Kamala Harris helped shut down Backpage.com. Sex workers are still feeling the fallout.

It was 2016, and California prosecutors were mulling an audacious bid to shut down the internet’s most popular clearinghouse for sex-related services.

Their boss, Kamala Harris, pressed her deputies to aggressively prosecute the founders of the website, Backpage.com. Her office brought the first-ever criminal charges targeting the site, and the case came to exemplify Harris’ tough-on-crime reputation as state attorney general.

Now, as she runs for president, she is touting her prosecutorial record, including what she frequently describes as her efforts to combat human trafficking. She even highlighted the shutdown of Backpage at the Democratic National Convention.

“Every politician of every party is on the bandwagon to say what they’ve done to fight human trafficking, right?” said Maggy Krell, who was one of Harris’ deputies in the California attorney general’s office and worked on the Backpage case. “What’s unique about Harris is she started it all. She literally started it all.”

The charges Harris brought against Backpage never went to trial. But they sparked a nationwide crackdown against the site, including a follow-on federal case that has been making its way through the courts for nearly a decade.

Last month, after a meandering legal saga in that follow-on case, the website’s 76-year-old co-founder was sentenced to five years in prison on a federal money-laundering charge. He reported on Wednesday to begin serving his sentence, while his lawyers appeal.

But some advocates on the left see Harris’ approach to Backpage — and to sex work more broadly — as overly punitive. Before the site was shuttered, they say, it primarily served as a place where sex workers safely connected with — and vetted — adult clients for consensual services. They say that Backpage cooperated with authorities to identify sex trafficking and that, by driving the market for consensual sex-related services to more obscure corners of the internet (or back into the streets), the shutdown of the site hampered efforts to investigate underage or coerced prostitution.

“Unfortunately, Kamala Harris is just one of many, many politicians to conflate adult, consensual prostitution with horrific, violent, gender-based violence,” said Kaytlin Bailey, the host of “The Oldest Profession Podcast” and founder of the group Old Pros, which advocates for the decriminalization of sex work.

Harris’ campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment about her role in the Backpage shutdown — or her current views about criminalizing prostitution, an issue on which she’s been inconsistent. Early in her career as a prosecutor, she mocked the idea of decriminalization and said sex workers should be arrested. But in 2019, when she was pivoting to the left during her first bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, she backtracked from that position.

Now, as she battles Donald Trump for undecided voters, there is one sign that her earlier, hard-line stance persists. Four years ago, when Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination, the party platform included a vow to “work with states and localities to protect the lives of sex workers.” There is no similar language in the platform the party adopted last month, just weeks after Harris became the Democratic nominee.

An online marketplace for sex

The founders of Backpage, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, didn’t set out to operate a sex-advertising website. They were journalists by trade.

Starting in the 1970s, Lacey and Larkin built an empire of alternative weekly newspapers that expanded across America and eventually included the Village Voice. Their company, originally called New Times Media, became known for hard-hitting investigations and pugnacious dealings with powerful officials.

The journalism at New Times papers was largely funded by cheap print classified ads — including thinly veiled solicitations of prostitution. But by the early 2000s, the financial model that Lacey and Larkin had wielded so successfully was collapsing. The rise of the internet, and in particular the emergence of digital want-ad site Craigslist, was devouring the newspapers’ classified ad revenue.

In response, the company launched Backpage.com in 2004 to try to hold onto some of that business. And in 2010, when Craigslist — under intense pressure from law enforcement officials and anti-sex-trafficking advocates — agreed to stop running adult-oriented ads, Backpage was perfectly positioned to fill the void. It quickly became a global destination for people seeking or selling sexual offerings.

As the site grew in popularity and revenue, it began to attract lawsuits and investigations over allegations that it was facilitating prostitution, which is illegal in most of the U.S., and that it was complicit — or worse — in egregious sex-trafficking cases.

Backpage and its owners wrapped themselves in the First Amendment, arguing that the ads on the site didn’t explicitly solicit illegal activity and that subjecting publishers to legal liability for ambiguous advertising copy they did not write would have a chilling effect on the freedom of the press. For many years, they evaded serious legal consequences.

‘The world’s top online brothel’

By 2016, prosecutors in the California attorney general’s office were noticing the increasing prevalence of Backpage in sex-trafficking cases they were handling. They began exploring the site’s finances and mulling criminal charges against those who owned and ran it.

Harris was enthusiastic about the idea, according to Krell, the frontline prosecutor who ran the case and later wrote a book about it.

“She was the first one out of the foxhole on Backpage,” Krell said. “I remember the conversation really well. She was really concerned about the victims.”

