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- Michael G. Lacey (born July 30, 1948) is an Arizona-based journalist, editor, publisher and First Amendment advocate. He is the founder and former executive editor of the Phoenix New Times, which he and his business partner, publisher Jim Larkin, expanded into a nationwide chain of 17 alternative weeklies, known as Village Voice Media (VVM). The company focused on long-form, magazine-style journalism, and included such papers as the Village Voice in New York, LA Weekly, Miami New Times and the OC Weekly in Orange County, California, among others.Lacey's papers prized investigative reporting and set a high bar for writing. His writers won more than 3,800 writing awards, including 39 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, 67 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, 39 Investigative Writers and Editors awards, five finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and one Pulitzer for LA Weekly culinary scribe Jonathan Gold, the first ever for food writing. His writers focused on police misconduct, political corruption and abuse of power, and he and his reporters often became targets for retribution by political enemies and law enforcement. The most famous of these retaliatory incidents was Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's arrests of Lacey and Larkin, after the pair exposed illegal grand jury subpoenas that demanded notes and other investigative material from journalists at Phoenix New Times, as well as information on the papers' online readers. The arrests of two prominent newspapermen caused a national outcry, and the county attorney dropped the case. Lacey and Larkin sued, eventually receiving a $3.75 million settlement. They used the settlement to create the nonprofit Frontera Fund, which donated the money to pro-immigrant organizations in Arizona. Lacey and Larkin sold VVM to company execs in 2012, separating the company from Backpage.com, a classified listings site they created in 2004 to compete with Craigslist.org. Backpage came under criticism from state attorneys general and nonprofits that accused the company of facilitating prostitution and sex trafficking through its adult, dating and massage sections. Backpage cooperated with law enforcement and moderated its site for illegal activity, but attorneys general and others demanded the site take down all adult-oriented ads, even though federal court rulings found the ads to be First Amendment-protected speech. The ads also enjoyed Section 230 immunity, which generally holds websites harmless for content posted by users. In 2015, Lacey and Larkin sold the company to its CEO, Carl Ferrer. In October 2016, then-California AG Kamala Harris had Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer arrested on pimping charges. Harris was running for U.S. Senate at the time. The pimping charges were twice thrown out based on the First Amendment, Section 230 and the AG's lack of jurisdiction, which Harris was aware of when her office filed the charges. On April 6, 2018, the FBI raided Lacey and Larkin's homes and seized Backpage, removing it from the internet. Lacey and Larkin were arrested, held for a week, then released on $1 million bonds. They contend their prosecution is political payback for their 40-plus years in the newspaper industry, during which they made powerful enemies such as Backpage-critics Sen. John McCain and his wife Cindy. They and four former Backpage execs face up to 100 counts of facilitating prostitution, money laundering and conspiracy. All six have pleaded not guilty. Their trial commenced on Sept. 1, 2021. After eight days and four witnesses, Judge Susan Brnovich declared a mistrial. During the trial, the judge warned the prosecution to avoid discussion of sex trafficking and child sex trafficking, which the defendants are not charged with, and to keep the focus on the actual charges of facilitating prostitution under the U.S. Travel Act. But the prosecution's opening statement and two prosecution witnesses both discussed child sex trafficking. The judge felt that the cumulative effect of the government's opening statement and the prosecution's questioning of these witnesses unfairly tainted the jury. Brnovich scheduled a new trial for February 22, 2022. She later recused herself from the case. Federal Judge Diane Humetewa was appointed to replace her. In a Jan. 20, 2022 article in Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported the following: "A new federal trial was supposed to start in February, but it's been postponed as the parties battle over whether the case should be totally dismissed. In December, a district judge dismissed defendants' motion to dismiss; they responded by appealing to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals." On September 21, 2022, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the defendants' request that the court reverse Humetewa and dismiss the case because a new trial would violate the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on Double Jeopardy. The panel wrote that "the government’s misconduct" during the trial "was not so egregious as to compel a finding" that prosecutors intended to provoke a mistrial, the legal standard for dismissal in this instance. A new trial reportedly could take place in 2023. (en)
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- Michael G. Lacey (born July 30, 1948) is an Arizona-based journalist, editor, publisher and First Amendment advocate. He is the founder and former executive editor of the Phoenix New Times, which he and his business partner, publisher Jim Larkin, expanded into a nationwide chain of 17 alternative weeklies, known as Village Voice Media (VVM). Lacey and Larkin sold VVM to company execs in 2012, separating the company from Backpage.com, a classified listings site they created in 2004 to compete with Craigslist.org. In 2015, Lacey and Larkin sold the company to its CEO, Carl Ferrer. (en)
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