The Missouri Governor, His Affair, and the Chaos That Followed. Here’s What It Means.

“I am very worried as a family man about the effects that this has on his family,” Mike Kehoe, the Senate majority leader and a Republican, said. “The governor’s political career might have two-and-a-half years on it at best, but he’s going to have a family for life.”

What does he say happened?

Mr. Greitens acknowledged having a consensual extramarital affair, issuing a statement — together with his wife, Sheena — shortly after delivering his State of the State address in January. He has portrayed the issue as a personal matter, not a legal violation, and his lawyers have pushed back vehemently against suggestions of criminal behavior or coercion of any kind. Mr. Greitens has dismissed the legislative report, which quoted extensively from the woman he had a relationship with, as “tabloid trash” and called the investigation into his behavior a “political witch hunt.” He declined to answer questions before the same legislative committee she spoke to.

On Thursday, he seemed to relish the prospect of having the invasion of privacy case against him heard next month. “In 32 days,” he said in a statement, “a court of law and a jury of my peers will let every person in Missouri know the truth and prove my innocence.”

Who has called on Mr. Greitens to resign?

Pretty much everybody in Missouri politics. After the release of the 24-page report this week from the state legislative committee, dozens of legislators and other elected officials — Republican and Democrat — reiterated calls for Mr. Greitens to step down. They include Josh Hawley, the attorney general of Missouri and a Republican; Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat; Mr. Kehoe, the Senate majority leader; and even financial backers like David Humphreys, a businessman whose family was one of Mr. Greitens’s top donors, giving him more than $2 million during his run for governor.

Does anyone still support Mr. Greitens?

An inner circle of advisers to the governor, including several strategists and donors, were said to be urging Mr. Greitens to resist calls to resign. Some evangelical leaders, who supported him in 2016 along with an overwhelming number of the state’s white evangelical voters, said they had maintained their support for the governor.

Brandon Park, the lead pastor at Connection Point, an evangelical church in Raytown, Mo., affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, said he did not think Mr. Greitens should resign. He supports the governor’s anti-abortion positions, and he says evangelical Christians respect him for his policies. “I see a lot of these personal attacks both on Trump and Greitens as a way to take away attention from the ideals that matter most to evangelical Christians,” he said. “It does seem to be a little bit of a witch hunt.”

Others, though, were more critical. Phil Hopper, the pastor of Abundant Live Church near Kansas City, Mo., said he would be “amazed” that anybody would be supporting Mr. Greitens, but said that due process must take its course.

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Backpage.com, CEO Plead Guilty to Charges

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—The chief executive of a website that authorities have dubbed an “online brothel” pleaded guilty Thursday to state and federal charges including conspiracy and money laundering. He also agreed to testify in prosecutions against others at Backpage.com, authorities said.

Authorities allege the site was often used to traffic underage victims, while company officials said they tried to scrub the website of such ads.

Chief Executive Officer

Carl Ferrer

will serve no more than five years in prison under a California agreement in which he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of money laundering in California.

Also Thursday, Texas Attorney General

Ken Paxton

said the company pleaded guilty to human trafficking. And a federal judge in Phoenix unsealed an April 5 plea deal revealing that Mr. Ferrer pleaded guilty to conspiracy and Backpage pleaded guilty to money-laundering conspiracy.

“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,” U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “But this illegality stops right now.”

Under his plea agreement, Mr. Ferrer agreed to make the company’s data available to law enforcement as investigations and prosecutions continue. The guilty pleas are the latest in a cascade of developments in the past week against the company founded by the former owners of the Village Voice in New York City,

Michael Lacey,

69 years old, and

James Larkin,

68.

The company founders were among Backpage officials indicted by a federal grand jury in Arizona. Attorneys for the company and Messrs. Ferrer, Lacey and Larkin didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from the Associated Press.

The U.S. Justice Department has seized and shut down the website, and Mr. Ferrer’s federal plea deal requires him to help the government seize all of the company’s assets.

Mr. Ferrer could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine in the federal case in Arizona, while Backpage could face a maximum fine of $500,000 for its money-laundering conspiracy plea in the Arizona case.

The federal plea deal says any prison sentence Mr. Ferrer would face would run concurrent with his five-year terms in California and Texas.

Messrs. Lacey and Larkin remain jailed in Arizona while they await hearings on whether they should be released after pleading not guilty to federal charges alleging they helped publish ads for sexual services.

Messrs. Lacey and Larkin also earlier pleaded not guilty to the California charges after Sacramento County Superior Court Judge

Larry Brown

last year allowed the state to continue with money-laundering charges. Prosecutors allege Backpage’s operators illegally funneled nearly $45 million through multiple companies and created websites to get around banks that refused to process their transactions.

But Judge Brown threw out pimping conspiracy and other state charges against Backpage’s operators. The judge ruled that the charges are barred by a federal law protecting free speech that grants immunity to websites posting content from others.

President

Donald Trump

this week signed a law making it easier to prosecute website operators in the future.

—Copyright 2018 the Associated Press

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