Five news outlets have quietly removed a years-old news story from their websites about the 2019 arrest of a prominent former Colorado Springs City Council member, who ran in a Republican primary for a state House seat in 2023.
The removal of the stories was discovered after the alleged perpetrator of the crime, Lisa Czelatdko, wrote multiple threatening emails to the Colorado Times Recorder starting about a month ago demanding the removal of a reference to Czelatdko’s arrest in a 2023 CTR story about her primary race against state Rep. Rebecca Keltie (R-CO Springs).
The Colorado Times Recorder did not delete the sentence from our story, as Czelatdko requested. It appears that the other five news outlets removed entire stories about her sometime between the beginning of March 2024 and just after Czelatdko started emailing the Colorado Times Recorder.
Of the five news outlets that did scrub the article from their public archive, only KOAA News5, the local NBC affiliate, responded to requests for an explanation of the action, issuing a statement that its “decision to archive the story was made due to evolution in our content strategy and our use of mugshots in our reporting.” The other outlets — the Colorado Springs Gazette, KKTV, Fox21, and KVOR — didn’t respond to emails and phone calls.
Czelatdko emailed CTR reporter Heidi Beedle on February 25, identifying herself as a “respected member of the Colorado Springs community both professionally and personally” and as a former Colorado Springs City Council member who also served on over 50 committees and boards, including the CSU board, and was endorsed by the Gazette and the Broadmoor.
“I have spent my life building a positive reputation and being a good woman,” she wrote.
She asked Heidi to remove the following portion of an article Heidi wrote in December 2023: “and in 2019 [Czelatdko] was arrested allegedly greeting her husband with a can of mace, then hurling knives at him while trying to force him out of their house. The charges were later dropped.”
Czelatdko wrote that “there are no arrest records, police reports, or court records under my name associated with this incident.”
“Furthermore, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) report attached to this email confirms that no arrest has ever been filed in the state of Colorado in relation to this matter. The report shows this incident is provable false,” she continued, adding, “False content and has been very damaging to my personal and professional life. It also is professional and personally damaging to my incredible 4 daughters who also are outstanding and beloved members of the school, business and firefighting community here in Colorado Springs.”
Heidi discussed Czelatdko’s emails with CTR staff. Details of the domestic violence incident that led to her arrest, along with the $10,000 bond she posted three days later, were widely reported at the time by leading media outlets in Colorado Springs. KOAA’s headline, for example, stated, “Former Colorado Springs city councilwoman suspected of throwing knives at husband.” Several months later, the Gazette reported on Czelatdko’s hearing, where prosecutors dropped the felony assault and menacing charges, saying that a dismissal was “in the interests of justice.” The judge then agreed to seal the case, a fact also noted in the Gazette’s reporting.
Because the judge sealed the case, it does not appear on the CBI report sent to us by Czelatdko. But the CBI report states that “sealed records (except those allowed per state statute 24-72-703), and juvenile records are not available to the public.”
In looking over her article mentioning Czelatdko, Heidi noted that the article about the arrest, which she’d linked to in her article, was still online, a fact she pointed out to Czelatdko via email. Sometime during the following week, the story was removed from the website of KOAA. Heidi then linked to the WayBack Machine’s archived version of KOAA article about Czelatdko and removed the broken link to KOAA’s website. A clarification was subsequently added at the bottom of the article.
After writing Heidi four more times, Czelatdko emailed CTR’s editor on March 10 and cc’d Heidi.
In a series of emails, she again asked for the removal of the reference to her in our story; alleged defamation and libel; and she threatened legal action, including “injunctive relief and substantial monetary damages for the harm inflicted upon my reputation and livelihood.” When we rejected her request, she sent us copies of her complaints about us to the Colorado Attorney General, the Colorado Press Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists. Her most recent email arrived last week, stating that the “actions of Heidi Beedle and the Colorado Times Recorder constitute multiple violations under Colorado law.”
She also alleged that the article removed from KOAA’s website, which Heidi had linked to, was “false and inaccurate.”
In an email, KOAA stated that its article was accurate, even though it had been removed.
“First, we stand by the accuracy of our original story,” states KOAA’s statement. “We reported information that was factual. Upon learning that the charges mentioned in the original story were later dropped, we updated the story to reflect this new information.
“Our decision to archive the story was made due to evolution in our content strategy and our use of mugshots in our reporting. For years, KOAA, like many media outlets, displayed the mugshots provided by law enforcement following criminal arrests. But in the age of digital and social media, where information lives in perpetuity, the practice of identifying suspects and showing their mugshots has at times led to unintended consequences. Today, we consider a range of criteria when we evaluate whether to use mugshots and when to archive content, and our policy is always to uphold journalism ethics and standards. It is our responsibility as journalists to always provide fair, balanced, and consistent reporting.”
