 Before Senator and former Attorney General of California, Kamala Harris was chosen as Joe Biden's running mate in the 2020 election, she played a role in a campaign to force a website called Backpage.com to stop operating on the grounds that it was used to facilitate sex trafficking. Backpage.com needs to shut itself down when it has created as its business model the profiting of the selling of human beings and the purchase of human beings. Good businesses such as Craigslist understood how it could be abused and mishandled and they shut that aspect of their business model down. Backpage needs to do the same. We didn't cow tail. We don't cow tail. It would give the lie to our entire lives, our entire career of being journalists. If the government could come in and put their stubby little fingers in our chest and make us ask for our mommy, it ain't gonna happen. In the course of her prosecution of Backpage's founders, Michael Lacy and James Larkin, Harris spread misinformation about its practices. She co-filed criminal charges that were quickly dismissed but succeeded at garnering headlines and photo ops that raised her political profile. In reality, Backpage.com had become a powerful tool for law enforcement to catch sex traffickers because of the cooperation and commitment of the site's founders to the cause, whom Harris and many other state attorneys general and politicians had painted as villains. Harris had supported anti-sex trafficking bills when she was district attorney of San Francisco, but it was in October 2016 after she was elected California Attorney General that she co-filed criminal charges against Lacy and Larkin as well as Backpage CEO Carl Ferrar. Though accused of running a website used by sex traffickers, the charges were quickly tossed out because Lacy and Larkin were clearly protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, known as the Internet's First Amendment, which says that an online platform isn't responsible for many types of content posted by its customers. According to Lacy and Larkin, the charges were so thin there was no reason to file them, except as a stunt to raise her public profile. She does this right before the election, and inside the courtroom there is a jail cell. They filmed us in the jail cell and then broadcast it on the evening news. So Harris gets to have her name in all the papers right before the election, saying that she's the one who helped take down these people that everyone for years has been characterizing as these big evil sex traffickers. It was a publicity stunt. Lacy and Larkin spent four days in a Sacramento jail. She knew that Section 230 barred her from bringing these charges, but she brought them anyway. And of course, a judge threw them right out. So Harris filed another set of charges against the three men. Harris was trying to say that Brauer and Lacy and Larkin buy virtue of having this site and knowing that sometimes, you know, bad things happen there, that they were guilty. These other pimping charges later get dismissed too. Journalist Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes about sex workers in the criminal justice system, and she's been covering the lawsuit against Backpage, which recently got rescheduled to 2021 because of COVID-19. Brown revealed secret Justice Department memos showing prosecutors spent years trying to build a child sex trafficking case against Backpage, but failed to uncover compelling evidence of criminal intent or pattern or reckless conduct regarding minors. Instead, Justice Department officials found Backpage was remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and proactively sent ads containing minors to authorities. The memos revealed a world far outside the characterization Harris and other politicians, attorneys general and activists had been pushing for years about Backpage. To be clear, this is a crime. It is a crime that is rightly punishable by incarceration in prison. On January 10, 2017, Harris, who had been elected the junior senator from California, participated in hearings on Backpage. These individuals must be held accountable. These allegations must be given voice. And we have to do all that is right to make sure that we as a civil society protect always the most vulnerable among us and not take advantage of them, assuming nobody will care. These hearings have made clear we care. But as Harris and other senators characterized Backpage as complicit in sex trafficking, Justice Department memos reveal law enforcement officers the country over were working with Backpage employees, taking seminars on how to use the site from Backpage lawyers and coming to rely on the site for sex trafficking investigations. A 2012 memo described the Backpage data as a goldmine of information for investigators. So many different people put on this huge show of making them the villain in this. A lot of people in government actively made the calculation to make life more dangerous for both sex workers and sex trafficking victims in order to satisfy this crusade that they were on publicly. On April 6, 2018, the FBI raided the homes of Lacey and Larkin and accused them of running a website that facilitated prostitution. Their trial is scheduled to take place in January 2021. It's hard to make us feel guilty. We're not guilty. We're not guilty. You can't talk me into it. It's an evergreen political issue. Always works. They're waiting to be governors or senators, presidents. That's what that was all about.