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]

70,000 Conspiracy Theorists Just Like Tony Ortega

It has been a tumultuous week in America. While the nation’s capital may have been the initial epicenter of the unrest, fallout across social media platforms in the wake of the rioting continues to reverberate.

One of the tremors affecting social media at the moment caught our attention here at the blog in

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Shattering Ortega’s Conspiracy of Silence

One day in and the new year is already starting off with a bang. Here at the blog we’ve long been sounding the alarm bells over the conduct of sex trafficking apologists like Tony Ortega. One of the major concerns we had about the way Tony conducted himself with such brazen hypocrisy during

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Secret Clubs, Hidden Agendas

A quick follow-up to the story we first reported to you regarding the insatiable lust for notoriety of attention-grubbing hack wannabe “celebrities” like Tony Ortega and his erstwhile sugar mamma Karen de la Carriere.

We were asked by several readers for more information on the methods by which these shameless individuals seek to aggrandize

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Tony’s Sugar Momma Teaches Him The Ropes: “If You Can’t Succeed, Cheat”

Tony Ortega and Karen de la Carriere

Some time ago we ran a cutting indictment of Tony Ortega’s blatant attempt to artificially inflate his social media presence by manipulating his list of Twitter followers.

As we shall see, this penchant for deceptively ‘gaming’ social media is a trait which is all too common among

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For Ortega, Backpage There Are No Isolated Incidents

In terms of bad press for Backpage, it has been nothing short of a disaster. In addition to the two separate child sex trafficking rape cases, this past week, a third case made the news.

On Wednesday, 26yr old Trevien Thomas of Fresno, California pleaded guilty to driving a 14-year-old girl from Dallas and

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An Undeniable “Reign of Terror”

In what many are calling the biggest judgement against a Backpage pimp to date, this Monday brought news that East Texas man who trafficked children and adults during an “eight-year reign of terror” in North Houston was ordered to serve a life sentence in federal prison and pay nearly $1 million in restitution to

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Ortega’s Strategy Exposed: Sanitize, Legitimize, Normalize

Hot on the heels of a former trafficked child sold and raped by Backpage and its accomplices, we have news of yet another still darker account of a new underage victim which further erodes Tony Ortega’s fraudulent Backpage defense.

As we have seen, the gist of Tony Ortega’s faulty argument that ‘Backpage and

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Obfuscation By Circumnavigation Puts Ortega In No-Win Situation

More details out today following the explosive news we first reported to you in our last post about a young woman who had been one of the many children trafficked by Backpage.

The young woman — who has requested anonymity in the case — was bought and sold to be raped during a

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The Questions We Ask Looking Back at 2020

If it comes as a shock to you to learn that human trafficking wasn’t a federal crime in the United States until the year 2000, you are not alone. It is a fact many have asked us to confirm this year — and one which, frankly, still amazes even us.

As we look back

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Ortega’s ‘Backpage Defense’ Gets The Boot As Sex Trafficking Businesses See Eviction Rates Soar

Back at the end of October we raised the then controversial proposition that landlords should begin using their positions to deny rental privileges to those who engage in or promote human trafficking.

At that time we even, somewhat jokingly, suggested in our piece that this might be a compelling argument for Tony’s wife

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