For this media accountability action, after years of investigation, I filed a consumer protection complaint under the Colorado Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) against Alden Global Capital and its two controlling partners, Randall Smith and Heath Freeman individually, in Colorado District Court. I filed the case pro se, with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
It’s not as if I decided to use ChatGPT to represent myself in a murder trial, I took hold of the tools available to me to stand up as a consumer and individual citizen on behalf of all people in Colorado, with a message for all states, to say enough is enough with the Alden Global Capital mass media deception. These two men, Smith and Freeman, unwilling to show themselves in public or come to the table to be held accountable, are ruining journalism in America on a large scale and thus effecting democracy in a massive way. Having consolidated local news companies into the second largest newspaper conglomerate in the country, they are harming the world by misrepresenting their personal interferences into the world of American journalism, including forcing editorial and operational decisions that they promise the world they are not doing.
Legally, via the CCPA, I’m asking the court to recognize that Smith and Freeman are knowingly engaged in what the courts aptly call “deceptive business trade practices”. Their product as a news service is falsely represented to consumers as being independent and governed by published journalistic standards which they know are not followed. Here in Colorado, the evidence shows that Smith and Freeman, acting as Alden board members, have taken formal board member votes to micro-manage the Denver Post’s editorial and policy decisions, even as the newspaper’s own Terms of Service claim that ownership plays no role in editorial control. The evidence in the case includes once private letters between Freeman and members of the Senate, documented interferences by Alden’s hidden editorial demands, and documentation from Denver Post representatives who admitted that they are no longer capable of following their own journalistic promises. The facts detail how Smith and Freeman’s board rejected the Denver Posts requests to update their editorial promises to the public. If the Denver Post updated their terms to reflect their true, diminished capabilities and true ownership control over operations and editorial, it would rightfully cause the general public to lose trust in their products and services and thus, harm the revenue Alden makes from subscription and advertising sales. A company can not have a terms of service and sell a product based on their promises to uphold those terms while knowing that they do not actually abide by those terms. In consumer law, this is known as “deception”, a form of business fraud.
Why should I personally have a standing to bring this claim? I had already been investigating Alden and understood that they engage in consumer fraud through the editor’s alignment with Alden’s mission, but I did not know this same deceptive practice applied to my own situation. I assumed the chief editor had at least formed an editorial opinion about the Osher series, even if it was a bad one. In mid-2024, new email correspondence revealed for the first time that she had never reviewed the series at all and therefore had never formed any editorial judgment. She initially claimed she had reviewed the articles and found nothing to change, but when pressed, she inadvertently admitted she had never edited or even evaluated them; and when I then asked her to conduct a review, she refused. This was the first moment I could have known that my harm did not result from an editorial opinion but from a deceptive practice: knowingly not following the newspaper’s promised standards while attempting to conceal that fact. That discovery is what gives me standing under the CCPA.
By applying the CCPA, I’m seeking injunctive relief, asking the court to require Smith and Freeman to either remove or revise the Denver Post’s Terms of Service which I show Alden controls, so that the terms accurately reflect the company’s actual operations. The current terms promise a high caliber of ethical journalism with promises their news companies will comply with specific, laid-out editorial and ethical standards that, in practice, are knowingly no longer followed, as I also show in detail with facts throughout my complaint.
Having explicated and poured over other complaints filed under the CCPA, I believe it’s the correct path to hold Alden Global Capital accountable for their deceptive business practices, and in particular, though rare, holding the actual individuals in control to account, which the CCPA allows for. When executives engage in consumer fraud on behalf of their companies, they expose themselves to personal, civil liabilities under this act and can be held personally liable. Just as a business cannot put up a terms of service to pretend they follow those terms while knowing they do not, a trusted journalistic institution serving democracy by reporting on public matters cannot be structured so that it knowingly abandons its own journalistic standards while intentionally withholding this fact from the public in order to preserve consumer trust and financial value.
