THE biggest forum for sex
trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site
called Backpage.com.
This emporium for girls
and women - some under age or forced into prostitution - is in turn owned by an
opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been
unclear who the ultimate owners are.
That mystery is solved.
The owners turn out to include private equity financiers, including Goldman
Sachs with a 16 percent stake.
Goldman Sachs was
mortified when I began inquiring last week about its stake in America's leading
Web site for prostitution ads. It began working frantically to unload its
shares, and on Friday afternoon it called to say that it had just signed an
agreement to sell its stake to management.
"We had no influence
over operations," Andrea Raphael, a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman, told me.
Let's back up for a
moment. There's no doubt that many escort ads on Backpage are placed by consenting
adults. But it's equally clear that Backpage plays a major role in the
trafficking of minors or women who are coerced. In one recent case in New York
City, prosecutors say that a 15-year-old girl was drugged, tied up, raped and
sold to johns through Backpage and other sites.
Backpage has 70 percent of
the market for prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a trade organization.
Village Voice Media makes
some effort to screen out ads placed by traffickers and to alert authorities to
abuses, but neither law enforcement officials nor antitrafficking organizations
are much impressed. As a result, pressure is growing on the company to drop
escort ads.Goldman Sachs began working frantically to unload its shares, and on Friday afternoon:
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