{"id":18347,"date":"2012-04-09T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2012-04-09T11:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=18347"},"modified":"2012-04-02T08:56:02","modified_gmt":"2012-04-02T07:56:02","slug":"financiers-and-sex-trafficking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/04\/financiers-and-sex-trafficking\/","title":{"rendered":"Financiers and Sex Trafficking"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site called Backpage.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This emporium for girls and women \u2014 some under age or forced into prostitution \u2014 is in turn owned by an opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been unclear who the ultimate owners are.<\/p>\n

That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equity<\/a> financiers, including Goldman Sachs<\/a> with a 16 percent stake.<\/p>\n

Goldman Sachs was mortified when I began inquiring last week about its stake in America\u2019s leading Web site for prostitution ads. It began working frantically to unload its shares, and on Friday [30 Mar 2012] afternoon it called to say that it had just signed an agreement to sell its stake to management.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had no influence over operations,\u201d Andrea Raphael, a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman, told me.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s back up for a moment. There\u2019s no doubt that many escort ads on Backpage are placed by consenting adults. But it\u2019s 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<\/a> was drugged, tied up, raped and sold to johns through Backpage and other sites.<\/p>\n

Backpage has 70 percent of the market<\/a> for prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a trade organization.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

After my last column on this issue, 19 U.S. senators wrote the company<\/a>, asking it to stop abetting traffickers. On Thursday, antitrafficking campaigners protested outside the Village Voice newspaper (which is owned by Village Voice Media). A petition<\/a> on Change.org criticizing the company has gathered 220,000 signatures.<\/p>\n

In Washington State, the governor signed a bill into law<\/a> on Thursday that could expose Backpage to criminal sanctions if it advertises under-age girls for sex without verifying their ages. (There\u2019s some uncertainty about the constitutionality of the law.)<\/p>\n

Village Voice Media has been able to resist pressure partly because, as a private company, it doesn\u2019t disclose its owners. But I\u2019ve obtained documents that, with some digging, shed light on who\u2019s behind it.<\/p>\n

The two biggest owners are Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, the managers of the company, and they seem to own about half of the shares. The best known of the other owners is Goldman Sachs, which invested in the company in 2000 (before Backpage became a part of Village Voice Media in a 2006 merger<\/a>).<\/p>\n

A Goldman managing director, Scott L. Lebovitz, sat on the Village Voice Media board for many years. Goldman says he stepped down in early 2010.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be clear: this is a tiny investment by a huge company, and I have no reason to think that Goldman\u2019s top executives knew of its connection to sex trafficking. Goldman prides itself on its work on gender: its 10,000 Women<\/a> initiative does splendid work supporting women in business around the globe. Full disclosure: Goldman\u2019s foundation was one of about 15 funders of a public television documentary version of a book that my wife and I wrote about the world\u2019s women.<\/p>\n

That said, for more than six years Goldman has held a significant stake in a company notorious for ties to sex trafficking, and it sat on the company\u2019s board for four of those years. There\u2019s no indication that Goldman or anyone else ever used its ownership to urge Village Voice Media to drop escort ads or verify ages. Elizabeth L. McDougall, chief counsel for Village Voice Media, told me Friday that she was \u201cunaware of any dissent\u201d from owners.<\/p>\n

Several lesser-known financial companies also hold significant stakes in Village Voice Media, and one person close to the company says that there are about a dozen owners in all. One is Trimaran, an investment company in New York. It wouldn\u2019t disclose the size of its stake but told me that it had \u201cno influence whatsoever\u201d on management and is now trying to sell its shares.<\/p>\n

Two other companies, Alta Communications<\/a> and Brynwood Partners<\/a>, did not respond to my repeated inquiries about ties to Village Voice Media (Brynwood may be an asset manager rather than an owner). One thought: If the minority shareholders, Goldman included, worked together instead of rushing for the exits, they might be able to pressure Village Voice Media to get out of escort ads.<\/p>\n

There are no easy solutions to sex trafficking. I think the most important single step is for prosecutors to focus more on pimps and johns. Closing down the leading Web site used by traffickers would complicate their lives, and after so many years of girls being trafficked on this site, it\u2019s time to hold owners accountable.<\/p>\n

_______________________<\/p>\n

Nicholas D. Kristof<\/em>, a columnist for The New York Times since 2001, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week.<\/em><\/p>\n

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 1, 2012, on page SR13 of the New York edition with the headline: Financiers and Sex Trafficking.<\/em><\/h6>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2014 some under age or forced into prostitution \u2014 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}