpage was shut down. One of its owners and two executives were convicted in November 2023.
And Nicholas Kristof deserves accolades for his fearless crusade.