HOW I’VE USED AI
The District Court in Boulder has so far been accepting of my use of A.I. At a hearing, I explained that I felt out of place in such a forum, wished I had the wherewithal to afford experienced representation for such a large case, and voluntarily offered to go into detail about my use of A.I. The judge was interested to hear about it so I elaborated. As far as I know, I am the first person to file a case in the district court in Colorado pro se using AI tools while openly disclosing my use and method.
To provide an explanation to the judge for how I’ve been using Chat GPT, I asked it to provide an overview of my use which I included in my filings (ChatGPT Archive Link):
You have to use flattery these days as a warning to double-check your work. I was already familiar with ChatGPT and had been using it extensively to code, working within the codebases I already know well, particularly PHP which is good for building on the internet, and how I’ve built most of my works. When writing or debugging code, there’s a point where the boundaries of a codebase become clear; there are only so many valid functions, parameters, and logical paths available. That realization helped me understand why ChatGPT performs so effectively with programming: code is structured, finite, and rule-based.
When I began studying the CCPA, the rules of civil procedure for the court Im in, and began reading through other CCPA pleadings from complaint to case end, I noticed that law functions much like a codeset. It consists of defined inputs and outputs including statutory provisions, case precedents, procedural rules, and outcomes that depend on how the pieces can interact most effectively to get to the desired end. Seeing law through that lens made it natural to use ChatGPT not only for research but as an analytical tool. The system can integrate the full text of statutes, rules, and judicial history, then translate that structure into plain language, legal argumentation, or narrative form. In the same way that it can act as a capable co-developer within a software environment, ChatGPT can also function as a kind of legal interpreter, able to parse a complex procedural framework and render it accessible to different audiences, whether lay readers, or lawyers.
CONTEXT FOR MY USE OF AI
A couple of months ago, I attended a talk on AI, Law and Entrepreneurship hosted by the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group (RMAIIG) at the University of Colorado Boulder. The event struck a deep chord with me because it helped me see my own work in this case through a broader frame, less as an uncharted endeavor I’ve taken on myself, and more as part of a larger shift in how artificial intelligence is beginning to bridge the gap between law and accessibility.
The first lecture featured Harry Surden, Professor of Law at the University of Colorado, Faculty Director of the Silicon Flatirons Center AI Initiative, and Associate Director of Stanford University’s CodeX Center for Legal Informatics.
Surden, who has been studying AI in law for nearly two decades, went through justifying AI’s recent breakthroughs by benchmarks for the various LLM models and broke the question down neatly into what he called simple versus hard cases. In simple cases where the law is clear, precedent consistent, and outcomes predictable (e.g. a general tennant/landlord lease might regularly fall into this category), AI is “really good” now according to Surden. But in hard cases, those with conflicting precedents, factual ambiguity, or high error cost, human legal judgment is still essential. For now.
The second lecture was by Jason Lynch, General Counsel and COO at Foundry Group, Boulderite Brad Feld’s venture-capital firm. Feld, together with David Cohen and now-Governor Jared Polis, co-founded Techstars. Lynch’s presentation took the AI-can-do-law logic to its edge. In his talk provocatively titled “AI Lawyers Should Be Admitted to the Bar,” he argued that AI can already perform nearly all the core functions of an attorney counseling, advising, drafting pleadings, and preparing filings. He noted that AI passes the bar and might in some cases outperform a newly minted lawyer who has just passed the bar.
Both Surden and Lynch appeared driven by the positive effects A.I. may have on what they both consider to be an access to justice crisis in America: 80 percent of civil legal needs in the U.S. go unmet. 40 percent of counties in the US have fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents, and where lawyers are available, they are often cost prohibitive.
