Sex charges are political, Backpage co-founders say

The Phoenix co-founders of Backpage, the website the federal government claims was used by the men to facilitate prostitution, said in an interview with Reason magazine published this week that their charges stem from the journalism they oversaw at their Phoenix tabloid, New Times.

In the interview, conducted in July at the home of James Larkin, the former publisher of New Times, the two men said their crusading style of reporting earned them enemies in high places.

“We didn’t really care what politicians saw in us,” Larkin said to Reason, “And that’s come back to haunt us.”

Among the enemies they earned were U.S. Sen. John McCain and his wife, Cindy, Larkin said. The article cites past reporting the New Times did on Sen. McCain’s ties to the savingsand-loan executive Charles Keating and on Cindy McCain’s addiction to prescription pills.

“Part of the reason this has really worked is because you have Cindy and John McCain involved in this,” Larkin told the magazine, “and they see an opportunity to even a score. We think there’s no question that this is partly their doing.”

Larkin and his co-founder, former New Times Editor Michael Lacey, were charged in April with multiple counts related to the since-shuttered website.

The two are accused of knowingly facilitating prostitution through classified advertising on the website. They also are accused of money laundering. Other Backpage executives also have been charged. Two, including the former CEO of Backpage, Carl Ferrer, have pleaded guilty to charges. Ferrer, as part of his plea deal, has agreed to aid in the prosecution of Lacey and Larkin.

Cindy McCain could not be reached for comment. John McCain died Saturday afternoon at the family home in Cornville.

In April, after Lacey was arrested, Cindy McCain said she and other advocates had tried to work with Backpage to alter its business practices. But, she said, Lacey and Larkin would not relent.

“They simply felt they were in the right and everybody else was in the wrong,” she said.

Backpage had faced criticism for years for its advertising practices. But efforts against the website, in both criminal and civil court, were stymied by a federal law that protected websites that posted words written by other people.

The law was designed to allow a website such as Yelp to be held harmless if someone posted a bad review about a restaurant. It also allowed news websites to police their comments sections, editing out objectionable postings without being held liable for all content.

But the charges Backpage faced this year were based on internal emails that, prosecutors allege, showed the executives purposefully went after the prostitution business.

Larkin told Reason, in the interview published this week, that the issue is about free speech, not about the freedom for consenting adults to exchange sex for money.

We’ve never, ever broken the law,” Larkin told the magazine. “Never have, never wanted to. This isn’t really — I know this is probably heresy — this isn’t about sex work to me. This is about speech.”

Lacey described it as the “biggest speech battle in America right now.”

He said the First Amendment was not simply designed to protect “the rights of the McLaughlin Group to speak their mind on television.”

He said it was designed to protect “unpopular speech, dangerous speech. Speech that threatens the norm. Not only do we have that right, our readers have that right. The (Backpage) posters have that right.”

The two men are confined to Maricopa County and must wear ankle monitors. Larkin told Reason that “everything has been brutal.”

Lacey predicted a victory in court. “We didn’t go looking for this fight,” Lacey told Reason. “But we didn’t back away from it either.”