The late Jim Larkin‘s powerful presence pervades a new documentary by Reason magazine on the federal criminal case involving Backpage.com. The as-yet-untitled 40-minute film was previewed in late July to an audience of about 100 at a brick-lined venue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Larkin, the co-founder of a national chain of alt-weeklies known as Village Voice Media, took his own life on July 31, 2023, just days before a second trial of Larkin, VVM executive editor Michael Lacey and four others linked to the now defunct classified listings site was set to begin.

The unfinished film, a collaboration between award-winning documentarian Paul Detrick and Reason senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown, will not be completed until after Aug. 27, when  Lacey is scheduled to be sentenced for the one count of money laundering of which he was convicted in November after an 11-week trial.

The maximum punishment for Lacey’s one guilty count is 20 years in prison. As the documentary observes, whatever Lacey’s ultimate sentence, the 76-year-old could spend the rest of his life behind bars.

In the film, Detrick and Brown visit Lacey’s labyrinthine home in Phoenix, where the pair interview him as he awaits sentencing.

Lacey expresses confidence that he will beat the rap on appeal, even if he has to spend some time in prison. The conviction was for “international concealment money laundering,” but there was no concealment. Lacey’s attorney notified the IRS of the legal transfer of funds to a European bank. And Lacey has not been convicted of an underlying criminal count that might render the transfer illicit.

Larkin’s death greatly troubles Lacey as he tells the filmmakers.

“I still catch myself before I’ve had coffee saying, ‘I got to send this to Jim.’ Okay, I’ll see something, and then I say, ‘Oh fuck, I’m not sending anything to Jim,'” Lacey says.

Looking at a handful of the 3,800 writing awards he and his papers and writers won over the years, he adds, “So, I see him all the time in this stuff. I mean, we really were a partnership.”

An Alt-Weekly Empire

Lacey and Larkin became fast friends in 1972, after Larkin joined the fledgling Phoenix New Times, co-founded two years before by Lacey and others in response to the Kent State Massacre and the war in Vietnam. Larkin would come to run the business side, while Lacey ran the editorial side. Together they forged an alt-weekly juggernaut.

Drawing on their past interviews of Larkin, the filmmakers let Larkin describe the newspaper chain’s business plan, which included taking ads that many print publications shied away from: headshops, massage parlors and escorts, to name a few.

“We were funded with classified display ads,” Larkin says. “The papers were always free. Adult ads, stripper ads, all kinds of ads in the back of the book . . . Totally legal, always have been legal.”

That unorthodox revenue stream helped New Times focus on the reader, tell “interesting stories” and “express attitudes that were not right-wing, not left-wing, but kind of unusually anachronistic,” Larkin explains.

As the internet became ubiquitous, Craigslist.org began to hoover up all classified advertising, an existential threat for a free newspaper. That’s when Backpage.com was born as a way for Lacey and Larkin to recoup lost revenue, compete with Craigslist and fund their newspapers’ journalism.

The enterprise was deemed lawful by several federal and state courts. When then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris had Lacey and Larkin arrested on bogus pimping charges in 2016 in an election-year stunt, a state court judge threw out the case. Harris refiled before leaving for the U.S. Senate, and a different state court judge again dismissed the pimping charges.

Both California judges found that Backpage was protected both by Section 230, a federal law grounded in the First Amendment that generally holds interactive websites harmless for third-party content posted by others. Previously, numerous federal judges had likewise ruled that Backpage was protected by the First Amendment, Section 230, or both.

Significantly, during the federal case, prosecutors successfully blocked any mention of the many court decisions in Backpage’s favor. Nor were the defendants permitted to disclose that numerous attorneys advised Backpage that it was operating within the law.

Blood on Their Hands

Detrick and Brown’s documentary covers a lot of ground, showing how Lacey and Larkin’s unwillingness to bend the knee before powerful politicians — state AGs among them — eventually led to the FBI’s 2018 arrests of Lacey, Larkin and four others. The six defendants were charged with a total of 100 counts involving conspiracy, money laundering and violations of the U.S. Travel Act, an obscure law intended to target the mafia, which makes it illegal to facilitate a business engaged in violations of certain state laws, like those against prostitution.

