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Bankers and Sex Trafficking
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times


New York Times, March 31, 2012
Posted: April 11th, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/kristof-fin...

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. 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. It began working frantically to unload its shares. Backpage has 70 percent of the market for prostitution ads. 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. 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. 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). 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 companys board for four of those years. Theres no indication that Goldman or anyone else ever used its ownership to urge Village Voice Media to drop escort ads or verify ages.

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