Teenagers were sold to men to rape on the Internet website that bears his name, Craigslist, and Craig Newmark's response was to defend his Cyberspace empire by falsely alleging journalists reporting it committed ethics violations. Now he’s reshaping journalism with millions of dollars in donations to news organizations, colleges and institutions.

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There's a Digital Age pimp bankrolling news reporting in America.

Craig Newmark created and owns a big piece of Craigslist, the well-known Internet message board website. Craigslist has long had a dark side, hidden in plain sight. Some of its profits have come "at the expense of girls like us, who are lured, kidnapped, and forced to feed the increasing demand for child rape," MC, then 17, and AK, then 19, wrote in an open letter to Newmark in 2010. 

MC's pimp forced her into prostitution at 11. He "sold many girls my age." He made MC "and other girls" sit in front of "laptops, posting pictures and answering ads on Craigslist, he made $1,500 a night selling my body."

"Men answered the Craigslist advertisements and paid to rape me," AK wrote. 

AK's pimp sold her "by the hour at truck stops and cheap motels, 10 hours with 10 different men every night." 

He made $30,000 a month, "facilitated by Craigslist 300 times."

"I personally know over 20 girls who were trafficked through Craigslist. Like me they were taken from city to city," AK revealed. "Philadelphia, Dallas, Milwaukee, Washington, DC." 

AK and MC's letter was first published as a half-page public notice in the San Francisco Chronicle May 2010 by Fair Fund, which advocates for sex trafficking victims. Then it was published as a full-page notice in the Washington Post Aug.6. Fair Fund told The Guardian it verified the victims' accounts. AK was so credible she met with President Barack Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder, it said.

Craigslist featured explicit ads for prostitution until Sept. 2010. They helped make Newmark a billionaire. Now he's become the go-to philanthropist for democratic political candidates and left-leaning causes of all kinds, including journalism. News organizations, in particular, like to suck up Newmark money like piglets at a sow's teats.

For example, Newmark purchased the naming rights to the City of New York's graduate school of journalism for $20 million in 2018. Now it's the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. 

The man who made pimping girls like MC and AK easy as pressing a few computer buttons is even passing himself off as a friend of womankind.

Yet no one's asking the hard questions that need answers-until now.

What happened to Me Too? Did Newmark’s million-dollar donations to journalists and their institutions buy him a Me Too pass?

What became the Craigslist juggernaut started as the coder’s free email list in 1995. Craig’s original list functioned as an Internet bulletin board for art events, jobs and apartments for rent in San Francisco. Newmark named Jim Buckmaster Chief Executive Officer in 2000. Newmark maintained ownership and control. Craigslist was a Internet website with dedicated pages for 45 American cities and five million viewers per month 9 years later, Wired reported in 2004. 

Craigslist made more than $8 million that year. It made more than $100 million six years later in 2010, the New York Times found. Craigslist's revenue grew every year until it made more than $1 billion in 2018. Newmark was a billionaire by 2017, Forbes magazine reported. 

"The guy has to be banking $400 million a year," one insider told Forbes.

Part of Newmark's billion-dollar fortune was banked off the backs of sex-workers. Craigslist added a section called "Erotic Services" in 2001. It was a "a virtual prostitution hub" by 2005, a 2018 NYU Stern Business School study found. 

As Craigslist revenue grew, newspapers' advertising revenue from classified ads shrank. For example, in Craigslist's hometown alone, San Francisco, newspapers lost $50-$65 million in revenue by 2004. Newmark himself "jokingly apologized" in 2005 "for the destruction of American newspapers." The "Exploder of Journalism" is what New York Magazine called him in 2006, for "destroying classified revenues for big-city newspapers, which are already in crisis." 

"In the past few months, I and countless others in the mainstream media have awakened," is how reporter Phillip Weiss described the rise of Craigslist. What "we thought was benign, was in fact a wild beast, loose in the orchards."

Craigslist "is changing everything," Weiss explained. It was "the symbol of the transformation of the information industry."

Like Craigslist changed journalism, it changed sex-work. 

It's no exaggeration to say that Craigslist almost single-handedly normalized prostitution in America. Craigslist enabled the commodification-some might call it a kind of slavery-of human beings on a scale not previously possible. It supercharged the sex industry. It turned every Main Street into a Digital Red Light District-a sexual marketplace facilitated by but also hidden from public view by the Internet.

Craigslist hosted 25,000 prostitution-related ads every 10 days, in the Noughties, the 2018 NYU study found.

