Backpage.com seeks dismissal of trafficking lawsuit

With precedent and Congress in their corner, attorneys for Backpage.com will appeal to a federal judge in Boston today to broom a harrowing lawsuit brought by three teens who claim they were the victims of sex trafficking as minors because their bodies were put up for sale on the controversial classified ads website.

The company eliminated its adult-entertainment ads one year ago following a critical probe of its practices by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which stated in its report, “The National Association of Attorneys General has aptly described Backpage as a ‘hub’ of ‘human trafficking, especially the trafficking of minors.’ ”

The adult ads ran for several years while the three Jane Does contend they were prostituted by relatives and an ex-boyfriend while they were as young as 14. Two of the girls are from Massachusetts and the third is from Rhode Island, according to court filings.

Their lawsuit accuses Texas-based Backpage.com of being a “criminal enterprise” that provided the forum by which they were sold to men in multiple states in violation of the Massachusetts Anti-Human Trafficking and Victim Protection and federal Trafficking Victims Protection acts.

Backpage.com does not “minimize the grievous harms Plaintiffs allege they suffered,” the website’s lawyers tell U.S. District Court Judge Leo T. Sorokin in their motion to dismiss. “But Congress made a considered policy judgment that the law should hold actual wrongdoers responsible, rather than cripple the Internet by imposing liability on websites that host content created by third parties.”

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 prompted Sorokin’s colleague Judge Richard G. Stearns to lament in 2015 that he had “no choice” but to close out a similar suit against Backpage.com by alleged teen trafficking victims.

“Congress has made the determination that the balance between suppression of trafficking and freedom of expression should be struck in favor of the latter in so far as the Internet is concerned,” Stearns wrote in his decision.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to take on the case after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First District in Boston upheld Stearns’ order.

“This is a hard case — hard not in the sense that the legal issues defy resolution, but hard in the sense that the law requires that we, like the court below, deny relief to plaintiffs whose circumstances evoke outrage,” the appellate judges reported.

Founded in 2004, Backpage.com offers classified listings for a variety of products and services, including job and real estate listings.