Backpage Founders Finally Get Trial Date, Will Face Jury Aug. 17

More than two years after they were first busted on charges that their site, Backpage.com, profited from making sex trafficking easier, then illegally laundered their millions from the enterprise, founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin will finally face a jury in a federal courtroom in the case.  Though in the weeks after their April 2018 arrest—and shutdown by the feds of the Backpage.com site—authorities said that Lacey and Larkin would have to wait until January of 2020 to be tried on the charges, that time frame has now come and gone with no action taken. Instead, according to a report by the Associated Press, the trial for the co-defendants will open on August 17 in federal court in Arizona, where the servers and bank accounts that kept the site running were reportedly located. Lacey, along with Larkin and several others who were then students at Arizona State University founded the Phoenix New Times weekly newspaper in 1970. Over the next two decades, they grew the New Times into a nationwide chain, eventually purchasing Village Voice Media—a competing chain of “alternative” weeklies—to add more papers to their portfolio. But in 2004, they founded Backpage, an online classified ad site specializing in ads for sexual services. Eight years later, Lacey and Larkin split from Village Voice Media, keeping the highly lucrative Backpage business for themselves. Federal authorities say that the site has generated about $500 million in revenue from the sex ad business. They also say that the site’s management maintained a policy of editing advertisements to conceal any illegal activities, including sex trafficking of minors, that were advertised on the site.  Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer pleaded guilty to the charges against him in 2018, and cooperated with authorities, telling them that he had “conspired with other Backpage principals … to find ways to knowingly facilitate the state-law prostitution crimes being committed by Backpage's customers." Dan Hyer, the site’s sales and marketing director, also pleaded guilty, and admitted that he took part in a scheme to unfairly compete against other classified ad sites by offering free advertising to sex workers. Photos by Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, Sacramento County Sheriff's Office