Phoenix domestic-violence shelter files lawsuit against Backpage

A Phoenix domestic-violence shelter filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the website Backpage.com and its founders, claiming the online marketplace created victims of sex trafficking that the shelter spent time and money housing and counseling.

The lawsuit was filed by the Sojourner Center in the U.S. District Court in Arizona. It lists as defendants Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the two men who started the website, Backpage.com, an outgrowth of the back page of classified advertising in the alternative weekly they founded in Phoenix, New Times.

The website, according to a U.S. Senate investigation, morphed from a general marketplace to one that gained most of its revenue from adult ads. Some of those ads, the investigation found, involved underage girls and boys being offered for sex.

The lawsuit relies heavily on the results of that investigation, released in January by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

That report said company emails revealed that employees of Backpage worked to conceal the illegal activity on its site in order to keep the profits flowing.

Sojourner Center says in the lawsuit that in 2016 it cared for at least 15 women and children who were offered for sex on Backpage.com. Sojourner said that the website is responsible for creating the victims the center has sheltered.

The time and money it spent on sex-trafficking victims was diverted, the lawsuit says, from Sojourner Center’s intended mission of helping victims of domestic violence.

A similar lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Florida, with a non-profit also saying that working on helping victims of sex trafficking has distracted it from its work involving cases of human trafficking, which typically involves forced labor.

A spokesman for Lacey, Larkin and Backpage did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday evening.

The lawsuit outlines the stories of three underage people, two girls and a boy, who received help at Sojourner and reported being offered for sex on Backpage. It also outlines the stories of five women who say they were trafficked on Backpage as adults.

Adult advertising removed

Following the release of the Senate investigation, Backpage removed adult advertising from its website. Instead, visitors to the site saw the word “censored.”

Backpage, in previous statements, has said it has a First Amendment right to provide a forum for people to interact.

Besides Backpage, the lawsuit lists two other websites, BigCity.com and EvilEmpire.com, that it says aggregate the advertisements on Backpage. The lawsuit also lists several holding companies that it says are involved in owning the websites.

In the fall of 2016, Lacey and Larkin faced criminal charges out of California, accused of acting as pimps. A judge tossed those charges out in December, but they were since refiled.

Lacey and Larkin were called to testify at a Senate hearing in January. Both men refused to answer questions, citing their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The two started the alternative tabloid New Times in 1970, launching an empire that would produce alternative weeklies in other states. The company eventually bought the Village Voice in New York.

But Lacey and Larkin sold off the tabloids and held on to Backpage. It started seeing an increase in adult advertising after the online classified site craigslist removed its adult section under pressure from politicians and activists.

The issue of sex trafficking has received political attention nationally. In Arizona, a governor’s task force, chaired by Cindy McCain, the wife of U.S. Sen. John McCain, has ensured it has received attention from top law-enforcement officials here.

Advocates have successfully redefined the street crime of prostitution as sex trafficking, portraying the people offering sex for sale as victims of abuse, either ongoing or in the past.

The lawsuit was filed by David Boies, a New York lawyer who represented the government in its successful antitrust case against Microsoft and who represented Vice President Al Gore in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. Boies started his own firm, Boies Schiller Flexner.

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