Senate lawmakers voted unanimously to cite a sex-advertising website CEO Carl Ferrer for contempt after he ignored a subpoena that could shed light on whether his company facilitates sex-trafficking.
Backpage is the first company in 20 years to receive a Senate contempt citation, a vote that Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio — who is chairing the investigation into the company, alongside McCaskill — hopes will lead to the Justice Department compelling the website to comply with the subpoena. Senators voted 96-0 to hold Ferrer in contempt.
“Our investigation showed that Backpage ‘edits’ advertisements before posting them, by removing certain words, phrases, or images,” Portman said on the Senate floor.
“For instance, they might remove a word or image that makes clear that sexual services are being offered for money,” he added. “And then they would post this ‘sanitized’ version of the ad. While this editing changes nothing about the underlying transaction, it tends to conceal the evidence of illegality. In other words, Backpage’s editing procedures, far from being an effective anti-trafficking measure, only served to sanitize the ads of illegal content to an outside viewer.”
“Backpage has refused to cooperate,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said on the Senate floor before the vote took place. “Under any circumstances, I find it shocking that a company would refuse a lawful subpoena of the United States Senate. It’s particularly outrageous given that Backpage has already admitted that serious criminal activity, including sex-trafficking of children, occurs on its site.”
“In order to address the problem of selling children and coerced adults in online marketplaces in a legislative manner, first we need to understand it better and that’s what our work has been,” Portman said in February, when his Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on investigations recommended the contempt citation be passed.
Backpage won a First Amendment lawsuit in November, when a federal court ruled that the sheriff of Cook County, Ill., improperly pressured credit card companies to stop processing ad sales on their website. But Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., said the First Amendment offers the company no protection from a Senate inquiry.
“The CEO of Backpage [shouldn’t] try to hide behind the First Amendment, making arguments that don’t bear out under the First Amendment because we’re talking about illegality, the trafficking of children in horrific ways,” Ayotte said after reading a litany of sex-trafficking cases reportedly tied to Backpage.
