Lampooning Rape, Kidnapping and Sexual Assault

More than a decade ago, Tony Ortega was editor of The Village Voice in New York. There he became the leading defender and apologist for the lucrative underage sex trafficking ads site, Backpage.com, that funded the Voice—and Ortega’s paycheck.

Accordingly, Ortega, as the Voice attack dog, vilified those decrying Backpage and stooped so low as to blame the underage girls sold for sex on the site, claiming they had misrepresented themselves in ads, “violating” Backpage rules.

Backpage was finally revealed to be so dangerous and destructive to the lives of underage boys and girls who were victimized by vicious pimps and sexual predators, the federal government seized and shut it down in 2018.

But before his stint at Village Voice as a Backpage apologist, Ortega had already cemented a sordid reputation for exploiting sexual abuse victims to forward his twisted agenda.

In 2002, career criminal Roy Dean Ratliff, 37, kidnapped, bound, gagged and raped two young girls—Tamara Brooks, 16, and Jacqueline Marris, 17—then drove them to a remote area and held them captive in a stolen SUV. Ratliff threatened several times to kill the girls. Managing to escape their bonds, the pair attacked their assailant with a knife and a broken bottle, buying enough time for the police to locate the SUV. Ratliff was subsequently killed by the police and the young women were rescued.

America was horrified by their brutal ordeal, but cheered their heroism and story of survival. One man, however—Tony Ortega—saw the tragedy as an opportunity for satire and ridicule. Writing for New Times LA under a false name, Ortega described how NBC was supposedly planning to launch a new reality television show called Survive This!

The premise of the show? Female contestants would be chased by “convicted sex offenders” through a remote area to see if they could survive for 48 hours.

In Ortega’s parody, a “network executive” stated the show would be like “‘Survivor’ meets Hannibal Lecter,” the cannibalistic serial killer from Silence of the Lambs, and had him quip, “To put it bluntly, jailbait sells….Clothes getting ripped off would boost ratings.”

The Hollywood Reporter subsequently outed Ortega as the source of the fake story, which Ortega insisted he intended to be “humor.” Snopes.com stated: “Humor is far more difficult to accept as such when it lampoons those who have been victimized by all too real events.”

An outraged New York journalist wrote, “Tony Ortega takes two teenagers, already brutally raped…and editorially sodomizes them by appropriating their identities, putting lies in their mouths and pimping them as shameless opportunists.”

The Church of Scientology took a leading role in exposing Tony Ortega’s enabling of child sex trafficking through Backpage.com. In response, Ortega retaliated with a torrent of assault pieces on the Church. That, in turn, generated too much attention on the Backpage controversy and cost Ortega his job at The Village Voice.

In short order, fueled by anti-Scientology funding sources, Ortega had resumed the publication of daily blogs directing hatred and bigotry at the Church that exposed his duplicity.

Ortega bills himself an expert on Scientology, yet he has never so much as visited a Church of Scientology, and generates a blatant, paid agenda of harassment.

One could then ask: What kind of character would dedicate his working life to denigrating the religion of millions around the world?

Answer: The twisted kind, one who would ridicule in print the kidnapping and rape of teenagers Tamara and Jacqueline as fodder for a journalistic “joke”—and then become a strident defender for Backpage.com.

That’s Tony Ortega.