Harris even raised the possibility of child pornography charges against the site’s proprietors, according to Krell. Prosecutors didn’t go that far. But they did bring state-court criminal charges — including “pimping conspiracy” — against Lacey and Larkin, and hit Backpage’s CEO, Carl Ferrer, with even more counts, including “pimping of a minor.”

Harris’ office alleged that Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer directed a screening process at Backpage to block words that signaled underage prostitutes and explicit offers of sex for money — but rather than rejecting those ads and blocking the posters, they published the ads anyway (without the red-flag words).

The three men, Harris’ prosecutors alleged, were driven by a torrent of cash flowing into the site from “escort” or “adult services” ads. (Years later, federal prosecutors claimed that Backpage took in a staggering half-billion dollars in revenue over its 14-year existence, although how much was derived from illegal activity remains disputed.)

“Raking in millions of dollars from the trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable victims is outrageous, despicable and illegal,” Harris said in a statement announcing the charges. “Backpage and its executives purposefully and unlawfully designed Backpage to be the world’s top online brothel.”

Continued crusade in the Senate

Bringing the Backpage case was one of the last things Harris did as California attorney general. A month later, she handily won the race to succeed retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer.

In her new job in Washington, Harris kept the website in her crosshairs. Just a week after starting her term in January 2017, the fledgling lawmaker attended a Senate hearing where Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer were the key witnesses. The occasion was a lacerating investigative report concluding that Backpage knowingly facilitated criminal activity — including sex trafficking of minors — by systematically altering ads to conceal the illegal conduct.

Facing a bipartisan grilling, Lacey and Larkin repeatedly invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and asserted a First Amendment right not to be questioned about their publishing decisions. Their silence left a void filled by senators, including Harris.

“This is a new world because of technology,” Harris said. “This stuff usually happened on the street. It now facilitates, because of technology, cowards, both in terms of those who traffic and those who buy other human beings who are children.”

Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who led the probe with Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), recalled Harris enthusiastically backing the Senate’s efforts against Backpage.

“She and I talked a lot on that committee because we both had very similar backgrounds. We could discuss things from a prosecutor’s perspective,” McCaskill said in an interview. “Both of us were equally outraged.”

Others take a more cynical view that politicians of all stripes sought headlines and votes by unfairly equating Backpage with sex trafficking and child abuse.

“The whole story of the pursuit of Backpage is one of political opportunism,” said Robert Corn-Revere, the executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who represented Backpage when he was with the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine. “It’s a bigger story about government abuse.”

Blueprint for a federal case

Meanwhile, the California prosecution of Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer had hit a snag.

A judge quickly dismissed the initial charges after finding that the defendants had immunity under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act. Under that statute, operators of websites generally cannot be prosecuted for information posted by their users. The statute also gives operators latitude to screen postings for “obscene” or “objectionable” content without assuming liability for the underlying posts.

There was an irony to the dismissal on those grounds: Harris herself had signed a letter in 2013, along with other attorneys general, complaining that Section 230 precluded the very kind of criminal case she brought three years later against the Backpage founders.

California prosecutors did not appeal the dismissal of the charges. Instead, just days before Harris was sworn in as a senator, they filed a new criminal case against all three defendants focused on charges that they laundered money by obscuring the source of funds from Backpage’s ads when dealing with banks and credit card processing companies reluctant to do business with the site.

A judge again threw out a portion of that case, although the money laundering charges remain pending against Lacey to this day.

While it’s not clear if Lacey will ever go to trial on those charges, the most significant impact of the case may be that it served as a blueprint of sorts for a new prosecution brought a year and a half later. This case was led by the Justice Department.

On Feb. 6, 2018, Backpage’s servers and web address abruptly went offline, seized as part of a sprawling federal crackdown. FBI agents raided Lacey and Larkin’s homes in Arizona and arrested both men. A 93-count indictment obtained by federal prosecutors charged Lacey, Larkin, Ferrer and four other people associated with Backpage with using the internet to knowingly facilitate illegal prostitution and money laundering.

On the seized Backpage.com URL, the federal authorities published a takedown notice naming the California attorney general’s office as part of the effort, and the Justice Department separately thanked California prosecutors for their contribution to the crackdown.

“She filed the first criminal case, ever, against Backpage,” Krell said of Harris. “We still see the legal embers on that burning, but it was the California case that really started the whole shutdown of Backpage.”

Two trials, one suicide

The federal case sparked a convoluted legal saga that drags on to this day.