Prosecutors played hardball, destroying the website and a mountain of evidence with it. Backpage had already been slandered as a hotbed of sex trafficking, and prosecutors amplified that propaganda, though the defendants were not accused of sex trafficking or harming anyone physically. Such egregious misconduct by prosecutors led to a mistrial in 2021.

The documentary also discusses how the prosecution effectively suppressed exculpatory evidence — specifically,  two secret DOJ memos, published by Reason, which argued against prosecution, in part because of Backpage’s extensive cooperation with law enforcement.

Then there’s the government’s seizure of nearly all of Lacey and Larkin’s assets, which hamstrung their ability to adequately fund their defense.

Detrick and Brown interview First Amendment attorney Robert Corn-Revere, who was involved in civil litigation on Backpage’s behalf and in the early stages of the criminal defense of Lacey and Larkin. Corn-Revere, now chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, bemoans the government’s tactic of starving the defense and making it impossible for the defendants to pay their lawyers.

“Ultimately, that led to my firm’s bowing out from representation of the former owners of backpage.com,” he says. “I think the government has Jim Larkin’s blood on its hands for both the prosecution and the tactics that it’s used in this prosecution.”

Detrick and Brown’s latest documentary is one of several the Reason team has done on the Backpage case, including 2019’s “The Rise and Fall of Backpage,” which won an L.A. Press Club Award for investigative journalism and which serves as the best primer on the takedown of the classified listings giant for those unfamiliar with the case.

After the screening, Reason editor-at-large Nick Gillespie moderated a panel discussion and Q&A, featuring Corn-Revere, sex worker rights advocate and comedian Kaytlin Bailey and Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason’s editor-in-chief. Brown and Detrick were unable to attend the event.

Corn-Revere opened up the discussion, explaining how Craigslist nominally did away with its adult ad section in 2010. Backpage refused to follow suit, ultimately drawing the ire of the federal government after its many First Amendment wins.

The attorney referred to Lacey and Larkin as “a couple of rebels who challenged the system.” And, he said, that defiance had consequences.

“We won a number of victories on their behalf and they became a target,” he said. “When you have the entire weight of the federal government and the states coming after you, eventually something’s going to give.”

Bailey jumped in, saying that one of the scariest parts of the documentary is “that it doesn’t matter whether or not you have access to incredible resources,” as Lacey and Larkin once did.

Lacey and Larkin had “the kind of money that’s supposed to protect you from this kind of thing,” Bailey said, adding, “It’s extra devastating to sort of watch that not only is being right not enough, but being right and having access to an incredible defense is also not enough.”

Mangu-Ward commented on the bipartisan support for censorship of legal adult advertising, saying both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump agree that adult advertising should be verboten, at least on U.S.-based sites. Both sides are “perfectly willing to smudge the difference between consensual commercial arrangements, between adults and child sex trafficking and wipe it all out,” she said.

She observed that the government is now coming after major social media platforms such as Facebook, using the same playbook of falsely accusing the site of abetting child sex trafficking and passing restrictive laws like FOSTA/SESTA.

For Mangu-Ward, this means the steady erosion of freedom of expression on the internet.

It isn’t just adult advertising that government actors are chipping away at, she said. “They’re chipping away at commenting, they’re chipping away at engagement, they’re chipping away at interaction anywhere that you feel like you are part of a media community or you have an affinity with the brand.”

Mangu-Ward warned that the censorship pandemic starts with speech frowned upon by both sides of the political aisle — adult advertising — then morphs and spreads, chilling free speech across the board.

Which makes one wonder: Are libertarians and sex workers the only people left with the stones to defend free speech and champion the First Amendment? Despite Reason’s best efforts, this seems to be the status quo.

The film is, in part, a tribute to Larkin. In it, Brown remembers interviewing Larkin over the years, saying she encountered “a soft-spoken sharp-witted and highly principled man with a deep love for his family and pride in the Phoenix area community.”

Larkin was “a highly successful businessman” with “the spirit of a renegade journalist,” Brown says.

Indeed, Larkin was all that and more.

Please also see:
Kamala Harris’ Prosecution of Ex-Backpage Owners Argues Against POTUS Candidacy
and
Prosecutors Want Lacey Sentenced on Bogus Allegations