After being the subject of a series of critical stories in 2017, Andrew Baron sued Denver Post owner Alden Global Capital, arguing corporate draining of resources led to a breakdown in news quality.
DENVER (CN) — The Colorado Court of Appeals on Thursday affirmed the dismissal of a former nonprofit founder’s lawsuit against the owners of the Denver Post, rejecting his attempt to use state consumer protection law to challenge reporting critical of him.
“Baron was required to file suit by October 2021, which was several years before his 2025 lawsuit. Having failed to do so, his claims were untimely,” Court of Appeals Judge Melissa Meirink wrote in a 16-page opinion.
The Denver Post published a series of articles in 2017, reporting financial mismanagement at the nonprofit Humanwire, owned by entrepreneur Andrew Baron.
After the reporting, the 20th Judicial District Attorney’s Office charged Baron with charity fraud, and he eventually pleaded no contest. In 2018, a Boulder judge sentenced Baron to a one-year deferred sentence and ordered him to pay restitution. To this day, Baron denies wrongdoing and has long sought a correction from the newspaper, even posting his own version of the story on his blog.
Last year, Baron sued the Denver Post’s corporate owner, Alden Global Capital, claiming he was a victim of a general decline in news quality driven by corporate mismanagement.
In the 50-page complaint, Baron claimed the company violated consumer rights “by promoting themselves as publishers of ethical journalism through their operational policies, while failing to meet such policy standards in practice.”
To justify filing his lawsuit nearly seven years after the Denver Post last printed his name — and four years after the statute of limitations lapsed — Baron cited a 2024 email in which editor Lee Ann Colacioppo told him to stop asking for a correction and to stop defaming her reporter.
After hearing oral argument in May 2025, 20th Judicial District Judge Michael Kotlarczyk dismissed the suit as being filed too late. Baron appealed. The Colorado Court of Appeals agreed to review the case but declined to hold oral argument.
The lower court, Meirink wrote, correctly found the clock on Baron’s consumer protection claim started in 2018 when “Baron was aware of (1) the allegedly false stories, which had been reported as early as 2017; (2) the newspapers’ failure to correct them despite his requests; and (3) the newspapers’ alleged failure to comply with their editorial policies.”
The panel was unpersuaded that an email rehashing the issue restarted the clock.
“The newspapers’ 2024 refusal to remove or correct the articles wasn’t a new position, but one that the newspapers had maintained since 2017,” Meirink wrote.
Following Kotlarczyk’s dismissal, Baron filed a motion to amend the judgment, asserting a fraudulent concealment claim, which the judge saw as raising a new argument and thus denied. In Thursday’s opinion, Meirink agreed with the lower court finding, “while Baron may have used terms like ‘fraud’ or ‘fraudulent’ and ‘concealment’ to describe defendants’ actions, at no point did he assert fraudulent concealment as a separate claim.”
While Kotlarczyk declined to rule on Baron’s application of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act to challenge the Denver Post’s reporting, Alden’s attorney, Michael Beylkin, urged the Court of Appeals to address the issue on appeal. The court declined, keeping its review to issues addressed by the lower court.
Michael Beylkin, who practices with Zansberg Beylkin in Denver, did not immediately respond to an inquiry for comment.
Over email, Baron told Courthouse News he is disappointed in the decision but hopes to use what he learned to continue to pursue his claims. Baron likened the Denver Post’s reporting to a farmer selling eggs from caged chickens under the “cage-free” label.
“I believe that is consumer deception,” he wrote. “We need journalism more than ever. If a company promises ethical standards to sell its reports while knowingly failing to follow them, it should either honor those standards or change its terms.”
Meirink was joined on the opinion by Colorado Court of Appeals Judges Craig Welling and Eric Kuhn, all of whom were appointed by Democratic Governor Jared Polis.
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