Tony Ortega and The Underground Bunker

Tony Ortega is a former employee of the Village Voice—a publication which found itself in hot water when it was revealed they’d been advertising the services of known sex-traffickers in their seedy ‘Backpage’ section.

Ortega now runs the Underground Bunker blog. Billing itself as the go-to zone for (eye-rolling sensationalized, bigoted, anti-religious) rants, it gives away Ortega’s game. How much clearer can it be that this supposedly “legitimate” blog is nothing but a bully pulpit from which Ortega can indulge his intolerance disguised as social outrage and foist off entirely fabricated nonsense as “breaking news”?

Sources in the journalist community consider Tony Ortega a developer of false leads, and let’s be clear Ortega is not a real journalist and here is why. When evaluating information, we are often admonished to “consider the source.” In the case of Tony Ortega, the warning applies not only to the content of his blogs but also to Ortega personally and the “publications” for which he worked.

Alternative papers are free weekly publications that earn revenue most often through the sale of the kind of advertising that reputable newspapers won’t permit – adult bookstores, strip clubs, classifieds with strong sexual content, etc. In between the trash, they slip in tabloid-style articles, promoted as “edgy” or “daring” when, in truth, they are simply fabrications sensationalized by low credibility writers like Ortega. While some of these “papers” make an effort to rise above the rest, most are gutter rags that all too often define “alternative news” as a slanderous substitution of the facts.

Ortega has spent his life practicing this excuse for journalism within the New Times Media and the Village Voice Media franchise of alternative papers. This platform has suited him well, for Ortega wrote for sleazy tabloids like he was born to it, a disposition that was in evidence as far back as high school.

[Header image: John Rickard]

Hate and Bigotry

We live in a country besieged by religious intolerance. We read about it daily in the national headlines, see it again and again on the nightly news. Indeed, according to an FBI report, hate crimes have risen yet again, marking a third straight year of rises (up 17 percent.) Tellingly, one out

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Tony Ortega Mocks Disaster Relief Efforts

Tony Ortega, opportunist that he is, took full advantage of the tragedy of Hurricane Dorian this past week to further his campaign to smear Scientology. It really is stunning the lengths to which someone as petty and self-centered as Tony Ortega will go to make an already bad situation even worse.

In the

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Pimps and Perverts

The Internet has long been a marketplace for the sex trade, one where the now mercifully defunct website, Backpage was justly demonized as a hotbed for illegal activity, including child sex trafficking.

We’ve seen time and again how Tony Ortega and his pals defended Backpage, at times even picking very public fights bemoaning

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What Losers Do Best

Tony Ortega and Karen De La Carriere

With the death of the mysterious sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein so much in the news this past week, one seemingly minor question continues to confound news sources. Who was financing Epstein’s lifestyle? With no job to speak of, no sources of income, no vast inheritance from

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Tony Ortega

“What’s there to panic about?”

The above quote, taken from one of Tony Ortega’s many shameless defenses of the Backpage child sex-ring syndicate, tells us so much about Ortega’s mindset in the midst of the scandal that would ultimately bring down the criminal enterprise employing him.

In someways it’s almost understandable that

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Keeping It In The Family

Back when Tony Ortega, infamous Backpage defender of pimps, prostitution, and philandering, was exposed carrying on multiple affairs while married to different women, people were rightly disgusted by his behavior.

When it came to light he was ‘sexting’ (chatting explicitly online) with a close family friend we began to see he was no

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Pure Theater

Backpage.com Bosses

We have spoken openly and frankly here on the blog about how Michael Lacey and James Larkin piggybacked off their then-failing newspaper Village Voice to launch an international sex trafficking syndicate with a global reach. They succeeded in their efforts far beyond what they’d imagined and today we are all the

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“Traffic Jam” Hits Sex Traffickers

With the advent of the Internet, we now live in an age where so much of life is happening online. By the time the study of online sex trafficking began in a serious scholarly back in 2011, we were already seeing websites like Craigslist and, worst of them all, Backpage emerging as behemoths in

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Child Sex-trafficking in America

Tony Ortega and Leah Remini

If you ask Tony Ortega about child sex-trafficking in America, he’s likely to give you the same set of repeated lies he’s given so many media outlets before.

Consider this whopper Ortega offered up in a propaganda piece he wrote in defense of Backpage shortly before authorities

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Tony Ortega’s Hidden Crimes

More than a year after his arrest on unrelated drug charges following a traffic stop by police man in Amarillo, TX was charged with human trafficking and has been sentenced to ten years in prison.

In March of 2018, Jirehn Lamarr Curtis Jr., 22, was stopped for a routine traffic violation. Though detained

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