But the law didn’t end slavery in America, nor did it end trafficking. The domestic trading of human beings continued, illegal importation persisted for decades, and by 1865 some 12 million Africans had been shipped across the Atlantic, with more than 1 million dying on the way.
In other words, the statute closed one channel of commerce in human beings, but the economic impulse behind it endured.
At the center of it all stood Tony Ortega, who helped Backpage stay in business as its chief promoter and defender, but has since escaped accountability.
Two centuries later, the anniversary invites a sober reminder: Exploitation doesn’t disappear when it’s outlawed. Rather, it reorganizes around new tools and technologies. In the digital era, the sale of women and children for sex proliferated, and one of the most consequential platforms behind that modern-day slavery shift was Backpage.com—an online classified advertising site seized by federal authorities in 2018 after years of facilitating sex trafficking.
Founded in 2004, Backpage grew into a sprawling international network of online sex classifieds. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton described it as “the largest online sex trafficking marketplace in the world,” stating that it “facilitated the sex trafficking of innocent women and children through sites it ran for 943 locations in 97 countries and 17 languages.”
Investigations laid bare the massive scope of its harm. A US Senate subcommittee found that 73 percent of child trafficking reports submitted to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children involved one site: Backpage.
“Backpage has more stringent rules to post an ad to sell a pet, a motorcycle or a boat, than it does to sell a person,” Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman said during the investigation. “A user is required to submit a verified phone number for selling a hamster, but not when placing ads that could involve the sale of a child for sexual abuse. Think about that.”
On April 6, 2018, federal authorities shut the platform down and seized the website. Michael Lacey, one of Backpage’s co-founders, along with executives John Brunst and Scott Spear, received federal prison sentences. Backpage co-founder Jim Larkin committed suicide before trial.
But one figure occupies a distinct place in the public discourse: Tony Ortega. During Backpage’s most active and ethically fraught years, Ortega, a distinctly partisan self-styled “reporter,” served as editor-in-chief of The Village Voice, owned by Village Voice Media—the same corporate entity that owned Backpage.
Even as anti-trafficking advocates intensified scrutiny and prosecutors built their case, Ortega vehemently and publicly defended the site, thereby helping it continue to exploit women and children. He characterized concerns about underage sex trafficking as a “mass panic,” a “national fantasy” and a “small problem.” He described warnings about an epidemic of child sexual exploitation as exaggerating a “nonexistent” crisis. And he insisted that underage prostitution was “nothing like what is being trumpeted.”
That propaganda now sits in stark contrast to subsequent Senate findings, criminal convictions and multimillion-dollar forfeitures.
The human toll behind it all appears in survivor litigation. In March 2025, a federal lawsuit detailed how a 16-year-old girl, Isabelle Hughes, was advertised on Backpage for seven months by her own mother, who allegedly forced her into nonconsensual sex acts with men responding to online ads. The complaint states that Hughes “was subjected to coercion, threats and intimidation to perform sexual acts, including oral sex and vaginal intercourse, in exchange for money which was turned over to her mother.” Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis said Hughes was “at the age she should’ve been learning how to drive, or going to school dances.”
Her attorney, Travis Walker, described the pattern succinctly: “It’s family members trafficking family members for drugs and money” through Backpage. Hughes herself observed that without accountability, “there really is no means for change.”
And at the center of it all stood Tony Ortega, who helped Backpage stay in business as its chief promoter and defender, but has since escaped accountability.
Backpage executives were prosecuted. The platform was dismantled. Hundreds of millions of dollars were designated for victim compensation. Through indictments, convictions and asset seizures, the legal system imposed consequences on those who operated the marketplace.
But Ortega was not among those charged. Instead, his public dismissal of child sex trafficking remains an indelible part of the historical record—echoing the voices that once defended slavery itself.
Today, trafficking operates through different mechanisms than it did in the days of the transatlantic slave trade, yet the conflict between profit and human dignity persists.
March 2 marks a moment when lawmakers declared that people could not be imported as cargo. More than two centuries later, the dismantling of Backpage reflects a modern assertion that people cannot be listed as inventory either.
For survivors like Isabelle Hughes, the question is immediate rather than theoretical. It is about whether accountability shapes memory as well as verdicts. Anniversaries can become ceremonial markers—or they can prompt examination of how exploitation resurfaces in new forms.
As long as there are markets that monetize vulnerability, abolition remains an ongoing mission, requiring vigilance from prosecutors, lawmakers, journalists and the public alike.
Tony Ortega was not among those prosecuted. But his dismissal of child sex trafficking now stands fixed beside the convictions that followed—convictions of the men he championed who made a business out of the sexual exploitation of kids.
