Prosecutor accuses Backpage executives of child trafficking; defense calls for mistrial
Prosecutors laid out for a federal jury Friday how the executives of Backpage, the classified advertising website, worked to corner the market on online classified ads for prostitution and how, when confronted with obstacles from banks and law enforcement, invented workarounds.
“They definitely knew that these were prostitution ads,” said Reginald Jones, an assistant U.S. Attorney. “They didn’t shut down the website. They didn’t stop these ads from being posted.”
Jones offered a motivation: “Please,” he said. “They were generating the vast majority of their revenue from these ads.”
Jones said that in the years before the website was seized by the government, it was earning more than $100 million annually.
The opening statement from the prosecution at the U.S. District Courthouse in Phoenix marked the beginning of what is expected to be a lengthy trial against six former executives and employees of Backpage. Each is charged with facilitating prostitution through the website. Four of the executives are charged with money laundering.
Among the people who were charged in April 2018 were the co-founders of the website, Michael Lacey and James Larkin. Those two men started the alternative weekly New Times in Phoenix, founded in 1970, that grew into a chain that sprouted across the nation and eventually bought out New York’s Village Voice.
After Jones finished his opening statement, defense attorneys for the six former Backpage.com executives and employees called for a mistrial based on what Jones told the 17-member jury.
Among their reasons: Jones, in his statement, led the jury to think that if the defendants don’t testify, which is their Constitutional right, it should be looked at askance, as if they couldn’t defend their actions.
Jones said in his statement that “these defendants can’t deny that the vast majority of ads in the adult section of Backpage.com were for prostitution.”
Paul Cambria, an attorney for Lacey, one of the co-founders of Backpage, said that statement eroded the right of his client and the other defendants to not take the stand.
Cambria noted that the topic came up frequently during the two days of jury selection, with some potential jurors saying they expected an accused person to testify, particularly if they were innocent.
The prosecutor told the judge he was paraphrasing a quote that a Backpage executive said while meeting with an anti-trafficking advocate. That advocate from the group Polaris, he said, was expected to testify.
Cambria also said that the opening statement told a sweeping story but didn’t address specific charges in the indictment against the accused.
“If a prima facia case was not made in the opening, the charge can be dismissed,” Cambria told the judge.
The indictment lists 50 ads posted on Backpage that the government contended were prostitution ads. Cambria said none were mentioned by the government.
“He didn’t mention specific ads in the opening,” Cambria said.
Thomas Bienert, an attorney for Larkin, also faulted the government’s opening statement for mentioning that children were trafficked on Backpage, an issue the judge had warned the government to tread lightly on, given how explosive it would be in jurors’ minds.
“We can’t unring this bell,” he told the judge.
Judge Susan Brnovich said she would review those matters, and others the defense attorneys raised, over the Labor Day weekend. She asked for specific documents to review and ordered an expedited transcript of the hearing.
The next scheduled court date was set for Wednesday.
A series of objections from the defense
Attorneys for five of the six defendants charged were set to make opening statements of their own.
Bienert, slated to go first, said his statement was likely 90 minutes long and he did not wish to have it interrupted midway through after a parade of attorneys arguing for a mistrial lasted until past 4 p.m.
Bienert said he felt caught in a no-win situation as jurors would be left with the government’s statement “percolating” in their minds over the coming four days.
Defense attorneys, in pre-trial motions, have asserted that the ads, as objectionable as some may find them, are protected under the First Amendment. Backpage, they have argued, was merely a host for the ads and carries no liability for words that others created.
Jones’s statement on behalf of the government stretched to nearly two hours.
He started with an anecdote of a mother, whom he said would testify, who found her 14-year-old daughter had gone missing after being advertised for sex on Backpage. Jones said that the mother booked an appointment with her daughter’s pimp, agreeing to pay $250 for a session. Jones said that the girl, upon seeing her mother at the pre-arranged meeting place, a bus station, fell to her knees and cried.
That final detail in the story brought the first of what were at least eight objections by defense attorneys.
Brnovich had given the government rules about how it could discuss trafficked women and children. It could mention the bare facts of the story, but not get into detail. Brnovich sustained that objection, meaning she thought it had merit.
There was an objection after Jones mentioned that Backpage hired people overseas to populate the website with ads poached from other sites.
There was another objection after Jones said that Backpage executives ordered a “deep cleaning” of the website around the time CNN was going to air a story accusing Backpage of trafficking children.
Jones walked jurors through a year-by-year history of Backpage.
He said executives planned to position itself as a venue for prostitution ads, in part, by reaching out to people who had placed “escort” ads on other websites and offering to place those ads on Backpage for free.
Jones told jurors that business grew after Craigslist shut down its adult section. Jones did not tell jurors that the website had done so under pressure from law enforcement, legislators and anti-trafficking advocates.
Jones said that Backpage went from netting $60 million in 2011 to $135 million in 2017.
Jones said that Backpage had a system screening out words and images in ads. But, he said, though individual words or images were censored, most of the ads would be posted.
Jones said that taking out a word or phrase indicative of prostitution didn’t change the fact that the overall ad was for prostitution.
“Stripping out or taking out ‘suck your’ and ‘lick your’ did nothing to change the true nature of what was being offered,” Jones told jurors. “It was still a prostitution ad.”
Jones said that as financial institutions, including Chase Bank, Visa, MasterCard and American Express, stopped doing business with Backpage, the company got creative.
Backpage created two other companies with the benign names Website Technologies and Posting Solutions, Jones said.
Payments were funneled through those entities, in an attempt to work around the Chase ban of Backpage, he said.
After the credit card companies stopped accepting payment, Jones said the company moved to bitcoin, or for those who preferred, check or money order made out to Posting Solutions, and not Backpage.
Jones told the jury that outside a U.S. Senate hearing, a mother of a woman who had been trafficked on Backpage confronted Lacey. Jones said the woman will testify that Lacey told her that “if these yahoos would keep their (expletive deleted) mouths shut we wouldn’t have all these issues.”
Jones said that he was grateful that the mothers, law enforcement, lawmakers and anti-trafficking organizations “didn’t keep their mouths shut and because of that Backpage.com is shut down.”
Cambria, Lacey’s attorney, argued that the use of that story by Jones was yet another reason that Judge Brnovich should declare a mistrial.
Text source: MCC.EXCHANGE
