PHOENIX — A federal judge has acquitted former Backpage.com co-owner Michael Lacey, and two co-defendants, of most of the counts remaining from the protracted case launched against the website operators by the Justice Department in 2018.
U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa announced on Tuesday that she had eliminated 63 of the 84 counts remaining after the November verdict by a jury in the first federal retrial of the case. That retrial followed an earlier attempt that ended in a mistrial.
As XBIZ reported, the retrial jury deadlocked on prostitution-related charges against Lacey, though it found him guilty on one count of international concealment money laundering related to the operation of Backpage. Lacey is scheduled to be sentenced on that single conviction on June 17.
Most of the acquitted charges concern transactional money laundering, Courthouse News reported. Humetewa wrote that the government “failed to trace the company’s financial moves to a criminal source” and also struck some of the prostitution charges.
In January, federal prosecutors filed a formal notice for a second retrial, which would give them an unusual third shot at convicting Lacey and his co-defendants.
“Essentially, the feds want Lacey, a longtime free speech advocate, to die in prison,” Arizona journalist Stephen Lemons, the foremost authority on the case, wrote for Front Page Confidential, a Lacey-aligned online publication. “They’ve already caused the death of Jim Larkin, Lacey’s longtime business partner, fellow newspaperman and co-defendant in the Backpage case.”
Larkin committed suicide in July 2023. He was reportedly exhausted by the financial burden imposed on his family by the federal authorities’ unusually lengthy and persistent campaign against the creators of Backpage.com.
The case against Backpage — dubbed by politicians from both parties “an online brothel” — was a central issue in the passing of the controversial FOSTA-SESTA legislation.