Backpage Kingpins Go on Trial—and Sex Workers May Pay the Price
Three years after the most popular place to advertise “adult services” was seized by the U.S. government, its founders will stand trial Wednesday in an Arizona courtroom, in a case that could have lasting repercussions for the future of online sex work.
The defendants, alt-weekly titans Michael Lacey and James Larkin, claim their website, Backpage.com, was a utopia for free expression, a place where “unpopular” speech was allowed to flourish and thrive. But the U.S. Department of Justice contends it was also a place where women and girls were sex trafficked against their will, with Lacey and Larkin’s knowledge.
Whom the judge sides with will determine whether Lacey and Larkin are locked away for decades, and whether online sex work—and possibly online expression, in general—will ever look the same again.