Court agrees Web site that lets pimps sell teen girls for sex is disgusting, but says it's protected by the First Amendment and federal law

A federal appeals court said today it's sympathetic to three woman who were advertised for sex on backpage.com while they were teens, but that a lower-court judge made the correct call in dismissing their suit because the site is protected by a federal law covering publishers who post content from third parties online.

A three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, which included retired US Supreme Court Justice David Souter, began its ruling:

This is a hard case - hard not in the sense that the legal issues defy resolution, but hard in the sense that the law requires that we, like the court below, deny relief to plaintiffs whose circumstances evoke outrage.

In their filings, the three women said they were only 15 when pimps began offering them on backpage.com, starting in 2010, and that each were raped several hundred times in Massachusetts and Rhode Island by the pimp's customers before they finally escaped.

The justices ruled that in a legal battle between the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 and the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which contains a provision protecting online publishers from suits involving content they did not originate, the latter wins out.

The court praised, but rejected arguments from the women's attorneys at Ropes and Gray and interested parties who included Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and several large cities, that, by profiting from the ads and taking steps to make them anonymous, backpage.com was profiting directly from prostitution. The justices said backpage.com - which started as a classified-ads service at the Village Voice in New York - was not acting any differently than any other publisher, albeit with particularly loathsome content:

The appellants' core argument is that Backpage has tailored its website to make sex trafficking easier. Aided by [briefs by interested parties], the appellants have made a persuasive case for that proposition. But Congress did not sound an uncertain trumpet when it enacted the CDA, and it chose to grant broad protections to internet publishers. Showing that a website operates through a meretricious business model is not enough to strip away those protections. If the evils that the appellants have identified are deemed to outweigh the First Amendment values that drive the CDA, the remedy is through legislation, not through litigation.