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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening.
For almost a decade, Backpage was the world's largest sex trafficking operation. Seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, in eight hundred cities throughout the world. Backpage ran thousands of listings advertising the sale of vulnerable young people for sex,
reaping a cut off every transaction. The owners of the website raked in millions of dollars, but many of the people in the advertisements were children as young as twelve and forced into commercial sex trade through fear, violence, and coercion.
In taking down back Page, veteran California prosecutor Maggie Crell tells the story of how she and her team prevailed against this sex trafficking monolith, beginning with her early career as a young da She shares the evolution of the anti human trafficking movement through a fascinating combination of memoir and legal insight. Crell reveals how she and her team started with the prosecution of street pimps and ultimately ended with the takedown of the largest purveyor of human trafficking
in the world. She shares powerful stories of interviews with victims, sting operations, court cases, and the personal struggles that were necessary to bring back Page executives to justice. Finally, Krell examines the state of sex trafficking after Backpage and the crucial work that still remains. The book that we're featuring this evening is taking down back Page, fighting the world's largest sex trafficker, with my special guest, former prosecutor and author,
Maggie Crell. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Maggie Crell, Thanks so much.
Dan, Good evening, Good evening.
Let's start off with the focus of this book. As you write early on in the book, tell us what the focus is of this book for.
Us, Please, Yes, I wanted to write about sex traffic in the United States. I wanted readers to understand where it happens, how it happens, and who it impacts. I wanted readers to understand the devastating consequences of sex trafficking, and I wanted law enforcement and lawyers to have a roadmap to being part of the solution.
You do talk about what this story is not about, So tell us what it's not related to in terms of sex work, right, I mean.
Not all sex work out there is sex trafficking, and the term sex work and sex trafficking sometimes get conflated. You know, not every transaction is non consensual, but the focus of this book are the many, many cases where it wasn't consensual, and that's what we call rape, and the exchange of money doesn't change that. And so I wanted to focus on sex trafficking and sexual abuse and what we did to stop it.
You said that you also saw firsthand the numerous rapes, robberies, and murders that occurred through Backpage.
That's right. The commercial sex industry isn't safe, and you know, survivors and people out there are at more risk than the general population when it comes to robberies, rapes, and murders.
You talked about the survivors who were part of the back Page case that we will be talking about right now, were forced into sex trafficking, and most of them as children. Their names have been changed to protect their privacy, and they were sold in multiple cities and sometimes in multiple states. Isn't that correct?
That's right. You know, I interface with numerous survivors throughout my time as a prosecutor, in this case in other cases, and what they went through is unimaginable. They face really steep barriers to even coming forward to even talking to law enforcement. I applaud their courage, and you know, without them and them being willing to share their stories, there wouldn't be a case, a book, an anti human trafficking movement, and they're truly the leaders of all of this.
You write about early on in this you were the prosecutor for the state of California, County of San Joaquin, and you write about December seventh, two thousand and four in the story you call Well on a story, the chapter you call entitled the Motel. Tell us about what you found out about this particular motel.
Well, when I first started my career as a prosecutor, I was a deputy district attorney, and that's the local county office that prosecutes crime in that region. Although they are enforcing state law, and based on my experience in prosecuting some of the prostitution cases, I really that the prostitutes shouldn't be where they were. I saw them as victims.
The narrative of them staring at me in orange jumpsuits being prosecuted for selling their bodies and the dead of night didn't fit, and I wanted to explore what we could do differently, who was helping these people, if anyone, why they were there, how it started, and what we
could do to make it stop. And I was able to work up an investigation against the local motel that really had become the hub for commercial sex, and instead of helping these vulnerable teenagers that were literally being sold in his parking lot, it appeared that the owner of the motel was really just continuing to enable the commercial
sex trade and clearly benefiting from it. Some of the evidence that we were able to obtain showed that he was actually handing out condoms and renting rooms to known predators. And so because based on that, we were able to kind of take systematic approach, So it wasn't about just one person, it was about shutting down a real hub of an industry in that area. And so shutting that motel was kind of my first dip in my career into making a case that's more systematic.
You charged the motel owner with committing prostitution and pimping, and so as you say, you shut down this motel, But to your horror, what did you find about afterwards when this motel was shut down? What else did you find?