Despite my own confidence in my claims which is not a confidence I obtained from AI but from access and time to understand the CCPA and other cases that have been tried under the act, the odds are completely against me. According to general studies of civil litigation, when a plaintiff proceeds pro se against well-resourced defendants with experienced representation, the chances of the plaintiff succeeding are in the range of 2-3%. While AI may help to change that rate in the future, my case in particular is especially difficult and complex, and the defendants have already proven to not play fair. My case would sit on the far edge of the ”hard cases” chart for a pro se litigant attempting to use AI. It’s practically a miracle that I’ve remained standing this long. While I may not win the war due to my lack of experience in this forum, I have won many battles already that act as stepping stones for the next person who becomes caught in the crosshairs of Alden’s bad faith business practices and is willing to stand up to such a large and ruthless, unaccountable power.
Accomplishments so far:
- Demonstrated that Alden’s attorneys, Steven Zansberg and Mike Beylkin, who represent Alden Global Capital, Heath Freeman and Randall Smith personally, are not litigating in good faith. They have employed what’s called judicial estoppel, which is a serious issue, asserting one set of facts as true when convenient and then later asserting the opposite set of facts as true when strategically useful. This conduct matters beyond my case: these same attorneys represent The Denver Post, so these tactics reflect how the newspaper itself attempts to win disputes in the community without ever engaging honestly. Their pattern includes, along with the editor, refusing to articulate an editorial position, refusing to participate in the editing process, falsely asserting that editing occurred and then inadvertently revealing that it never did, later asserting that it never would, refusing to confer unless compelled by the court, refusing all discovery, and using avoidance and estoppel as a strategy to win through a gross disregard for truth and honesty.
- Established that Freeman and Smith, in their own defensive pleadings became parties to the case individually by voluntarily adopting and incorporating the arguments of their corporate entities, thereby placing themselves within the litigation in their personal capacities, de facto. If there was ever uncertainty about their individual liability, their own pleadings resolved it: they have become rightful defendants to the claims for business fraud in this case. Combined with the documented facts showing Alden’s direct control over newsroom editorial and operations, this provides a template for other plaintiffs in Colorado and other states whose local Alden-owned newspapers engage in consumer deception, to consider suing Smith and Freeman individually, for having personally admitted the same facts and promises that their corporate entries admitted to.
- Shortly after my complaint was filed, Lee Ann Colacioppo, the chief editor of The Denver Post, who has been accommodating Smith and Freeman since Gregory Moore resigned over Alden’s interference, announced she is winding down her career. Throughout her tenure, she chose loyalty to Alden over service to the community by helping to conceal Alden’s role and by abandoning basic journalistic standards. Her own disregard for truth and her deceptive attempt to conceal that she never edited was an important contributor to the very conditions that now expose Freeman and Smith to claims of consumer fraud.
- Clarified in the pleadings that Alden’s attorneys have deliberately avoided the truth as a litigation strategy. In a notice to the court reserving my right to seek sanctions, I filed the complete correspondence between myself and Alden’s lawyers, which shows a pattern of bullying, refusal to engage in or permit discovery, and a willingness to obscure facts through bad-faith tactics. This behavior mirrors Alden’s broader institutional pattern toward its newspapers and the public. Any future claimant against an Alden-controlled entity should consider reading the full set of filings to see how they treat people. Be aware that these attorneys threaten filings without justification, but just because they can, even before reviewing what they would be opposing. The record speaks for itself: The Denver Post and Alden’s lawyers, who sometimes champion First Amendment causes in Colorado when it suits them, are playing both sides of the coin, using estoppel, factual avoidance, intimidation and threats to defend Smith and Freeman’s deceptive business practices.
I. Filing and Initial Proceedings (January – April 2025)
January 2025:
- I filed the original complaint in Boulder County District Court (Case No. 2025-CV-11) against Alden Global Capital, Heath Freeman, and Randall Smith as the only three defendants.
- My claims were brought primarily under the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, with related theories including fraudulent concealment, misrepresentation, and injunctive relief.
- The case emphasized that the deceptive conduct was related to the terms of service and thus commercial, not editorial.