Typical "Erotic Service" ads were explicitly for sexual services. Some were for sensual massage services implying sex. Every fetish also had a category, and a menu. Ads tended to be accompanied by sexually suggestive photographs of lingerie-clad bodies and intimate body parts. They included measurements, telephones numbers and keywords like "barely legal,"“ busty,” “school-girl fantasy,” "two-girl show" and "hung." Craigslist had its own code too. "Roses" were dollars. "Greek" meant anal. "GFE" was "Girlfriend Experience" was oral and vaginal sex. 

Craigslist increased prostitution 17.58% across the board wherever it was introduced, the study found. 

That's because it was so easy and anonymous, people who would not have become prostitutes if they had to walk the street or prowl hotel lobbies had no problem posting and answering posts on Craigslist. This group tended to be well-educated, employed and sexually adventurous. They could make extra money and even have extra fun on Craigslist. A few became first-wave Digital Age courtesans. 

However, just as many, more, maybe most (depending on time and place), were poor teenaged girls trafficked by gangs. 

"Commercial vice groups," the report politely called them. 

I interviewed an independent Craigslist sex-worker in 2004 to understand the Digital Age sex industry. 

“Angel” had been a pre-digital sex worker-turned-social worker before Craigslist. She first visited Newmark's Internet bulletin board looking for a desk for her Lower East Side studio apartment. She found its Erotic Services page "totally random." The chance to practice one of the world's oldest professions in the new Digital Age future was too much for her to resist. She "decided to dip my toe back into the waters. They were very nice waters.” 

The first really interesting thing Angel showed me were secret, hidden Craigslist message boards embedded within the public Craigslist website. These “black” pages could only be accessed with a correct, precise page code. Angel navigated these dark corners of the Internet with ease.

Craigslist was good, she said, because it empowered her to screen potential clients.

“In ordinary hooking men have all the power. They choose you,” she explained. Craigslist allowed her to “choose them. I post an ad and I get 30, 40 responses. I get to choose. It’s like going to McDonald’s."

Another important factor in Angel's calculus was total lack of law enforcement. 

"It is surprising to me," she said, "that I continue to move about freely, no consequences in sight."

Eventually she used the rolls of $100s she cached in empty Pilon coffee cans in her freezer to fund another college degree. She became a registered nurse.

The Connecticut Attorney General led a coalition of 42 other states and territories against Craigslist in 2008. It ended with an agreement requiring Craigslist to implement "sweeping new measures" designed to prevent "misuse" of the site. These measures include requiring posters to provide a phone number and pay a fee by credit or debit card-as if burners and ghost cards didn't exist.

“Prostitutes will hopefully stop using Craigslist to break the law, knowing that their posts could lead to arrest and conviction,” the Attorney General said in a statement.

The new measures did nothing to crimp the illicit commerce. The new fees actually earned Craigslist tens of millions of more dollars, the New York Times reported.

Then Craigslist Killer Philip Markoff murdered Julissa Brisman in 2009.

Brisman was a 25-year-old native New Yorker from Washington Heights. Markoff murdered Brisman in a Boston hotel room on Apr. 14, 2009. He targeted her on Craigslist, arranged a date, went to her hotel and tried to rob her. Brisman resisted. Markoff beat her and shot her three times. 

Brisman wasn't Markoff's first Craigslist victim. Markoff robbed two other sex workers, prosecutors alleged at his arraignment. 

Meanwhile, AK and MC's open letter was published. It was like propaganda of the deed. It inspired others to action. Newmark was slow to recognize the forces aligning against him. It was too late when he finally did.

Amber Lyon trapped Newmark in a textbook ambush interview for CNN on Aug. 4. 

"Can people trust that children are not being sex trafficked on Craigslist?," she asked.

Newmark just looked at Lyon, stupefied. Newmark stumbled away for a moment to exchange a mortified glance with an assistant but circled back. Face first into another double-barrel Lyon blast: "We've run into a lot of victims, and a lot of advocates, who pretty much call your site the Walmart of child sex trafficking."  

Newmark didn't come back for more after that.

During the interview, Newmark claimed Craigslist reported prostitution ads to police. Since they were in Washington, DC, Lyon asked a front-line DC vice cop what he thought of Newmark's claim. DC was also one of the cities AK named in her open letter as having been sex-trafficked in. 

Craisglist never contacted DC police with any information at all, ever, the vice cop said.

"If they're notifying, I'm not sure if they are notifying the right people because we're not getting a call," Brian Bray of the DC Metropolitan Police Department said.

Politicians across America breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Someone at CBS News recognized Lyon exposed Newkirk.

Notwithstanding that CNN was its competition, CBS published a report of its own detailing its competitor's news scoop, “Reporter's Sex-Trafficking Questions Silences Craigslist Founder.” When CBS asked the apparently thin-skinned Newmark to comment, his spokesperson issued a peevish statement citing Chapter and Verse of reporters' rules. Lyon 

approached Craig under false pretenses for this 'ambush' interview. It was a direct violation of the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics which states that a journalist should 'Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public.’