Well, I mean, it did shut down one corridor of human trafficking. But as my career continued, and at the same time, the legal landscape around human trafficking was changing. In California, for example, it wasn't until two thousand and six that we first passed our human trafficking law. And you know, as this legal landscape is changing, I'm moving
through my career doing bigger, more serious cases. And by the time I got to the Attorney General's office where I was a supervising Deputy Attorney General, the motel metamorphosized into a website and that was backpage dot Com.
And you say that it was more lucrative, more prolific, and more evasive than the motel had ever been.
That's right. You know, it wasn't sitting on a street corner where I could survey it, it was in cyberspace, and it was active in eight hundred cities around the world.
What was your legal strategy You said it was the same. What was the legal strategy for this?
The way the legal strategy was the same was it was about following the money and disrupting a system.
Can you talk about Operation Wilted Flower for US?
Sure, Operation Wilted Flower and is discussing the book, and it's basically an example of how we were innovative and used financial crimes to go after human trafficking. But it involved a ring of brothels that were sometimes residential brothels so just you know, looked like basic houses, but inside people were being sold for commercial sex. And then also some massage establishments that appeared to be regular massage establishments but were really brothels for commercial sex, and so we
went after those. We went after those cases. We were able to infiltrate several trafficking rings that way, and we were able to again follow money and disrupt a system.
You say that, you talk about the California Statutes was similar to the Federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, whichs been codified a few years before. You say, tell us about this law and the statute.
Sure, most states do have statutes that nearor the federal law, and the federal law has evolved over time, started in the early two thousands, and it protects people from being trafficked by force, fear, or coercion. And I think coersions are really important word. And I'll say too because I know this is a true crime podcast and people are focused on gruesome and gory details and murders and all
of that. But what we found with sex trafficking is a lot of the cases happened with coercion with force, but it's more manipulation. And you know, I think it's real important that that is part of the statute.
You talk about that the law was inspired by a nineteen ninety five case in California. Ty garment worker escaped from a sweatshop in El Monte, a commercial city in La County. Tell us just this is a very illustrative example. Tell us about this person that escaped from the sweatshop.
That's right. The modern human trafficking movement really started based on this heroic escape and the sharing of the story, and that brought about awareness and new laws aimed at human trafficking. So this was seventy or more people that were living in slave like conditions behind barbed wire at a sweatshop. This wasn't a sex trafficking case. This was a labor trafficking case. And I should flag that human trafficking is an umbrella term that encompasses both labor and sex.
The point of it is that the person is not free to leave, and so it's actually not the nature of the work, whether it's sex or washing dishes or working in a garment factory. It's the fact that the person is being forced or being coerced and isn't free to leave. And that was certainly the case back in the tight the tai garment factory industry in the Los Angeles area in the early nineties.
You jump ahead a little bit to twenty ten. You approached the chief of your division and proposed starting a new unit with someone named a mentor named Dave Drewliner that would focus on organized crime. What did you want to do by focusing on organized crime? What were you going to include in that organized crime effort?
I really wanted a human trafficking unit. I knew we needed that, and I knew that that should be our focus. But I thought that organized crime was a broader term and perhaps I would be able to smuggle the human trafficking work into the unit.
So what is the climate at that time in America in terms of consideration for sex trafficking, human trafficking, and then what happens in your own fight to be able to form this team and to make some meaningful prosecutions, the.
Climate was tough. There were definitely survivors and advocates who were trying to raise awareness, but within the law enforcement community, there weren't a lot of cases that were being prosecuted. It was still sting operations where those selling their bodies for sex were being arrested or those buying informally called John's, but people who are buying sex purchasers of sex being
arrested in sting operations. But there really wasn't an effort to go after the organized crime aspect of human trafficking, and there weren't a lot of resources, especially for survivors.
You talk about a investigative genius name Ray Diaz, what did he develop ultimately that would help in this fight?
Ideas is for sure an investigative genius, and I was lucky to be able to work with him on this case and on pretty much everything else I did at DJ.
But he was really the brains behind Operation Wilted Flower, which he asked about a little while ago, and what he came up with was a strategy to get informants into these brothels and massage partlers that I mentioned, And so he was able to basically wire them up for video and audio and get them to infiltrate these brothels and bring back footage that showed the victims, you know, the suspects, and real audio about how the operation was working.
