Internal DOJ Memos: Backpage.com Aided FBI Sex Trafficking Probes

In April of 2018, federal authorities shut down and “seized” the online classified ad site Backpage.com, supposedly on the grounds that the site was covering up for online sex traffickers who advertised on the site. But according to newly revealed internal Justice Department memos from several years before feds shuttered the site, Backpage took active measures to purge illegal sex traffickers and cooperated with law enforcement in sex trafficking investigations, according to a new report by Reason.com. The memos show that the federal investigation into Backpage began at least as far back at 2012, eight years after the site was founded. But though the feds were looking for child sex trafficking activities on the site, they found instead that Backpage was going out of its way to help law enforcement authorities catch the very sex traffickers it was accused of facilitating. “Unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations," wrote federal prosecutors Catherine Crisham and Aravind Swaminathan in a memo from April 3, 2012, which Reason posted online. Backpage provided sex-trafficking  investigators “maximum information and assistance permitted under the law," according to the prosecutors’ memo. But the feds revved up their investigation into the site anyway, digging through more than 100,000 documents, interviewing more than a dozen witnesses—including six in front of a grand jury—and issuing multiple subpoenas. But nine months later, according to a second DOJ internal memo only made public this week, the FBI had found no “smoking gun admissions which we had hoped would propel this investigation to indictment.” The investigation proceeded anyway, and five years later not only did the authorities shut down the site, they slapped the site’s founders, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, as well as other top executives, with a 93-count indictment, as AVN.com reported, charging them with hauling in about $500 million from their alleged enabling of prostitution on Backpage. According to the Reason.com report, many of those charges stem from the same 2012-2013 period during which, the memos reveal, prosecutors were unable to find any offenses with which to charge Backpage and its founders. "Witnesses have consistently testified that Backpage was making substantial efforts to prevent criminal conduct on its site, that it was coordinating efforts with law enforcement agencies,” the federal prosecutors said in their 2013 memo. Photo via Backpage.com