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]

Tony Ortega & Backpage: Self-Described “Extremists”

When the story of the Backpage, owned and operated by Tony Ortega’s beloved former employers, is finally written it will be a harrowing tale. And it’s likely to come with an NC-17 rating.

The sordid legacy of the world’s one-time leading human trafficking website is not for the change of heart. Its stomach-turning

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Who Is Karen de la Carriere?

Karen de la Carriere being interviewed with a rag in the background

Many readers have asked us, who is Karen de la Carriere?

Karen de la Carriere is a retired mistress for hire.

She lives in Los Angeles, CA, with her common-law husband, Jeffrey Augustine aka Jeff Augustine aka JeffSwift.

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Wheels of Justice

When you read as much about the Backpage and its disgusting legacy of dehumanizing crime and shameless greed as we do here, it can be at times a little overwhelming.

The stories may be graphic, even obscene, in their details but we believe they are important to tell. With so much happening in

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The Backpage Guilty Pleas Keep Stacking Up!

Recently on this blog we helped break the story of a former middle school teacher who admitted paying for sex with a 14-year-old girl trafficked on Backpage and his sentencing last week to 10 years in prison.

And last month we told you about a Wisconsin man who prosecutors say trafficked seven young

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TonyOrtega: Chief Propagandist-At-Large Part II

Yesterday we took a focused look at a recent Backpage judgment that underlines the reprehensible behavior of both the company and its would-be apologists like Backpage Chief Propagandist-At-Large Tony Ortega who defended its business model on the grounds that it was ‘freedom of speech’.

One of the true tragedies of yesterday’s appalling story

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Tony Ortega: Chief Propagandist-At-Large

Arielle Silverstein and Tony Ortega

One of the questions we are often asked here in the midst of our reporting on the widening Backpage scandal is just how Backpage specifically and intentionally facilitated child sex trafficking.

While men like Tony Ortega have busied themselves devising elaborate defenses seeking to minimize and excuse

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Lowest of the Low

“I helped turn a weekly newspaper with a web site into a digital enterprise.”

– Tony Ortega, boasting to the New York Times Blog, September 14, 2012

We’ve been looking at various incidences of fallout following Ortega’s ‘help’ turning a failing weekly newspaper into a digital brothel enterprise, the likes of

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Another Week, Another Backpage Scandal

Another week, another scandal tied to Backpage and its unscrupulous band of executives and sycophantic defenders.

Today we found a report on Decrypt that child prostitution site Backpage used multiple crypto currency exchanges to launder its cash. The site, which closed last year, moved hundreds of thousands worth of dark money through crypto

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Closing the Loophole

Kamala Harris was the first charged the owners of Backpage.com with more than 10 counts of pimping.

Backpage.com, the infamous classified ad website, was notorious for hosting advertisements connected to sex trafficking. As has been discussed here and elsewhere, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 74 percent of all the reports

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Prosecutors Target Backpage’s Lawyers

We’ve previously reported that Tony Ortega has just cause to be worried about being legally implicated in the broad-sweeping net federal prosecutors are using to round up all those who played a part in the Backpage sex trafficking scandal. Today we find another reason for Tony Ortega to be concerned that justice will

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