He would have the informants pretend either that they were trying to be customers or that they were trying to set up a similar business and wanted to talk about rotating some of the victims. And he really did a tremendous job with it, and it ended up allowing us to bust several locations, offer services to survivors, and take some really bad actors out of the industry.
Let's talk about an actual prosecution now, another one that you feature this Andrew Jordan charged with sex trafficking and an ed victim named Tasha. So let's talk as you do in the book tell us about Tasha and Andrew Jordan.
Yeah, I mean that part of the book is important because I think it really lays out how sex trafficking happens in that case. It started with an ad where Tasha met Jordan and he manipulated her. At the time, she was really vulnerable. She was on her own, she was young, she needed money, she had some emotional challenges, and she presented with a lot of the vulnerabilities that are really common among victims. And Jordan used all of
those vulnerabilities to his advantage. He completely pushed her into the sex trade, made her continue, and then really started requiring her to make a quota each night, tell him everything that happened. And you know, a few weeks in he was controlling her every move and that is the kind of coercive control that is typical of a trafficking case. So we laid all that out, We went to trial on that case. She was one of two victims of Jordan's and he was ultimately convicted at the end.
Now that gives you some confidence, and but what does happen as a result of that prosecution.
As a result of that prosecution, he was convicted of two counts of sex trafficking as well as I believe assault in domestic violence, and he was sentenced to a prison term in California.
What about the concept of aiding and a betting and how does it relate to this? And you talk about in two thy and thirteen a.
Really important concept in criminal law in California and everywhere else. It's the idea that when somebody is responsible for a crime, it's not just the principal who goes in and uses the gun and takes the money. It's everybody who knowingly helped set it up. So you know, if it's a convenience store robbery, you have the person that drove there, you have the person that provided the gun. You have the person that played lookout, you have the person that
drove the getaway car. You have a number of people who may have been involved in some way, and as long as they do so knowingly with that same intent to rob the convenience store, they are legally on the hook. And what's important about human trafficking and what we learned from the other cases is that most of these defendants aren't acting on their own. They're getting some help. And in the case of backpage back Page was the one that was helping.
You talk about back Page in eight hundred cities, and you talk about twenty twelve, human trafficking was recognized as the world's second largest criminal business, with only the manufacturer of sale of drugs being more so. But you also write, and I've heard this expression before, you can only sell a drug once, but you can sell a young girl a child over and over and over again.
I hate that expression, but yes, it's true. And unlike drugs, we're talking about people here, and it's really the most vulnerable people in our society.
Very very interesting. You talk about a little bit later in the book how it came upon that to pass by Congress in nineteen ninety six the Communications Decency Act, which protected online platforms. This is an important issue to this story. Can you explain that for us?
Yes, this is a really important issue. And you know, this kind of goes back to your question about what this what it was like prosecuting this motel versus this website, And the biggest difference is the Communications Decency Act, which has nothing to do with motels but has everything to do with protecting websites. And the idea of the law is to protect online platforms from liability when based on content posted by users. This law had protected back Page
for many years. It protected back Page from civil suits and initially protected back Page from the case that my office filed.
Now you say, before you have to go after Backpage, you needed an investigation plan, and one of those priorities was to be able to get a search warrant for emails. Tell us why that was so important and what was your investigation plan at that time?
That's right, And I think you know, it's important to know just you know, what it really takes to investigate these kinds of cases. I mean, it's not the kind of thing that can be summed up in a you know, a one hour episode of Law and Order. It really takes extensive planning and resources and just building these cases step by step by step. I was trying to figure out who was running the company and how I knew who Some of the owners might be on paper, but
I had no idea what their involvement were. Sometimes companies have shareholders who aren't involved at all and have no idea what's actually happening. Sometimes companies have investors. Sometimes companies have you know, day to day operators who are really, you know, running the illicit part of the business. So I needed a lot of information to even figure out who could be a suspect in this case. And this is really, you know, typical of how we approach our investigations.
We looked for ways to get search warrants to find that may be useful to a criminal case. So in this case, we were looking and we knew that Carl Fair was the CEO, and we were looking to figure out whether we could get into his emails to figure out who he was communicating with and what he was communicating about. To run back Page.
