On Wednesday, August 28, 2024, the veteran newspaper editor Michael Lacey walked into a federal courthouse in Phoenix to face sentencing for one count of international concealment money laundering. Federal prosecutors were seeking 20 years, which would have kept Lacey locked up until he was 96. It was an unfortunate milestone in an eight-year legal saga with broad implications both for free speech and for the sex work industry.
Lacey's sentencing is the final scene in Classified: The War on Backpage, a new 42-minute documentary film produced by Reason, directed by Paul Detrick, and reported by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, now streaming exclusively at CiVL. It ties together Brown's years of reporting on the government's case against the online classified site—a legal crusade led in its early stages by former California Attorney General Kamala Harris.
