Legal heavyweight joins bout against Backpage
Backpage.com, a beleaguered classified advertising website that has been sued repeatedly, accused of letting users post sex-trade ads, now has to reckon with a legal juggernaut who is championing three women in their pursuit of justice.
David Boies, considered one of the top attorneys in America, has co-signed a brief supporting the women in their pitch to get their case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Boies once served as special trial counsel for the Department of Justice and was Al Gore’s lawyer in the 2000 election dispute, defended IBM and Napster, butted heads with Bill Gates and Microsoft, and defended the NFL in the 2011 labor suit Brady v. NFL. He argues that Backpage shouldn’t be protected by a federal law that has shielded the company for years.
“The sex trafficking of children is an evil of our society, and the Internet is the primary method of advertising children for sex,” Boies said in a statement. “The Supreme Court should decide whether Congress intended to protect websites engaged in this type of activity.”
The three women claim they were sold in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and were raped thousands of times, by men led to them by Backpage.com ads. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns threw out the case in 2015, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Bay State jurist’s decision earlier this year.
Both courts came to the same conclusion: Under the Communications Decency Act, websites like Backpage are protected.
But the women, represented by Boston law firm Ropes & Gray, asked the Supreme Court to hear their case last month. And now numerous groups — including the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and the Organization for Prostitution Survivors — have lined up to support their petition.
They argue that the Communications Decency Act — and Section 230, which protects website owners from legal claims stemming from hosting information written by third parties — goes too far.
“The fact that websites like Backpage have been permitted to facilitate criminal activity with impunity creates a grave risk of harm to the public,” Boies’ brief states. “It is therefore critical that this Court grant review to realign the judicial interpretation of Section 230 with the purpose and legislative intent of the statute.”
Courts have consistently read Section 230 broadly enough to protect sites like Backpage, decisions that have received the backing of organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that fights for civil liberties in the digital realm.
The argument has been that allowing liability for Backpage could leave other websites open to suits and render Communications Decency Act protections useless.
But Boies and those who have joined him say it’s time for the pendulum to swing the other way.