In 2015, Backpage.com — the controversial classified ad site that was seized and shut down by the FBI on April 6 — sued the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, after he attempted to pressure credit card companies into refusing to do business with Backpage.
The suit, which got as far as a petition to the United States Supreme Court, claimed that Sheriff Tom Dart violated Backpage’s First Amendment rights by attempting to cut into the site’s revenue stream, writing letters to the Visa and Mastercard companies pressing them to cut off Backpage accounts.
In the lawsuit, Backpage denied that its site promoted prostitution and sex trafficking of children. But after Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in early April, admitting he was aware that Backpage allowed outlawed prostitution ads — and that the site deliberately edited advertisements to conceal the fact that they offered illegal sex services — Dart now says that the lawsuit was nothing but a pack of lies deisgned to deceive the courts.
On Thursday, Dart filed a 22-page court motion, accusing Backpage of fraud by filing the lawsuit, and demanding that Backpage reimburse Cook County for all of its legal fees over the three years of the court battle, according to a report Thursday in The Chicago Tribune.
“Backpage admitted on April 5, 2018, that its entire First Amendment civil rights case was based on untrue facts from the beginning, and thus a hoax, a fraud on this court, a fraud on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and a fraud on the United States Supreme Court,” Dart wrote in the document he submitted on Thursday, to U.S. District Judge John J. Tharp Jr.
Dart also accused Backpage, whose founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin were released from custody last week on $1 million bond each, of using the lawsuit to deflect law enforcement efforts to shut the site down.
“Backpage and its attorneys also have squandered resources of the Cook County State’s Attorney Office, the Office of the Sheriff of Cook County and the taxpayers of Cook County under the guise of a civil rights plaintiff, in its phony lawsuit, simultaneously fighting off the advances of law enforcement so that it could continue to make hundreds of millions of dollars from its enterprise that admittedly facilitated and promoted prostitution and child trafficking,” Dart continued.
The indictment against Backpage and its founders says that the site raked in a staggering $500 million from online ads for illegal sex services.
Lacey was apparently so flush that according to a report by a Phoenix TV station, he recently deposited a check for $500,000 into the account of a total stranger by accident.
Sex workers continue to cite evidence, however, that the federal shutdown of Backpage has made life more dangerous for those who consensually and voluntarily pursue their trade, and that taking the site offline deprives authorities of a valuable tool for spotting criminal sex traffickers.
According to a report on the news site VICE, a recent study showed that online sex traffickers regularly use a “code” of emojis to signal that they are offering children for sex. But the shutdown of Backpage removes a forum where law enforcement could read that code, identifying and tracking down sex traffickers, the report said.
Image via Backpage.com