You talked about Lacey and Larkin. They had built a news media empire called New Times Media, and with that it's really helping the Backpage. They defended their right to run the world largest online brothel, didn't they.
That's right they have. They've defended themselves. They see this as a free speech issue, and using the Communications Decency Act, they continued to build their empire.
What's horrifying was that Larkin and Lacy own the company and would show up at meetings with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children along with shareholder Don Moon. Tell us us a little bit about this.
Yeah, and this came up in the congressional investigation of Backpage. But the National Center for Missing Exploited Children actually reaches out and meets with back Page to talk about the fact that missing children were showing up on this website again and again. And National Center for Missing Exploited Children gets tip reports for missing kids and suspected commercially exploited kids, and these kids often are found on back Page or
matched on back Page. And so the point of the meeting, according to the documents that were in the congressional report, was to kind of give back Page some guidance on how to how to basically stop kids from being sexually commercially exploited on the website. Back Page walked away from the table.
Sure, you talk about Kamala Harris and her role, and her role will be more important as time goes on, But you also talk about an interesting group called Thorn. Tell us about Thorn, who's involved with Thorn and what they were specifically able to do.
Yes, Thorn is an incredible nonprofit organization and what they've done is basically used use the Internet and use special software to attempt to minimize and interrupt the commercial sexual exploitation of children online. I was able to work with Thorn on one of our early operations in the backbase investigation. They used an analytics program to tag backpage posts that
appeared more likely to be minors than adults. And I'll treface this by saying, one of the things that's really hard in these cases is you go through these ads and you see these pictures and I'm focused on the female section because that's our investigation, but there's there were there were boys and men on there as well. But you see these pictures of these girls and they could be sixteen or they could be twenty five, and you
really don't know. You don't really know whether or not they're a minor from just looking at the pictures, but you look for clues. And some of the clues we looked for were it's a Bay Area ad and the phone numbers a Las Vegas area code, and then you look up that phone number and see several girls that are advertised using that phone number in different places. So clues like that give us an idea of whether it
might be trafficking. And then just looking at the pictures and the background and the whether it's a hotel background, and that sort of thing casing together these cases. But what Thorn did was really to come up with an analytics program that could analyze that sort of data, could look for clues and how the ads were written and come back with information. So part of it was we were trying to test their programming to see whether it was useful or not. And then also we were trying
to recover minor sex trafficking victims. So using information that they provided to us early on from their program, we were able to make contact with the people and the ads who they thought were most likely to be minors.
You talk about Special Agent Brian Fischner being assigned to the case. With his help, you continued investigating back page structure and who were the company officers and where the day to live. How else do you continue with this pursuit of these people.
That's right. Brian was so great to work with. He was really just so smart and diligent and worked so hard on this case. He had a lot of good ideas, and one of them was that he placed an ad on back page using an undercover officer picture, and he posted it. He used an undercover phone number and used an undercover credit card to purchase the ad. The point of this was a few things. One to be able to later trace the money too, to be able to see what kind of reception a regular ad would get.
Were all the people calling for commercial sex or were some of them just calling for you know, other kinds of dating. We wanted to know the extent of it, and then we also wanted what happened when he asked to get it taken down. So within minutes of the ad being placed, the undercover officer that was managing the phone was getting hundreds of calls and texts, and the nature of them was purely sexual, very graphic, obviously calls
for commercial sex. The people that were calling were expecting the person at the other end to fulfill all sorts of sexual desires and to meet up. So that was very clear. I think there were you know, eight hundred and six slimy phone calls and texts in a matter of a few days. And then Brian's next step was contacting Backpage to try and get the ad taken down.
And so I'll continue a little bit with how that worked out, But basically Brian called Carl Fair, the CEO, on his cell phone, and said, you know, Essentially, we
suspect that this is a sex trafficking ad. Brian caught off guard that he actually picked up the phone, but he did, and so they talked for a few minutes and then he said he'd send a follow up email, and that is how we established Carl Fair's email address, and he did end up he did end up taking down the ad, but that gave us a really useful clue for being able to initiate.
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dot com promo code true murder. Now, Maggie, you were talking about the clue that would lead to the successful search warrant potentially for the emails of company executives and people involved in the data day operations. What was that clue that was discovered?
