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BOULDER, Colo. (CN) — Citing a lapsed statute of limitations, a Boulder judge dismissed an entrepreneur’s suit against the owner of the Denver Post on Friday, which had claimed flawed news coverage violated state consumer protection law.
“Baron doesn’t dispute that the statute of limitations for his Colorado Consumer Protection Act claims has long since passed, if the statute is based on the news reports,” wrote 20th Judicial District Judge Michael Kotlarczyk in a 12-page order.
The Denver Post published a series of articles in 2017, reporting financial mismanagement at the nonprofit Humanwire, owned by entrepreneur Andrew Baron, who has long claimed the newspaper failed to accurately portray his organization.
Following the reporting, however, the 20th Judicial District Attorney’s Office charged Baron with charity fraud, to which he eventually pleaded no contest, resulting in his record being sealed.
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 Dembot.
In his lawsuit, Baron said he counted 120 inaccuracies across six stories reported on him in the Denver Post and the Boulder Daily Camera.
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.
In his order, Kotlarczyk said the idea of an email exchange resetting the statute of limitations ultimately led to “an absurd result — effectively giving defamation plaintiffs a never-expiring claim against media companies.”
In dismissing the case on timeliness grounds, Kotlarczyk declined to address jurisdictional challenges raised by Alden’s president and left the merits of Baron’s consumer claims untouched.
On Jan. 17, Baron sued the Post’s investment fund owner Alden Global Capital, along with its president Heath Freeman and chief of investments Randall Smith. Rather than defamation claims, Baron cited the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, arguing that the company was misleading consumers through policies promising to pursue the truth.
The son of famed trial lawyer Fred Baron, Andrew Baron claimed to be the victim of a general decline in news quality prompted by Alden’s mismanagement of its newspapers and practice of cutting resources even when publications turn a profit.
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.”
Alden Global Capital is represented by civil rights attorney Michael Beylkin, who declined to speak with Courthouse News.
Baron, who represented himself through the litigation, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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