How The Feds Destroyed Backpage.com and Its Founders
“I’m having the lawyers inquire as to whether or not I can bring a library with me to prison,” Michael Lacey said with resignation. The Backpage co-founder and former alt-weekly magnate was standing in the library of his labyrinthine Paradise Valley, Arizona, home. The room abuts one of Lacey’s two home offices, each teeming with books, family photos, journalism awards, and file folders—a mix of case files and past work he’s been combing through as he works on a book proposal.
It was March 2024, and Lacey was still holding out hope of avoiding federal prison. But prosecutors were eager to send him there, and Lacey recognized that may well be his fate.
I was there with a Reason video crew, interviewing Lacey for a documentary. This was my second visit to Lacey’s home. The first, in 2018, was not long after the feds raided the place, and the vibe was different then. Lacey and his longtime friend and business partner James Larkin were pissed but not dejected. They cracked jokes about their enemies—folks such as Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. They told elaborate stories about the heyday of their alt-weekly empire, finishing each other’s sentences. They broke out wine from Larkin’s vineyard and vowed they would fight this to the end.
Larkin committed suicide a week before the pair’s second federal trial was scheduled to start in August 2023.
In my second visit, Lacey was still cracking jokes and telling stories. But no one was there to finish his sentences, to remind him of the name of some official they angered once upon a time, to laugh with him about the wild office parties they threw in the 1970s, to try to rein him in (not always successfully) when his language got a little too colorful. “I still catch myself before I’ve had coffee, saying ‘Ah, I’ve got to send this to Jim,’ OK? I’ll see something and it’s like: ‘Oh, fuck. No sending anything to Jim.'”
In September, Lacey turned himself over to the U.S. Marshals—no library in tow, unsure even where he’d be imprisoned. Prosecutors recommended a 20-year sentence for the 76-year-old Lacey. U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa instead sentenced him to five years plus a $3 million fine.
Lacey’s path from journalist to felon is at once unique—a product of particular times, temperaments, technological changes, and moral panics—and all too familiar. It’s a story of how far government agents will go to punish people who defy them, and a playbook for authorities intent on wresting more control over online speech of all sorts.
How It Started
Lacey and Larkin were no strangers to First Amendment conflicts when the Backpage prosecution started. Their friendship and business partnership began as part of the team running a scrappy anti-war student paper called the Arizona Times that launched in 1970. It would grow into the Phoenix New Times, a thriving weekly unafraid to skewer Arizona power players, including Arpaio, McCain and wife Cindy, and many others.
In the 1980s and 1990s, their portfolio grew to include alternative weeklies in more than a dozen cities, including the iconic Village Voice in Greenwich Village. Lacey mainly handled editorial and Larkin handled the business end of things.
Both fought in court again and again, defending their First Amendment right to distribute, write, and—this is the part that finally brought them to ruin—run ads as they saw fit. New Times was even convicted in 1971for running an abortion services ad, but it fought the case to Arizona’s Court of Appeals, which ruled in the paper’s favor and struck down the state’s law against advertising abortions or birth control.
In 2004, Lacey and Larkin launched the website Backpage as an extension of the classified ads that had always run in the back of their newspapers (and most other newspapers). Backpage.com had all the sections you would find in its print counterparts, including apartments for rent, job openings, and personals and adult services ads, separated by city.
At first, nobody paid much attention to the site. When attorneys general declared war on adult services ads online in the late 2000s, the similar but better-known Craigslist was the platform in their crosshairs.
Though newspapers had for decades published ads for escorts, phone sex lines, and other forms of legal sex work, Craigslist’s online facilitation of these ads coincided with two burgeoning moral panics. The first concerned the rise of user-generated content—platforms such as Craigslist and early social media entities that allowed speech to be published without traditional gatekeepers.
The second panic: sex trafficking. A coalition of Christian activists and radical feminists had been teaming up to push the idea that levels of forced and underage prostitution were suddenly reaching epidemic proportions. To support this narrative, they tended to conflate all prostitution or even any sort of sex work with coerced sex trafficking.
Becoming a Target
“Sex trafficking is usually the way it was framed, even when it was consensual sex work,” says Techdirt founder and editor Mike Masnick, who has been covering tech policy since the 1990s. “Finally Craigslist was like, ‘forget it.'” The platform shuttered its adult ad section. “And then you have the same A.G.s complaining about Backpage. And it’s like, ‘Oh, OK, that’s where everybody went.'”
In 2012, then–California Attorney General Kamala Harris said: “Backpage.com needs to shut itself down when it has created as its business model the profiting off the selling of human beings and the purchase of human beings….Good businesses, such as Craigslist, understood how it could be abused and mishandled and they shut that aspect of their business model down.”
Harris was far from alone in making these kinds of statements. For years, politicians right and left had pushed the narrative that Backpage actively allowed ads for human trafficking, including the trafficking of underage girls.
It wasn’t true. The company prohibited ads for illegal conduct; it reported posts by people suspected of being underage to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children; and it worked with law enforcement agencies, including local cops and the federal Department of Justice, to bring down people who used the site to perpetuate sexual exploitation and abuse.
“Based on the reporting and the details and everything that’s come out in the court documents, it appeared that they took the role of doing content moderation seriously,” Masnick says.
Prosecutors would later argue many of the ads were only thinly veiled enticements for prostitution. Backpage would argue that so long as ads involve seeming adults who weren’t explicitly offering prostitution, the posts were legal and so was providing a forum for them.
“You can’t tell from looking at an ad on a site like that whether or not it is for, in fact, an escort service—which is legal in most states, I think licensed in a majority of states—or someone who posts the ads but intends to engage [in prostitution], which is illegal in most jurisdictions,” says First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere, who now works as chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “Nor can you tell from the face of those ads that it would have anything to do with [sex] trafficking.”
Backpage was a business “that not just one but every single lawyer that looked at the business said, ‘This is legal,'” says Lacey. “And because we made enemies politically, all that got overlooked.”
Backpage “ended up with relationships with police departments” across the country, he adds. The person overseeing this collaboration—sometimes even testifying in court against alleged traffickers on behalf of prosecutors—was Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer, who got a certificate from then–FBI Director Robert Mueller thanking him for his cooperation.
Federal prosecutors acknowledged Backpage’s helpfulness in confidential memos from 2012 and 2013 that I obtained in my reporting. “Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests,” prosecutors wrote in such a memo. The staff “often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations.” Backpage “genuinely wanted to get child prostitution off its site.” Witnesses “consistently testified” that Backpage “was making substantial efforts to prevent criminal conduct [and] was conducting its businesses in accordance with legal advice.”
A judge wouldn’t allow those exculpatory memos to be admitted in court after prosecutors accidentally turned them over to the defense team. “Not only not admissible but ordered physically destroyed,” says Lacey. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“What changed between [when the memos were written] and when the prosecution happened in 2018 is that Backpage had been increasingly successful in its First Amendment litigation, and the political pressure to do something, anything, to make Backpage go away increased during that time,” says Corn-Revere, who was at one point part of a firm that represented Lacey and Larkin in court. “These [were] guys who did not back down from a fight. And so when the political pressure to do some
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