That's right, We learned that so after Brian had talked to Carl fair we and received an email. We knew his email address, and then we learned that that email
address was actually on a Google server. So rather than having to track down the website servers that in the email service that might exist for this company that we knew by this point was headquartered in Texas, and I think we knew that there was an office in Arizona and then some movement off seas, but we really weren't sure where in California we could connect the dots on this.
But we discovered that Google actually held the email servers, and so we were able to send our search warrant right to Google.
Tell us about November twenty fifteen, with the Attorney General executive team in San Francisco.
So I think we skipped a little bit over and a little bit over Vice President Harris's role when she first came to the Attorney General's office. That was a major boost for anti trafficking efforts in the office. She wanted us to focus on human trafficking and it was definitely a top priority and that really gave me a lot of to start building a case against back Page. But when I got to that meeting in November twenty fifteen, I felt like all of my hard work up until
that point kind of meant nothing. It was really hard. The lawyers in the meeting were great, they were asking tough questions, but I didn't feel like they really got the case. And at the end of the meeting, I didn't get approval to file it.
Yeah, you talk about the Communications Decency Act again and how you have to prepare to be able to defend against it. How do you do that?
That's right? So the Communications Decency Act isn't without exceptions. When the person that owns the website creates some of the content, they're not protected. And when the person that runs a website, I argued, is involved in criminality and is involved in this extent of criminality knowingly that that should be an exception too. But the court didn't agree with me on that point, and the court ultimately didn't find enough content creation to find them outside of the
Communications Decency Act. But what I was preparing during this part was really to show how Backpage helped post these ads, the way they moderated the ads, the way they helped users, the way they gave law enforcement the bare minimum, but didn't really do anything to let law enforcement get in front of the problem. And so my theory was that developing these facts would take them out of the protection of the Communications Decency Act.
Right, you find that Backpage assists traffickers and posting ads and victims without alerting law enforcement. You also talk about that staff would reach out to these users to offer special credits and ways to use bitcoin. Tell us more about the damaging and incriminating evidence that is found.
Right, And back Page did a whole lot more to help users, and it did to assist law enforcement. Clearly, their business model was to continue to aggressively sell their product, and they use bitcoin and you know, other strategies to essentially be evasive and evade law enforcement. Their goal was to continue to build the world's top online brothel.
You're meeting with victims routinely, and you mentioned a victim named Carissa, and she's an important person in this story as well. What does Carissa do for you or introduce you? To tell us about Carissa.
I would never call Carissa Phelps a victim. She happens to be a survivor of sex trafficking, but she's also an author and a lawyer and a partner at a law firm and has had such an amazing career. I was inspired by her book that came out a while ago, but she was she was running, you know, several different organizations to help survivors of trafficking and help raise awareness within law enforcement. She was doing a bunch of trainings.
So I met her through you know, a network of people that we're doing similar work, and she talked to me about back Page and you know, I already knew about it at the time, every prosecutor did, but she was she really gave me a push. I remember, you know, sitting with her in the conference room and she said, how can you let this website do this? How can people just be sold in an open marketplace on the internet. This happened on the corner. It would be shut down
in a heartbeat. Why is this okay? And it really kind of pushed me and challenged me, and I knew it wasn't okay, and I was dedicated and determined to make a stop.
You talk about Flight twenty one, and you talk about a task force if being formed or a new unit pardon me, being formed in Texas, and you called this person cursed the Melton tell us about that conversation.
That's right, Well, I already told you, Dan that I had been trying to get a task force going in California since twenty ten. And I think a colleague, you know, sent me an article about Texas starting a unit just to sort of rib me a little bit that everybody else was able to do this, and I still hadn't.
But I called Kirston Melton, who was the head of that unit, and I introduced myself and we started getting to know each other, and we were talking about different trends that we were seeing in our respective states, the growing gang involvement in sex trafficking, the way that people were being moved around, the challenges we were facing in our cases, the barriers that we saw for survivors for reporting and working with law enforcement, just the challenge of
a lack of resources and a lack of support for survivors. And so we talked through all those things and really built a relationship, and eventually I confided in her that we were investigating Backpage, and she of course knew what it was, and she immediately wanted to help. And we talked about the fact that the headquarters was in Dallas, and there she was in Texas to get a different part of Texas, but still in Texas Texas Attorney General's office.