KOAA declined a request to explain why it didn’t simply remove the mug shot of Czelatdko from its website.
It’s not known why the other four Colorado Springs outlets removed the story.
Whatever the reason, they should have at least posted an explanation to readers of their action, said Fred Brown, co-author of the ethics code of the Society of Professional Journalists.
“Generally, the best way to handle such situations is to post the latest status at the top of the online file, so it’s the first thing the (re)searcher sees,” wrote Brown. “In this case, at the very least, the editor’s note should say that the case was settled and the charges dropped.
“If this were a private person and not a public official, it would be more acceptable to remove the story entirely. An explanatory note would still be ethically appropriate, although it would be challenging to figure out how to word it.
“Another complicating factor is that the court has sealed the arrest record. Does that — can it — apply retroactively? You’d have to ask an attorney.”
Samantha Barbas, a professor of law at the University of Iowa and the author of Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan, said via email that it’s unlikely the news outlets would be legally required to remove information about a sealed case.
“As a legal scholar, I would say that news organizations generally do not have to take down stories, especially those that concern matters that are in the public record, like an arrest or a hearing. The First Amendment generally protects the press from forced takedowns.
“The sealing of the case doesn’t take the facts out of the public record or erase the public memory of the event. News outlets can voluntarily choose to remove articles, of course. Yet, as a matter of public policy, it seems that news outlets are not serving the public if they erase history, especially history pertaining to elected officials and political issues.”
Another possible explanation for the removal of the articles: The news outlets wanted to protect the reputation of Czelatdko, who is a well-known Republican.
Of the four news outlets that didn’t explain why they removed Czelatdko’s story, only the Colorado Springs Gazette, under Executive Editor Vince Bzdek, has faced credible allegations of interfering in the paper’s news reporting process to protect Republicans. The Gazette’s owner, Phil Anschutz, is a GOP billionaire who’s active in politics. The editorial page of the Gazette is hard right.
Keltie, who defeated Czelatdko in the 2024 GOP primary in a Colorado Springs House District, acknowledged that Czelatdko’s arrest came up during their primary race last year.
Reached for comment, Keltie declined to speculate why Czelatdko is now trying to erase news reports about the incident, but offered the following statement:
“It’s important that people know who they’re electing,” says Keltie. “Their background is important — things that they’ve done, whether they have a record, if they have a DUI, if they’ve been arrested- that’s who the candidate is. And it’s one thing if it happened fifteen or more years ago, but in this case it didn’t — it was just in 2019. So if it’s current information, it’s important for people to know who they’re electing.
“People have history. if you do something wrong, as long as you make it better by explaining, this is what I did, no one’s going to expect people to be perfect. But if you’re trying your best to hide your past from the public, you’re already not trustworthy.”
The decision by the news platforms in Colorado to remove the Czelatdko story comes as news outlets, large and small, have caved to pressure from conservatives who don’t like their coverage.
In one widely publicized instance, ABC News agreed in December to a $15 million settlement in a lawsuit filed by Trump alleging defamation resulting from George Stephanopoulos’ on-air statement that Trump had been found guilty of raping writer E. Jean Carroll. In fact, a jury found Trump guilty of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.
In another case, Trump alleged that CBS News and Paramount, its parent company, violated consumer protection laws due to routine changes made during an interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount moved to settle the lawsuit as the Trump Administration was reviewing Paramount’s merger with another media company, Skydance. Paramount CEO Shari Redstone is reportedly in favor of resolving the issue with Trump, instead of fighting the case, which is widely regarded as a sure loser for Trump.
Small Outlets Face Conservative Pressure
In explaining to Fresh Air March 11 why he wrote his book Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment and the Campaign to Protect the Powerful, New York Times reporter David Enrich said that his investigative unit at the Times has been increasingly “bombarded with threatening letters” from lawyers and the Times is “pretty well equipped to handle those kinds of threats.”
But he wondered “what that would be like if you worked for a smaller news outlet or if you were an independent journalist.”
For his book, he told Fresh Air, he “started calling around to reporters, editors, publishers, lawyers all over the country and just asking them about their experiences and whether they’d been threatened and if they’d been sued, and I just started hearing this littiny of really kind of upsetting horror stories from people who had been pushed to the financial and psychological brink by these lawsuits or in some cases had faced these threats and essentially decided to not write about certain things or certain topics because they were scared about what would happen if they did.”
Enrich didn’t call the Colorado Times Recorder, but our progressive news outlet faces a drip of lawsuit threats, including a 2020 letter from lawyers representing conservative David Horowitz, and a fundraising campaign by far-right conspiracist Joe Oltmann, who asked supporters for money to pay for a lawsuit against the Colorado Times Recorder.
