LOS ANGELES—A woman in Washington State who says she became a victim of sex trafficking through Backpage while still a minor has filed a lawsuit against the now-defunct classified advertising site — as well as against Salesforce, the business software company that contracted with Backpage. The lawsuit was reported by the Tacoma News Tribune newspaper.
Backpage, a site widely used by sex workers to obtain clients while also keeping the ability to screen them and weed out potentially dangerous customers, was seized and shut down by federal authorities in April of 2018. The company’s founders and top executives were slapped with a 93-count indictment charging them with facilitating prostitution and money laundering.
While Backpage has been the target of multiple lawsuits, the Washington suit is the second against business software firm Salesforce over its contract with Backpage. The firm advertises itself as “the world’s #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform,” a service it provided to Backpage.
“Backpage was assisted in their marketing endeavors by the corporation, Salesforce, and the minor Plaintiff was advertised and sold to be raped in Pierce County and Kitsap County,” the lawsuit against the two companies states, as quoted by the News Tribune.
The suit goes on to allege that Backpage was “the leading and most notorious marketplace for online sex trafficking and commercial sex in the United States between 2004 and 2018,” and could not have reached that status without “the custom-ready data and marketing tools designed by Salesforce.”
The suit was filed by attorney Erik Bauer, who has sued Backpage on several occasions previously and described himself as “kind of a leader in this thing.” The plaintiff is identified only by the initials S.P.
But Salesforce was sued in 2019 as well, by 50 women who said that they were trafficked through Backpage. That suit also alleged that because Salesforce provided software and support for Backpage, it should also be liable for harms to women who say they were trafficked through the site.
In that case, a judge ruled that Salesforce was protected by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which says that software companies are not “publishers,” and therefore cannot be held legally liable for content that appears on their platforms.
The founders of Backpage, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, were arrested in 2018 and are currently awaiting trial — which has been delayed until April of this year.
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