The Ringer
by Kate Knibbs
October 6, Carl Ferrer, the goateed CEO of Backpage.com, left his Amsterdam office to visit the online classified-advertising site’s U.S. headquarters. He never made it back to Europe. The 55-year-old was promptly arrested by law enforcement officials from various jurisdictions after his plane touched down at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport. He was then taken to Sacramento County Jail in California and authorities raided Backpage’s mid-rise Dallas office for evidence in the case authorities planned to build against him. The California attorney general announced felony charges of pimping, pimping a minor, and conspiracy to commit pimping against Ferrer. (And yes, these are the real names of charges in California.)
Backpage is the most prominent online destination for on-demand paid sex in the United States, and according to the arrest warrant for Ferrer and others, it made nearly 99 percent of its over $50 million revenue in California from January 2013 to March 2015 from charging for erotic classified ads. It is, in essence, an escort advertising network nestled in a Craigslist knockoff.
Despite its CEO’s arrest, Backpage is still operational. Clicking through the website today, one can see that it is stocked with ads for all sorts of humdrum products, from car parts to studio apartments to overstocked moccasins. Many of its sales categories are sparsely populated. Last week, Brooklyn’s “Roommates” section contained one to three listings a day from people using the website to try to find a stranger to share a home with. It looks like a relic from an earlier era of the internet, with an ugly, spare design that announces how little the site’s dowdy appearance affects its success. Meanwhile, hundreds of emoji-decorated listings from people looking for far more fleeting and intimate meet-ups populate its sexual categories, from the euphemistic “Body Rubs” to the more straightforward “Strippers.” There are promises of “Girlfriend Feelings,” busty Russians, a “big soft booty white girl” in town for just one more day, women offering to deliver themselves as if they were on Seamless, and so much more. Clicking around for less than five minutes, I saw many butt cheeks. It is, quite clearly, not stringently moderated for explicit content beckoning an exchange of goods for sex.
Backpage’s lurid side has wormed its way into pop culture. Rappers like YG, Vic Mensa, and Migos all name-drop it in songs. (Sample lyric, courtesy of French Montana: “And I ain’t got a Backpage / fucking with them hoes.”) Last October, Backpage figured into a viral Twitter story about “hoeism” and murder. The website is a sloppy pseudo-honeypot where police click through hundreds of ads peddling sex before pouncing. In Jacksonville, Arkansas, last year, police dubbed a sting “Operation Backpage” after using the website to nab women selling sexual services. Last month, 10 men were arrested in Colorado after police monitored Backpage to build a sting operation. Also in November, a man who police call a pimp and who allegedly chained teenagers up inside a makeshift bedroom in Detroit was arrested after the teens escaped; a criminal complaint filed against the man says he would arrange “incalls” and other meetups for johns in his ramshackle de facto cell through several Backpage postings.
Ferrer, a former Dallas Observer classifieds salesman, wasn’t in jail alone for long. Michael Lacey and James Larkin, the founders of Backpage.com, joined the company’s CEO the following week, when they turned themselves in in Sacramento after the California attorney general charged each of them with conspiracy to commit pimping. (All three men have since been released on bail.)
“Backpage and its executives purposefully and unlawfully designed Backpage to be the world’s top online brothel,” California Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a statement in October. Her office had brought the charges against the men in the middle of what would turn out to be her successful campaign for U.S. Senate.
Backpage general counsel Liz McDougall called the arrests an “election year stunt.”
Whether or not it was designed to be a brothel, and whether its owners are neutral web hosts attacked for political gain or nefarious pimps adept at skating the law, is what the court must decide. But what Lacey and Larkin wanted Ferrer to do when they launched Backpage was something less controversial: They wanted him to steer the advertising business that would keep their journalism passion project afloat. …