Jury convicts Backpage co-founder on only one charge

A few weeks ago, in November, Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey was convicted on only one charge out of the myriad of charges against him. The federal jury in Arizona remained deadlocked on all but one charge. If they had remained deadlocked on all the charges, this would have been the second mistrial declared for Lacey. In the first trial, a mistrial was declared because prosecutors would not stop mentioning child trafficking after the judge ruled that it couldn’t be mentioned in court.

So what was the charge Lacey was convicted for? Out of all the prostitution charges he was facing, the jury deadlocked on all of them. However, Lacey was convicted on a single count of money laundering.

As you may know, Lacey founded Backpage with co-founder Jim Larkin as a craigslist competitor, but their focus was mainly on thinly veiled ads for prostitution. It’s also where they made the vast majority of their money. The former journalists claimed the Backpage ads were a free speech issue. The federal government disagreed when they seized Backpage and shut it down in 2018. Tragically, Jim Larkin took his own life a week before this trial was set to start. For more on the history of Backpage, you can read all my posts about it here. Lacey even contended in previous testimony that he didn’t know Backpage was being used for prostitution.

What I don’t understand is how can the jury convict him of money laundering but not for any of the charges of facilitating prostitution. The money laundering charge stated Lacey transferred $16.5 million to a bank in Hungary, knowing the money was made from illegal activity. What other illegal activity were they making money from on Backpage besides prostitution and human trafficking? And don’t think children weren’t trafficked on Backpage because they most certainly were.

The maximum sentence for the single charge of money laundering is 20 years in federal prison. Since Lacey is an old, rich, white dude, I’ll be shocked if he even steps inside a prison cell. I have yet to see when sentencing is set to take place or whether federal prosecutors will try Lacey again for the prostitution charges. So far, they’re 0–0–2 in that department. They may want to settle on pushing for the maximum on the money laundering charge.

One of the many things that bugged me about Backpage was that they claimed to be a vaunted resource in the fight against human trafficking. They constantly talked about how they would happily work with law enforcement to help find trafficked children. However, as I always liked to say, you can’t be both the cause and solution to the same problem. I dubbed that the Backpage Paradox. But let’s take a look how Backpage was actually ‘helping’.

According to the testimony of former Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer, Backpage would flood the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) with reports in order to overwhelm the NCMEC. They would also file reports on other platforms to the NCMEC to take away the attention from Backpage.

And yet, a jury still couldn’t convict Lacey for facilitating prostitution. Once again, the oppressed fail to receive the justice they deserve.

Source: 2 Backpage executives found guilty on prostitution charges; Lacey convicted of financial crime