By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Pandora Young on FishbowlLA, April 2012
In early April 2012, Goldman Sachs sold its 16% stake in Village Voice Media — the parent of LA Weekly, OC Weekly, and the broader VMG newspaper portfolio, plus the substantially more controversial Backpage classified-ads site. The divestment came after New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof had publicly raised questions about Goldman Sachs’s ownership position. The original FishbowlLA framing, by Pandora Young, called Goldman Sachs “cowardly” for divesting without using its ownership position to push Backpage to reform.
Then
The Backpage classified-ads operation had been under sustained external pressure across 2011 and 2012 over its role in adult-services advertising that had repeatedly been linked to trafficking prosecutions. The Ashton Kutcher pressure campaign (covered in batch 6) had been one earlier-cycle example; the Nicholas Kristof New York Times columns in early 2012 were a substantially more institutional-scale escalation.
Goldman Sachs’s 16% stake in VMG had been a holdover from the broader merger-and-acquisition deal that had created the merged Village Voice Media in 2005. The bank had been a passive financial investor; the broader question Pandora Young’s FishbowlLA framing raised was whether passive investment in an entity with substantive ethical-and-legal exposure was itself a meaningful ethical position — Young’s framing was that “if Goldman Sachs gave a damn about victims of sex trafficking, they” could have used the ownership position to push reform, rather than simply selling out.
The cowardice framing in the original piece was substantive. Young’s argument was that institutional divestment without engagement was a kind of moral free-riding: Goldman Sachs got the public-relations benefit of the divestment without bearing any of the operational cost of actually pushing Backpage to change.
The broader 2012 institutional cycle was substantively connected to the eventual federal action against Backpage. Goldman’s divestment was an early-signal moment that other institutional investors began to repeat across subsequent months; the cumulative pressure contributed to the broader institutional-financial isolation that Backpage operated under in the years leading up to its 2018 federal seizure.
Now
Backpage was seized by federal authorities in April 2018 — six years after the Goldman Sachs divestment. The post-2018 federal prosecution of Carl Ferrer (guilty plea on facilitating prostitution and money laundering), Michael Lacey (November 2023 conviction on money-laundering charges, with prosecutors continuing on broader charges), and the post-Larkin death prosecution cycle has continued. The 2012 Goldman divestment was one of the early institutional-disengagement signals; the cumulative pressure produced substantively significant federal action six years later.
Village Voice Media itself was reorganized in 2012-2013 — the print alt-weekly operation was separated from the Backpage classified-ads platform. The print operation went through subsequent ownership transitions; the LA Weekly, OC Weekly, and other VMG titles all faced substantial editorial-and-business reorganizations across the post-2013 period.
Nicholas Kristof has continued at the New York Times (with a brief 2021-2022 hiatus to run for Oregon governor) across the years since the 2012 columns. His broader sex-trafficking-and-platform-accountability advocacy has continued; the 2020 Times investigation of Pornhub (which Kristof co-led) was a substantial subsequent installment in the same broader category of platform-and-trafficking accountability journalism.
The 2012 piece reads now as one of the documented moments when the institutional-investment-and-ethics question around Backpage was being publicly contested. The Goldman Sachs divestment, the FBLA cowardice framing, and the broader Kristof-led pressure campaign were all part of the cumulative cycle that produced the eventual 2018 federal action — though the specific ethical question Young raised in 2012 about institutional engagement versus divestment has continued to be a recurring framework for subsequent ESG-and-platform investment discussions.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.
More from the FishbowlLA archive
- Erin Aubry Kaplan’s January 2013 KCET column — a Leimert Park reader, an off-line phone call, and Black-LA-Times coverage
- LA Weekly’s stages of grief over Jonathan Gold’s exit — Amy Scattergood and the February 2012 staff mood
- Rebecca Schoenkopf vs. Dennis Romero — March 2012 Twitter spat between Wonkette and LA Weekly