New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has made it his mission to out web sites like Backpage.com (owned by Village Voice Media, which runs the Seattle Weekly ) for their role in child sex trafficking, responded late last week to an unsigned VVM editorial---which ran in all VVM papers, including the Weekly--- accusing him of getting his facts wrong.

The VVM editorial, titled "What Nick Kristof Got Wrong," takes issue with the text accompanying a video accompanying (phew!) Kristof's online op/ed. At issue: Whether the prostituted girl in question was in fact 16, or older, when she was sold on Backpage.com. Kristof, VVM asserted, "concocted a story to suit his agenda and then asked his readers to boycott Village Voice Media."

The editorial goes on to claim that VVM devotes "hundreds of employees" exclusively to screening its online prostitution advertisers to make sure they aren't advertising underage prostitutes.

Neither VVM nor Seattle Weekly responded to a request from PubliCola to substantiate the claim that VVM, a chain with a dozen weekly newspapers, employs "hundreds" of workers to screen its escort advertisers (according to Hoovers.com, VVM has 1,400 employees, including editorial, advertising, and tech).

Kristof did completely upend one of the company's principle claims: that one of the juvenile prostitutes he quotes, Alissa, was actually 17 in 2003, the year Kristof says she was sold online at the age of 16:

The Voice is right that Alissa was 16 in 2003 — for about two days. In fact, Alissa turned 16 at the end of 2003. So all during 2004, she was 16 years old. And so it was in 2004, not 2003, that she was traveling up and down the east coast being pimped. Backpage operated in at least 11 cities during 2004, including Miami and Fort Lauderdale, both of them cities Alissa where says she was pimped on Backpage. Then at 17, as Backpage expanded to 30 cities including Boston, she was pimped even more broadly on Backpage — and also in Village Voice print ads, she says.

Kristof continues:

I’m frankly a bit surprised that Village Voice is even trying to deny its role. Attorneys General around the country have linked Backpage to arrests for trafficking of underage girls in 22 different states. As my column noted, one recent case involved a 15-year-old girl here in New York. A previous column I wrote cited a 13-year-old girl peddled on Backpage.

Here in Washington State, legislators passed a bill this past session prohibiting publications from knowingly posting prostitution ads for minors and requiring advertisers to keep records of the identification they use to verify the age of girls featured in ads, and both Mayor Mike McGinn and city council member Tim Burgess have made preventing child exploitation a cornerstone of their administrations.