Ferrer, the CEO, struck an early plea deal and agreed to testify against his former colleagues. But the first trial, in 2021, ended in a mistrial after the judge found that prosecutors wrongly and repeatedly mentioned child sex trafficking in front of the jury even though such allegations weren’t part of the federal charges.

Eight days before a second trial was slated to begin in August 2023, Larkin died by suicide at the age of 74. His supporters say the series of aggressive prosecutions destroyed his life.

“Jim Larkin was a gentle soul who just finally couldn’t take it anymore,” Corn-Revere said. “He was essentially hounded to death.”

Alex Andrews, a former sex worker and co-founder of a group that advocates for decriminalizing prostitution, described the Backpage prosecution as “state-sponsored homicide.”

Following Larkin’s death, the second trial proceeded against the remaining defendants. After 11 weeks in court, Lacey was convicted of a single count of money laundering and acquitted of a different money laundering count. The jury deadlocked on 84 other counts.

U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa subsequently acquitted Lacey on 53 of those counts, leaving 31 remaining charges that he could still someday face a third trial on.

Late last month, nearly eight years after Harris brought the first criminal charges against Backpage’s founders, Lacey was finally sentenced for what he did while running the long-defunct site.

His lawyers asked for leniency and proposed a sentence of probation for their 76-year-old client. They described him as a lifelong First Amendment advocate who made sacrifices to enable hard-hitting journalism, and they said any significant prison term would amount to a “death sentence” for a man of his age.

But federal prosecutors said Lacey and his cohorts abandoned their journalistic ideals to try to get rich as “purveyors of a prostitution website.” They asked for the maximum sentence: 20 years in prison.

Humetawa, an appointee of President Barack Obama and former counsel to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), sentenced Lacey to five years.

As Lacey turned himself in Wednesday to begin serving his prison term, he told a local television outlet that the case against Backpage was wrongheaded from the start.

“When we were cooperating with the government, there were hundreds of rescues of underage people who had snuck through the system,” Lacey told Arizona’s Family TV. “We didn’t think we were doing anything wrong. We thought the ads were legal. … This was a moral panic that got out of hand.”

‘We’re getting a cop’

Ever since she began running for higher office, Harris’ willingness to tout her reputation as “Kamala the cop” has evolved.

In 2019, while mounting her first bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, she attempted to characterize her record on criminal justice issues as progressive — a pivot that backfired and was attacked by some on the left. Even at the time, though, she said she had no second thoughts about how her office spearheaded the Backpage shutdown.

“Backpage was providing advertisement for the sale of children — of minors,” Harris told The Root in February 2019. “The people who were running Backpage basically thumbed their nose at us and kept doing it — making money off of the sale of youth. And so I called for them to be shut down, and I have no regrets about that.”

In 2024, as she runs against Trump, a convicted felon, Harris sees her tough-on-crime record as a political asset for a general electorate, not something to be finessed to appeal to the left. The prominent appearance of a self-described Backpage victim during the DNC last month tracks with that approach.

“She fought Backpage.com, the website that let me and thousands of others be bought and sold,” Courtney Baldwin told the crowd in Chicago on Aug. 22 just a few hours before Harris delivered her speech accepting the Democratic nomination.

Beyond Backpage, though, Harris’ views on the decriminalization of prostitution remain unclear. In the 2019 interview with The Root, she said she had long opposed arresting prostitutes. But in a biography-defining book she published a decade earlier, “Smart on Crime,” Harris declared: “We must arrest the prostitutes as well as the pimps and the johns.” She also vigorously opposed a 2008 referendum to decriminalize prostitution in San Francisco, dismissing the idea as “completely ridiculous” and warning it would lay “a welcome mat out for pimps and prostitutes.”

Since Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she has retreated from a series of liberal positions she staked out in the 2019 presidential primary on issues such as fracking, immigration and Medicare for All.

Asked by POLITICO about her current stance on decriminalizing prostitution, Harris’ campaign repeatedly declined to clarify her views, even as some advocates for sex workers expressed alarm about the party platform’s removal of language supporting efforts to protect these workers.

“It feels really icky,” said Andrews, the former sex worker and decriminalization advocate, referring to Harris’ role in the Backpage shutdown and her sudden ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket.

To be sure, Andrews and other advocates said they could not support Trump, despite their lingering bitterness about Harris.

“We’re getting a cop, basically, as a president, but is it better than the dictator we were gonna have otherwise? Yeah,” Andrews said. “I hope she gets elected over the other guy, but I still wish it was literally anybody else.”

Paul Demko previously worked for New Times Media at New Times Broward-Palm Beach and City Pages in Minneapolis. Demko, who detailed his dealings with Lacey in a 2018 POLITICO story, had no involvement in Backpage.