February–March 2025:
- The defendants filed an anti-SLAPP motion under C.R.S. § 13-20-1101, arguing that my claims arose from protected journalistic speech.
- I responded that (1) the claims target commercial misrepresentation, not speech; (2) the motion was untimely; and (3) even if the statute applied, I could meet Step Two with extensive factual evidence of falsity and deception.
- Before the hearing, I filed an amended complaint, which procedurally mooted the first anti-SLAPP motion.
Originally, I sued only the three individuals — Alden, Freeman, and Smith. The defense then argued that the entities actually responsible would be MediaNews Group, The Denver Post, and Prairie Mountain Media. I amended the complaint to include those parties, and the owners subsequently adopted the defenses of those entities, effectively making themselves de facto parties. This is a rare occurrence in corporate litigation, as it placed the principals themselves directly on the hook….which it should do.
II. Renewed Anti-SLAPP and Consolidated Opposition (April – June 2025)
April 2025:
- The defendants filed a renewed anti-SLAPP motion, recycling the same arguments.
- I filed a motion to strike the renewed filing as untimely under § 13-20-1101(5) and as procedurally abusive, while also submitting a full Step Two opposition on the merits.
- There was a missed opportunity on my part to help establish the correct precedent in Colorado on the fair timing for the use of an Anti-SLAPP, which is extremely dangerous for a plaintiff because it practically demands a mini-trial to get past it. I quickly learned through this process that the anti-SLAPP, while positive for companies that practice journalism sincerely, can be abused by companies like Alden where they use it to defend themselves against claims that are unrelated to defamation or first amendment speech, for example this commercial claim about following their terms of service. Under the rules, a plaintiff may file one amended complaint as a matter of right so long as the defendants have not yet filed an answer, and an anti-SLAPP motion is not considered an answer for this purpose. By the time the defendants filed their second anti-SLAPP motion, the deadline for doing so had already expired. The judge had the authority to decide the issue, but no Colorado court has ever ruled on this precise question of timing, and the judge in my case did not reach it either. I missed an opportunity to be more forceful in showing that if the defendants wanted to prevent my amended complaint from mooting their first anti-SLAPP motion, which prevents the risk of needing to file a second one too late, they needed to file an answer rather than relying solely on successive anti-SLAPP motions.
- My consolidated brief relied on Rhino Fund, Harte-Hanks, Newport Harbor Ventures, and complaints filed by the state of Colorado to illustrate the distinction between commercial deception and protected speech, and to show how, so long as the defendants misrepresent their product to consumers, every day is another day that they continue to engage in bad business practices.
- I attached extensive evidentiary exhibits, including:
- documented factual inaccuracies; ethical breaches, and an extended set of examples of ongoing breaches;
- the 2024 Colacioppo email which revealed the fraudulent concealment;
- correspondence showing institutional refusal to review corrections; and
- examples of misleading “corrections policy” and “Trust Project” representations.
During this stage, the defense invoked judicial estoppel and other procedural tactics while refusing to produce any discovery. In response, I filed all correspondence between myself, and the defendants lawyers into the public record to ensure full transparency. The record now includes a complete set of communications showing repeated avoidance of factual engagement.
To be clear, the defense has not only refused to provide any discovery, they have refused to accept any discovery. After asking them to let me know what discovery they would like to see, they went as far as to warn me not to send them any discovery.
III. District Court Order (June 20 – August 13, 2025)
June 20, 2025:
- The District Court dismissed the business entities including those Smith and Freeman alleged would be responsible instead of them, holding only that my claims were time-barred, while, importantly, dismissing Smith and Freeman without prejudice. Without prejudice means I’m free to try again, which I will do if needed after the ruling on appeal.
VI. Rule 59(e) Motion and Arguments (July 2025)
- My Rule 59(e) motion argued that the court had misapplied the statute of limitations by disregarding:
- The 2024 Colacioppo email as a new deceptive act restarting the limitations period under § 6-1-115.