Enslaved teenagers were being sold to groups of men to rape on the Internet website that bears his name and Craig Newmark's response was to falsely allege "ethics" violations by the people reporting it-effectively attempting to suppress the truth and thwart justice for sex-trafficking victims.

Brisman's murderer, Craigslist Killer Philip Markoff, killed himself in a Boston jail where he was being held awaiting trial-a few days after Lyon's scoop on Aug. 15. Markoff's suicide set Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley in motion. She called for Congress to crackdown on Craigslist five days later, Aug. 20. It facilitated "unpoliced trafficking online around the human sex trade." 

Attorneys general from 16 other states joined Attorney General Coakley’s call in a Aug. 24 letter to Newmark and Buckmaster.

The increasingly sharp public criticism of Craigslist's Adult Services section reflects a growing recognition that ads for prostitution-including ads trafficking children-are rampant on it.

Craigslist removed its Adult Services bulletin board on Sept. 3. It protested by replacing the Adult Services homepage menu tab with a black bar blazoned with white letters spelling "censored." Craigslist lawyers said the corporation would not "reinstate the category" at a Congressional  hearing Sept. 15.

An editorial in The Oregonian aptly summarized the controversy at the time: "Craigslist promotes itself as a neighborly town square while minimizing its role in enabling crime within the square. It celebrates its own morality while hiding behind legal immunity." 

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 gave Craigslist almost-total immunity from civil lawsuits at the time-even lawsuits from sex-trafficking victims. Newmark couldn’t be sued.

Like many malefactors, Newmark claimed to be a victim of an overzealous press.

“The company had mounted a massive law enforcement program, and the company really couldn’t talk about it,” he told The Ringer in 2017. "That provided an opportunity for a false narrative that proved to be pretty unfortunate." 

Internet bulletin board Backpage.com largely replaced Craigslist as the Internet's go-to source for sex-workers. It was shut down by federal prosecutors in 2018 and its operators charged with various federal felonies including facilitating prostitution. Carl Ferrer, the Backpage CEO, flipped against his former business partners-turned-codefendants and testified against them at their 2020 trial. It ended in a mistrial and is currently under appeal. 

Meanwhile, Newmark avoided prosecution, and prison. He transformed into media philanthropist-as the Me Too movement gathered force.

Newmark moved to New York City and bought a $6 million Greenwich Village duplex in 2016. Newmark saved local news blog Gothamist in 2017 by giving $2.5 million to WNYC to buy Gothamist after its owner, right-wing billionaire Joe Ricketts, canceled it because workers voted to unionize. Newmark's given more than $2 million to local news blog TheCity.nyc since its 2019 start. He's also funding Hellgatenyc.com-a worker-owned, woke news start-up.

Newmark gave journalists at ProPublica a $1 million in 2017 and another $1 million in 2020.

Newmark gave the Poynter Institute for Media Studies $1 million to fund a chair in journalism ethics in 2016 and another $5 million to establish the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership in 2019. He joined with Facebook and other Tech Industry giants to create the $14 million News Integrity Initiative in 2017.  

Besides paying to add his name to New York City's Graduate School of Journalism, Newmark gave Columbia University $15 million to endow a professorship in his name to run the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security in 2019. 

Newmark donated a total of $81 million to various causes in 2022. He gave away enough money to make him one of the biggest philanthropists of 2022, according to The Philanthropy 50, a Who's Who list of top donors, compiled by the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

So-called “journalists” were so busy spending Newmark's cash they, apparently, forgot they were journalists.

Newmark never apologized to MC, AK or any of the human beings sold into sexual slavery through his website. 

Instead, Buckmaster, Newmark's handpicked CEO, denigrated MC and AK's open letter by calling it an "advertisement." He demanded they corroborate their allegations with police reports in a Craigslist blog post on Aug. 9.

Malika Saada Saar, Google's Senior Counsel on Civil and Human Rights and founder of an advocacy group for young women and girls, went on CNN with more details to show, clearly, that the girls' stories were real.

Craigslist's response? "We saw your performance on CNN," Buckmaster's reply to Saar began Aug. 12.

“Craig, where is your apology?," Saar demanded in an open letter of her own, published on the Huffington Post Aug. 23. 

The Free Lance asked Newmark whether he had ever apologized and if he would otherwise like to comment. He ignored my invitation.

The Free Lance also invited comment from the seven news publications and institutions of journalism named as being funded by Newmark to respond to the suggestion that their silence has been purchased by Newmark’s donations.

“We do not have a comment about this,” Vania Andre, Communications & Marketing Director for The City, wrote in an email.

No other response was received. The Free Lance will update this report if they do.

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