Ex-editor sues Aspen Times over firing in wake of defamation case

The former top editor at The Aspen Times this week sued the newspaper and its parent companies, alleging he was wrongfully terminated after he published previously spiked stories soon after taking the job.

Andrew Travers, in a complaint filed Tuesday in Pitkin County District Court, alleges West Virginia-based Ogden Newspapers lied when leadership promised him editorial freedom to publish news and opinion stories on a controversial property at the base of Aspen Mountain and the billionaire real estate tycoon who purchased it.

“This is about accountability,” Travers said in an interview Wednesday. “Going to court and affirming my legal rights is a way to deter them from doing this to other journalists in other communities.”

The lawsuit names The Aspen Times, Ogden and Swift Communications, a Nevada publisher bought by Ogden in 2021. An Ogden representative did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment.

Travers took the editor-in-chief job in June 2022 amid a tumultuous time at the 141-year-old mountain newspaper.

The turmoil began when developer Vladislav Doronin, who was born in the Soviet Union and now holds Swedish citizenship, and his real estate company, OKO Group, purchased a prized one-acre parcel of land at the base of Aspen Mountain ski resort’s Lift 1A.

Locals, feeling betrayed that the previous owners sold to out-of-state interests, lambasted the deal. The Aspen Times ran several editorials and news stories on the unexpected sale, calling Doronin an oligarch and insinuating he might have worked with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Doronin, who built his fortune in Moscow’s real estate scene in the 1990s, sued the paper in May 2022 for defamation over the “oligarch” term.

During settlement negotiations, Ogden leadership told The Aspen Times not to run multiple columns and other stories about Doronin or the controversial property. The paper’s top editor at the time, David Krause, resigned, citing new management and health issues.

Travers said he believed he had assurances when he took the top job that he’d be able to rebuild the paper’s credibility following the settlement by publishing those editorials and explaining why the paper initially had killed them.

But a day after publishing the columns, along with internal emails showing the back-and-forth with newspaper management, they were removed from The Aspen Times’ website. Travers was fired shortly after.

“Ogden fired Mr. Travers for simply attempting to do his job as a watchdog journalist of one of the richest towns in America, and its billionaire residents,” his attorney, Denver-based Darold Killmer, wrote in the complaint. “He was lied to by defendants to induce him into taking the promotion, and when he performed the job as he was promised that he could, he was fired.”

The Aspen saga gained national attention from the likes of The New York Times. In August, Travers penned a story in The Atlantic titled “End Times in Aspen: How a Soviet-Born Developer and a West Virginia Billionaire Destroyed a 141-Year-Old Colorado Newspaper.”

Travers is now working for the Aspen Institute and as a freelance writer. He has no interest, he said, in being reinstated at The Aspen Times.

“The damage is tragic,” he said of staff departures and other changes in the wake of Ogden’s takeover. “It’s very hard to count on it for the basic news of the day in our community at this point.”

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• 2023
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