Democrats try to spin Kamala Harris’ history as an overzealous prosecutor into a positive

Courtney Baldwin’s story is heartbreaking, which you’d expect from a woman who survived the brutality of sex traffickers. But her presence on the mainstage at last week’s Democratic National Convention was unexpected because it highlighted just about everything that’s wrong with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and the ideological monoculture from which she emerged in California.

Baldwin’s biography is shocking. Kidnapped by a sex trafficker in 2013, she said, she was sold to men “in cities across California.” But her story is ultimately one of personal triumph and liberation. Sharing credit for that victory with Harris is perhaps gracious. It’s almost certainly political. But it’s definitely a stretch: Baldwin did her best to claim that Harris helped rescue her from captivity by closing down Backpage.com.

Backpage was a kind of Craigslist for escorts – a website that introduced people (mostly women) who were willing to provide company (with the near guarantee of sex) for their paying clients (mostly men). While serving as California’s attorney general in 2016, Harris made high-profile announcements that she had investigated, arrested and charged Backpage executives for trafficking underage women. 

Her charges went nowhere. But actual convictions were never necessary. It’s the symbolism that lasts, as evidenced by Courtney Baldwin’s presence just ahead of Harris on the DNC’s final day. 

Nor was Harris alone in the propaganda campaign. For most of the 2010s, vilifying Backpage was a nonpartisan professional sport. Two years after Harris first charged Backpage execs, Trump administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the FBI had seized Backpage. He was following the Harris playbook.

“For far too long, Backpage.com existed as the dominant marketplace for illicit commercial sex, a place where sex traffickers frequently advertised children and adults alike,” Sessions said in an April 2018 press release. “But this illegality stops right now. Last Friday, the Department of Justice seized Backpage, and it can no longer be used by criminals to promote and facilitate human trafficking.” 

Years of federal prosecution followed. At one point in the proceedings, a federal judge rebuked government prosecutors for their profligate use of such phrases as “child sex trafficking” in order to trigger emotional responses in jurors. She declared a mistrial. That did not stop the prosecutors. The end came only in November with a mistrial on all but one of 80-plus federal charges – a single count of money-laundering against defendant Mike Lacey, a Backpage cofounder. By then, Lacey’s codefendant, Backpage cofounder Jim Larkin, had killed himself. (Disclosure: Years before these events, I worked for Lacey and Larkin as publisher and editor of the newspaper their Village Voice Media owned in Orange County, California.)

Even as Courtney Baldwin spoke, Harris knew the truth was elsewhere – that government prosecutors like herself had tried to build their reputations at a cost borne entirely by Larkin, Lacey and others. 

Those others, ironically, turn out to be women who used Backpage to vet their customers before meeting them. With the disappearance of Backpage, those women find themselves relying on the old-school business model – violent pimps, criminal gangs and lonely meet-ups with dangerous men. Whatever one thinks of this “sex work,” only a sociopath would call this outcome a cause for celebration. 

The disappearance of Backpage was also a loss for officials eager to catch real sex traffickers. Reviewing government documents for Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown concluded that prosecutors like Harris knew all along that the charges against Backpage were bogus, and that – remarkably, given everything those prosecutors alleged – Backpage actually worked effectively with law enforcement to crack down on interactions that looked like sex trafficking. 

That’s just one of the problems with the Harris campaign’s spotlit performance by Courtney Baldwin on the final day of the Democratic National Convention. There’s also the fact that the source of much child sex-trafficking occurs at America’s southern border, and particularly on that part of the border that separates Mexico from California. 

The porousness of that border should raise serious questions about Vice President Harris’s performance as Border Czar. But long before that, even as California’s AG pursuing false claims against Backpage, Harris was blasting a U.S. Senate proposal that would have ended the states’ ability to circumvent federal border authority through sanctuary laws. Never mind the flood of unaccompanied minors from south of the U.S. border: California’s affection for illegal immigrants, exemplified by its myriad grants of legal shelter from federal authorities and myriad financial incentives to stay in the Golden State – continues to provide the supply of victims for real criminals.

Harris will no doubt survive these inconsistencies. These truths are unlikely to land among partisans and low-information voters in the American equivalent of a British snap election. But many Californians already know the truth. We understand the internal contradictions of the progressivism that may come to dominate White House conversations.

We watch daily as our political overlords hoist the progressive banner, charge the ramparts of the oppressor class, and destroy the lives of the people they claim to serve.

Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center, and cohost with David Bahnsen of National Review’s Radio Free California podcast.