So we made a pack to work together on the case, and she ended up being a tremendous help.
You talk about text messages while you're on a vacation from Kamala Harris. What does she have to say when you finally get to.
Talk to her, That's right. So we talked about my meeting in twenty fifteen where I didn't get the green light, and I should say that they didn't say not to keep investigating it. They definitely said keep going, but I just didn't know whether I would get approval to file the case. And time went on and I was very anxious to get this case charge. I felt like I was running out of time, and every night more people
were being sold on this website. So I was on a little vacation, which was pretty rare for me at the time, and I was with my son actually kayaking in the lake, and my phone kept bringing I brought it with me because we were going to take some pictures, and I saw that it was the Chief Deputy and they kept calling them like I had better pick up. So I picked up and it was the actual Attorney General, Kamala Harris, which is pretty rare for her to call, to reach way down the ORG charge to call, but
there she was. And you know, I'm trying to kayak. I've got my kid right there. I'm in a small boat that I'm trying not to tip. My phone receptions cutting out, so I'm a little bit panicked. I'm like folding the phone with my shoulder in my ear, and I'm paddling, paddling, paddling back to the dock. I jump out of the dock and basically wearing a bathing suit and no flip flocks, and I just start, you know, running up the up the dock and through the parking lot and up the hill to try and get some
semblance of cell phone reception. And she's asking me a bunch of questions and I can understand about every fourth word, and my heart is pounding, for sure, because I've been waiting for this call for years by this point. But we have a really great conversation and we talked through the case, and at the end of the call, she says, go.
Get them you right that. Meanwhile, the jury back in the Jordan case is he's guilty on all counts and most importantly, the jury believed the account of Alicia and Tasha. He got twenty one years, two counts of sex trafficking, pimping, and assault. How did that feel?
That's right? It was really important. It's really important. I mean, these these survivors who have the courage to come to court and testify and face their abusers. It takes tremendous courage. And you know what sets them apart is that they were they were willing to do that, and it's a
it's a really really hard thing. And the verdict tells them that the jury believes them and that what happened to them matters, that they matter, and that what happened to them was wrong and it's not okay, and you know, we can't we can't fix all the problems. I mean, the healing process is life long for many of these survivors. But that was an incredible step for them.
You're right about Brian Fitchner again, and he goes to the judge for these crucial search warrants. Does the judge sign these warrants and for the restaurants?
Yes, So after we got the green light, we were, you know, kind of scurrying to set everything up and figure out the operation. And by then we felt like we had built a solid case. Brian put together really strong arrest warrants and he went to the courthouse to see whether a judge would sign off on the arrest of Carl Ferrer and the two other owners.
So there is a very dramatic part of this book that talks about capturing these people and making sure that no one gets to you know, it's all in secret, so people you don't want, you want to have this element of surprise with these people and is very exciting in terms of the extradition fight as well. But tell us a little bit just about what's happening at the same time in terms of the search warrant in Texas.
Sure, so the judge in Sacramento did sign the arrest warrants. So I remember Brian Fickner texting me that he felt like he was holding a lottery ticket with these with these warrants, so those get put into a system whereever these defendants are, they are arrestable at that point. At that point Brian and I both went to Texas. We knew that Carl Ferrer was arriving on flight twenty one, which was a flight from the Netherlands where he had been to Houston Hobby Lobby Airport. That was the longest
flight of my life that I was never on. Ryan was in Houston at the airport. I was in Dallas, Texas, waiting to go into the headquarters of back Page. We had a search warrant that was signed by a Texas judge that Kirsta had worked on simultaneously, and the goal was to be able to search the offices once the
defendants were already under arrest. We didn't want to go into the offices before Pharaoh was under arrest because if he found out, we thought there was a chance that he could flee and that every criminal case where you're doing this kind of work, you have to kind of think through worst case scenarios and figure out how to
game plan. You have to worry about whether a suspect has evidence that they can destroy, whether through their cell phone or their laptop, and then you have to worry about whether there's any safety issues for you know, whether they might flee the country and be impossible to find.
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Now you talk about a tentative ruling. Everyone is excited, but there's a tentative ruling, and what does this tentative ruling say to you tell you so, we brought so we were.
