PHOENIX — The Arizona federal judge in charge of the Backpage.com retrial issued an order Tuesday stating that she is aware of the death of co-defendant James “Jim” Larkin, but nonetheless expects the parties in the case to prepare for trial to commence next Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa will meet with the parties on Friday and now be held, the court noted, “to discuss a dismissal of the superseding indictment against Mr. Larkin.”
As XBIZ has been reporting, Backpage.com was shuttered and seized by federal authorities in 2018, days before President Trump signed FOSTA into law. The government accused Larkin and the company’s other top executive, Mike Lacey, of a number of crimes related to their ownership of the popular adult-oriented classifieds website. The case was subsequently used by several political figures, including Vice President Kamala Harris, as an example of the need for the FOSTA Section 230 exception.
Federal prosecutors accused the company of “participation in a conspiracy to facilitate and promote prostitution,” money laundering, human trafficking and other charges, which were strongly disputed by the defense.
In September 2021, Judge Susan Brnovich declared a mistrial, ruling that the government and its witnesses “crossed the line several times” by inaccurately implying that the case involved CSAM and child exploitation, even after she admonished them not to do so.
Lacey and Larkin worked closely together for decades developing the Phoenix alt-weekly New Times into a national chain, later devoting their attention to the spin-off classifieds operation, Backpage.com.
While Lacey was responsible for the editorial direction of the companies, Larkin served as the “business mastermind,” the Arizona Republic explained in his obituary this week.
In a 2018 interview with Reason magazine, Larkin explained that in his opinion Backpage was targeted “because of the journalism the New Times published,” specifically articles exposing the powerful Arizona political machine around the late Sen. John McCain, his family and associates.
“We’ve never, ever broken the law,” Larkin insisted. “Never have, never wanted to.”
The Long Shadow of the Late Sen. John McCain
Larkin said his and Lacey’s fight against the forces trying to ruin them was not about sex work to him, but about free speech.
Before being appointed to the federal bench, Humetewa served as counsel to the U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Subcommittee, then chaired by Sen. McCain. Upon McCain’s passing, Humetewa published an almost hagiographic tribute to the veteran Arizona politician and erstwhile Republican presidential candidate.
“I am among a privileged few who witnessed his work first-hand on behalf of Indian Country,” Humetewa wrote. “In the early to mid-1990’s, I got to see the energy that he poured into the issues of concern to the tribes and their leaders. Issues like family violence, the adoption of Indian children, the development of registration systems to track pedophiles and other offenders in Indian Country. It was an energy that even the youngest Senate staffers or interns couldn’t match. And from what I saw, he worked that way until his final days in the U.S. Senate.
“I feel compelled to write this because, as a tribal citizen, my life and the lives of my family and tribe were directly affected by the Senator’s work and will continue to be. What is more, I’m certain that my professional life would be quite different had our lives not intersected.”
Lacey and Larkin’s New Times “wrote critically about John McCain from the beginning of his career in Arizona, first as a Congressman, then a Senator,” Stephen Lemons reported in the alt-weekly in 2018.
“In the late ’80s, New Times columnist Tom Fitzpatrick skewered McCain as ‘the most reprehensible’ participant in the Keating Five scandal, wherein McCain and four other Senators attempted to influence government regulators in favor of real-estate swindler Charles Keating — one of McCain’s most influential financial backers,” Lemons added.
Operating in the relatively small, interconnected world of Phoenix politics and political journalism, Lacey and Larkin also greenlit articles detailing the outlaw origins of Cindy McCain’s family fortune — liquor bootlegging during the Depression — and her struggle with opiate addiction, all of which made them a target for the wrath of the political machine controlled by the McCain family.
Humetewa’s bio, accompanying her tribute to McCain, proudly revealed she was one of the pallbearers at McCain’s memorial service in Phoenix.