- Continuing fraudulent concealment by Alden and its representatives.
- The ongoing pattern of deceptive trade practices distinct from defamation.
- The motion consolidated the CCPA claims into two parts:
- Part I: New and independent deceptive acts — the 2024 email and a 2025 defense-counsel statement that further misrepresented the facts.
- Part II: Ongoing institutional deception based on the false representation of correction and ethical-review policies.
- August 13, 2025: The court issued its final order, denying my Rule 59(e) motion to alter or amend the judgment.
- The ruling triggered the appellate deadlines and now serves as the anchor date for all appeal-related filings.
V. Appeal and Next Steps (September – November 2025)
October 1, 2025:
- I filed a Notice of Appeal to the Colorado Court of Appeals in Denver.
- Transcripts from the hearing were ordered, and I began preparing my arguments for the appeal. I’m not appealing just because I can, I do believe that fraudulent concealment was argued for correctly. If the appeal court finds I did not argue it correctly or that it was too late to be elaborated on from within the 59e rule then I will be sure and use that knowledge when adapting my new complaint which I will file.
Links (*Im still filling out links to filings. These can be accessed by searching the case number, 2025CV11 in the Colorado Court’s E-filing system for lawyers, or via Lexis Nexis for others at https://cocourts.com ). If you are engaged in research and would like a copy of a particular filing, please reach out.
Links to information, prior to filings:
- On Humanwire (March, 2022) – Facts on the organization, misreporting and what occurred as a result of the misreporting. https://dembot.net/on-humanwire/
- Personal entry related to the lack of accountability by The Denver Post (January, 2023) https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A9yiptkuS/?mibextid=wwXIfr
- Full investigation into The Denver Post and The Daily Camera’s operations under Alden (January, 2025) https://dembot.net/colorado-journalism-culture-shift/
Links to filings:
+ The First Complaint: Best to understand how Smith and Freeman operate Alden and their subsidiaries including MediaNew Group and The Denver Post, and how I claim they are engaged in ongoing consumer fraud. https://dembot.net/baron-v-alden-global-capital-randall-smith-and-heath-freeman/
+ The Amended Complaint: Best to understand the facts surrounding Christoper Osher’s extensive, extremely rare journalistic fraud (starts with Paragraph 11 on the PDF). https://dembot.net/amended-complaint/
+ Notice to court on the disregard for truth by defendants and their counsel. This included the full email correspondence between myself Alden’s lawyers [link forthcoming]
+ List of ALL filings prior to appeal: https://dembot.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025CV11-list-of-filings.pdf
CURRENT STATUS: The case was dismissed without prejudice as to the individual defendants, Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, meaning I am able to “try again”, which I will do, if needed. First, the case is before the Colorado Court of Appeals regarding the dismissal. If the appeal is unsuccessful with a decision I disagree with, I will use what I have learned to file a new, “better” complaint against Smith and Freeman. To date, the only substantive ruling the district court has made, which was the reason for dismissal, concerns the statute-of-limitations timeline. The District Court held that my CCPA claims expired in 2021, three years after what it viewed as the last deceptive act in a series. I appealed instead of immediately refiling because The Court did not properly address my argument that the statute of limitations was reset in 2024, when The Denver Post’s Editor-in-Chief made a new deceptive representation that constitutes fraudulent concealment under Colorado law. That 2024 act extended the limitations period to mid-2027. I also provided an array of other facts that should justify extending, reseting and starting the clock anew. I believe my January 2025 filing was therefore, timely. Even more simply, I argued a case should not be tossed on a statue-of -imitations grounds, at the pleadings stage, on a motion to dismiss. A decision from the Court of Appeals could come by the late summer or fall of 2026. If the decision is in my favor, the case will resume where it left off, and if the decision is not in my favor, and if I disagree, then I will take what I learned and try again.