Michael Lacey (editor)
Michael G. Lacey (born July 30, 1948) is an Arizona-based journalist, editor, publisher and First Amendment advocate. He is the founder and former executive editor of the Phoenix New Times, which he and his business partner, publisher Jim Larkin, expanded into a nationwide chain of 17 alternative weeklies, known as Village Voice Media (VVM).[1]
Michael Lacey
July 30, 1948
Journalist, editor, publisher, advocate
Village Voice Media (formerly)
The company focused on long-form, magazine-style journalism, and included such papers as the Village Voice in New York, LA Weekly, Miami New Times and the OC Weekly in Orange County, California, among others.[2]
Lacey's papers prized investigative reporting and set a high bar for writing. His writers won more than 3,800 writing awards, including 39 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, 67 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, 39 Investigative Writers and Editors awards, five finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and one Pulitzer for LA Weekly culinary scribe Jonathan Gold, the first ever for food writing.[3][4][5][6]
His writers focused on police misconduct, political corruption and abuse of power, and he and his reporters often became targets for retribution by political enemies and law enforcement. The most famous of these retaliatory incidents was Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's arrests of Lacey and Larkin, after the pair exposed illegal grand jury subpoenas that demanded notes and other investigative material from journalists at Phoenix New Times, as well as information on the papers' online readers.[7][8]
The arrests of two prominent newspapermen caused a national outcry, and the county attorney dropped the case. Lacey and Larkin sued, eventually receiving a $3.75 million settlement. They used the settlement to create the nonprofit Frontera Fund, which donated the money to pro-immigrant organizations in Arizona.[9]
Lacey and Larkin sold VVM to company execs in 2012, separating the company from Backpage.com, a classified listings site they created in 2004 to compete with Craigslist.org.[10]
Backpage came under criticism from state attorneys general and nonprofits that accused the company of facilitating prostitution and sex trafficking through its adult, dating and massage sections. Backpage cooperated with law enforcement and moderated its site for illegal activity, but attorneys general and others demanded the site take down all adult-oriented ads, even though federal court rulings found the ads to be First Amendment-protected speech. The ads also enjoyed Section 230 immunity, which generally holds websites harmless for content posted by users.[9][11][12][13]
In 2015, Lacey and Larkin sold the company to its CEO, Carl Ferrer.[14]
In October 2016, then-California AG Kamala Harris had Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer arrested on pimping charges. Harris was running for U.S. Senate at the time. The pimping charges were twice thrown out based on the First Amendment, Section 230 and the AG's lack of jurisdiction, which Harris was aware of when her office filed the charges.[15][16][17]
On April 6, 2018, the FBI raided Lacey and Larkin's homes and seized Backpage, removing it from the internet. Lacey and Larkin were arrested, held for a week, then released on $1 million bonds. They contend their prosecution is political payback for their 40-plus years in the newspaper industry, during which they made powerful enemies such as Backpage-critics Sen. John McCain and his wife Cindy.[18][9][19]
They and four former Backpage execs face up to 100 counts of facilitating prostitution, money laundering and conspiracy. All six have pleaded not guilty. Their trial commenced on Sept. 1, 2021.[20][9][21] After eight days and four witnesses, Judge Susan Brnovich declared a mistrial.[22][23][24] During the trial, the judge warned the prosecution to avoid discussion of sex trafficking and child sex trafficking, which the defendants are not charged with, and to keep the focus on the actual charges of facilitating prostitution under the U.S. Travel Act. But the prosecution's opening statement and two prosecution witnesses both discussed child sex trafficking. The judge felt that the cumulative effect of the government's opening statement and the prosecution's questioning of these witnesses unfairly tainted the jury.[25]
Brnovich scheduled a new trial for February 22, 2022.[26] She later recused herself from the case. Federal Judge Diane Humetewa was appointed to replace her. In a Jan. 20, 2022 article in Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported the following: "A new federal trial was supposed to start in February, but it's been postponed as the parties battle over whether the case should be totally dismissed. In December, a district judge dismissed defendants' motion to dismiss; they responded by appealing to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals."[27]
On September 21, 2022, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the defendants' request that the court reverse Humetewa and dismiss the case because a new trial would violate the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on Double Jeopardy.[28] The panel wrote that "the government’s misconduct" during the trial "was not so egregious as to compel a finding" that prosecutors intended to provoke a mistrial, the legal standard for dismissal in this instance.[29] A new trial reportedly could take place in 2023.[28]
Larkin committed suicide on July 31, 2023, a week before the second trial was set to begin.[30]Humetewa rescheduled the trial to begin on August 29, 2023.[31]
The jury returned a verdict on November 16, 2023, finding Lacey guilty of one count of international concealment money laundering and not guilty on one count of money laundering. On 84 additional counts against Lacey, the jury returned no verdict, with Humetewa declaring a mistrial on those counts.[32] Of his four co-defendants, two were found not guilty of all charges, and two were found guilty on multiple counts.[33]
In January 2024, federal prosecutors filed notice of their intent to retry Lacey on the outstanding 84 counts on which the jury was hung.[34] In April 2024, Humetewa ruled on an outstanding defense motion made at trial, acquitting Lacey of 50 counts of those 84 outstanding counts, citing "insufficient evidence" to support convictions.[35][36] The maximum sentence for Lacey's one money laundering conviction is 20 years in prison.[32] Lacey's sentencing is scheduled for July 9, 2024.[37]
Subsequent events[edit]
In Aug. 2019, Reason published internal DOJ memos describing how Backpage worked with federal and state law enforcement agencies to rescue trafficked children and women and put their traffickers behind bars. Prosecutors sent the memos to the defense by accident as part of the discovery process in the case, but a district court judge ruled that they could not be introduced at trial, despite their apparently exculpatory nature. Reason writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown contended that the memos show that “authorities have known for years that claims about Backpage [facilitating trafficking] were bogus.” [129][130]
In June 2021, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a study, finding that the combination of Backpage's takedown along with the passage of FOSTA/SESTA disrupted and dispersed adult advertising in the U.S. Websites for adult ads migrated to countries that do not recognize U.S. subpoenas. The GAO reported that the “relocation of platforms overseas makes it more difficult for law enforcement to gather tips and evidence”, and the FBI's capacity to “identify and locate sex trafficking victims and perpetrators” has been significantly decreased post-Backpage. The FBI said “this is largely because law enforcement was familiar with backpage.com, and backpage.com was generally responsive to legal requests for information.” [131][132]