When advocates for the young victims demanded that websites stop offering the ads, Craigslist complied. That type of advertising had migrated to the Internet, and because of the anonymity available online these ads were increasingly used to sell sex with underage girls and boys.
The motel case came the same year that three men who ran a chain of alternative-weekly newspapers launched to compete with Craigslist for erotic classified advertising. In “Taking Down Backpage,” Krell tells the story of how that awakening led her to years of fighting child sex trafficking - culminating in helping to shut down, a website that made such sales easier and more profitable.