Able to successfully extradite Calfarer. We had all three defendants in custody in a Sacramento County courtroom. They were charged with multiple felonies pimping and conspiracy. But very early on in the case, the defense moved to dismiss the case using the Communications Decency Act. I knew it was coming, thought it was well prepared for it, and I thought I had a wedding argument, but the judge clearly disagreed. The tentative ruling was a ruling basically dismissing our case.
So I pulled myself together and went to court and argued as best I could. I thought I gave him some hooks to kind of hang his hat on and give us a ruling that would allow us to survive. But unfortunately I didn't. We you know, we got kicked out of court very early on in the case.
Yeah, you talk about Right about twenty seventeen, the US Senate would issue a scathing report detailing how Backpage was trafficking children, so right that he would refer then the matter to the US Attorney General for criminal charges. And a year later the phenomena of the me too movement.
So tell us how things change. Some things like you talk about Jeffrey Epstein's arrest and indictment, and then you talk about you were in contact with a person named Bassen Banafa, a forensic Auditor'll tell us about what happens as a result of this me too movement and shifting societal attitude and the frential Sure.
So, I mean, I felt like things were starting to shift, but they weren't shifting fast enough, not fast enough for these survivors that were suffering, not fast enough for me in my case. And I was I remember just sitting in my office just really crushed that our case had been dismissed and I was trying to figure out how I could put it back together. But Assome Binoffa had worked with me on other cases and is a forensic auditor and really really just such an incredibly hard worker
and smart guy. He was a major asset in this case, and he helped me come up with a money laundering theory for the case. So we had gotten all of these bank records when we did the search warrants during the arrest, which was only a couple months before this dismissal, so we started putting together the bank records and building a money laundering case, and that's ultimately how we prevailed.
So two days before Christmas in twenty sixteen, about two months after the case had been dismissed, we recharged it as a money launder in case. New evidence, new theory, new judge, And that's ultimately how we were successful.
And what was the.
Result of this success in terms of backpage, in terms of prosecution of those involved.
So I think you alluded to this. We ended up based on a number of factors and things going on now with the congressional report. But the US Attorney's Office also got involved in the case. They had been investigating as well, and in a joint operation in twenty eighteen, the federal government, the FBI, the US Attorney in a joint operation with the Texas AG and our office, the California Attorney General's Office did a joint takedown of the website.
So the website was actually seized. There's a message on there still that says that this website has been seized, and that was just a huge moment. It meant that no one else would be able to be sold on that despicable website.
You also write about President and Trump signing a law creating an exemption to the CDA for sex trafficking.
That's right. While all of this was going on and I was slogging it out in court over the Communications Decency Act in Washington, d C. A group of dedicated senators and congress people and their teams were sorting through ways to fix the Communications Decency Act to clarify that it doesn't shield those that are knowingly facilitating sex trafficking.
That was known as the fastest sess the amendment, and it was signed in twenty eighteen, during the same couple of weeks that the website was shut down and the owner or the CEO, Carl Fair Backpage, led guilty to multiple charges.
You talk about the media circus along the way here. What was the media's reaction. You talk about a change in sort of their narrative and also just the public response.
It was a tough case. I mean, I felt like it wasn't like the topic wasn't well understood. The point of our charges weren't well understood when they were first filed. But I think there was a real changing of the
guard on. That part of the reason for the case and the book, and it's definitely a goal of the movement as well, is to raise awareness and make sure people understand what human trafficking really looks like, that the people and the ads are real people, that many of them don't want to be there, and that many of them were children.
You talk about a couple of those children, Leslie and another young girl, just as an example, a real example. Some of this stuff is clinical and we talk about the statutes, but the real people involved and some of these are really very tragic cases. So could you tell us about Leslie and the other young girl.
I mean, the people involved are really the heart of the heart of the work. I mean it started with the people that were able to escape from the garment industry, and you know it's still going on with people who are being commercially sexually exploited today. So Leslie was one of the victims that we met with along the way. She and her little sister were trafficked as children, as teenagers, and they had an abusive pimp, but wasn't the kind
of thing where they were forced with violence. They were really coerced because they didn't have anywhere else to go, and they were afraid, and they had a number of vulnerability factors, such as having to run away from abusive homes, not having a real positive relationship with family, and just all these factors made them really vulnerable to a manipulative trafficker.
We still see this kind of dynamics out there every day, and it's just this lopsided relationship where a person is coerced and forced and sometimes with physical force, but sometimes just psychological manipulation, and then they end up selling their body for somebody else's benefit.
You talk about the result, the actual tangible results of Backpage being taken down on prostitution and demand, tell us about that.
That's right. There were some studies done right after the site was shut down, and it showed that there was a real plunge in sex trafficking at that point and in demand. I mean, I have to say that, you know, after a two year pandemic and everything that's been going on online, I can't say that shutting down one website, you know, really ended sex trafficking. But I know that
it was a step in the right direction. I know that it sent a major message and it certainly helped the people who were trafficked on that site.
Do you think it would make a serious deterrent for people that to form organizations and companies like Backpage?
I certainly hope.
So what else did you find as the aftermath of all of this. We talk about Brian Epstein, and people know that he was previously not being wasn't able to be successfully prosecuted or indicted, and then there was So this me too movement is a seismic shift in attitude? Is this evolution? Are you happy with what has happened from the results of your work and the results of everything that's happened federally and these charges and this story.
Yes, I am really proud of this work. I think we're definitely moving in the right direction, you know, not because of me and my case, but because of the courage of so many people that have come forward and shared their stories and spoken out and spoken up for dignity for all of us. I know that we still have a long way to go, but just looking back on the human trafficking movement and all that's been accomplished in the last twenty years, I think it's a really incredible movement.
You have a photo of the three culprits in a cage in court during the trial, and you write about actually getting to see this Carl Fair for the first time. What was that like?
Yeah, I remember when I first saw him in court. It was in Houston, Texas. I hadn't slept in a couple of days because you know, we've been traveling, and then we had been searching his office and then you know, right before his court appearance, I learned that he was trying to get out of custody and I needed to go to court in order to convince the judge to extra write him to California. So I was running on sheer adrenaline and I came to court and that's when
I saw him for the first time. And there he was lined up in an orange jumpsuit, you know, in a row full of people who were charged with serious crimes just like him. And it was just a moment that really struck me, that this moment where everything kind of caught up and no matter who he was and how much money he had and what he had been doing, he wasn't going to get away with it. And you know, I'd imagine that's how people felt last week when Maxwell
got convicted. Of facilitating sex trafficking. Absolutely, she was Epstein's accomplice, of course.
And all along the way in this book, you do take and give credit to the advocates, the more than courageous victims that helped and gave valuable information, and so you share that information, those victories. Some of the first people you call to tell of the victories and these challenges. It's very interesting everybody's contribution to this fight to taking down back Page.
That's right. It was truly a team effort. I worked with really great agents. My co counsel on the case, Randy Mailman, is an incredible lawyer, and I was so lucky to be paired with her. So it definitely was a team effort and has been a team effort. I'm going to share too, a message I just got today from someone I've never met before, but she must have gotten she must have seen information about the book coming out,
and she wrote, you saved my life. I'm twenty four now, but I was very young, impressionable, and a lost teenager being advertised on the back page, and you are the reason my life had a switch after the site got shut down. I don't know why you randomly showed up on my Twitter page. But the nightmare of back Page is over, and I thank you. It's still left its scars and issues in my life, but I finally don't
have to do that kind of stuff anymore. I think that really stums up what a lot of survivors felt, that sense of relief when the site was shut down. It enabled people to move on with their lives and to feel seen and instead of a website that just continued to normalize sexual abuse, the fact that that was shut down, that the government said that was wrong and we're not going to tolerate that. We're going all the other way, was a really meaningful step in the right direction.
Absolutely. I want to thank you so much Maggie Crell for coming on and talking about your incredible book taking down back Page, fighting the world's largest sex trafficker. For those people that might want to check out your website, can you tell us about that and they can find out more information about this book.
Sure. The book is available on bookshop dot com or Amazon or your local bookstore pretty much anywhere the books are sold, and it's coming out January eleventh. My website is Maggie m agg Y Crell kr Ell All one word dot com, so www dot Maggie Crell dot com, and there's some information about me and the book and some of the reviews we've been getting.
Thank you so much taking down backpage fighting the world's largest sex trafficker. Maggie Crell, thank you so much, have a great evening, good night you too.
Thank you.