A lawyer’s $10 donation has turned into legal pursuit
On a late-autumn Tuesday in 2021, Jordan Thomas was walking along North Broadway when something bright caught his daughter’s eye: a table of backpacks, displayed to solicit donations for children in need, according to the volunteer who took Thomas’ $10 donation.
It was an ordinary, forgettable interaction. And Thomas is still talking about it.
“It seemed like a wonderful thing to donate to,” he said in his Uptown office last week.
A few weeks after donating his $10, Thomas noticed a second $10 charge on his credit card and realized that he had been signed up for recurring payments. The attorney, who handles consumer protection cases, read online reviews and learned he wasn’t alone.
“I thought I was doing a onetime donation for backpacks,” a fellow Denverite wrote. “I didn’t realize that they’ve been charging my credit card $10/mo for the past 6 months!”
Another complained, “They have been charging me $10 every month for no reason.”
Childhelp Inc. was founded in 1959 by two actresses, Sara O’meara and Yvonne Fedderson, who remain its CEO and president, respectively, today. It operates treatment facilities and advocacy centers for abused youths, as well as the National Child Abuse Hotline. The charity took in $48 million in 2021, its most recent reporting year, and employs 770 people.
O’meara and Fedderson have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize eight times for their work at Childhelp and have won 100 other honors each, according to Childhelp.
On Feb. 15, the Colorado Court of Appeals revived a lawsuit that Thomas filed in 2022, ruling that a Denver judge had been too quick to dismiss it. That means Thomas, who has already spent thousands of dollars and 100 hours on his $10 case, soon will spend more.
“The goal here is to shed some light on Childhelp,” he said last week, a few hours after the Court of Appeals gave him a win that he was expecting. “This is not about $10.”
O’meara and Fedderson were paid $530,000 each by Childhelp in 2021, the most recent year that the charity reported its executive salaries to the Internal Revenue Service. They own a home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., valued at $10.1 million, county records there show.
“Fedderson and O’meara use the donations to (Childhelp) as the primary source of funding for their opulent lifestyle,” Thomas alleges in his recently revived lawsuit.
“I think that calling it a charity,” he said of Childhelp last week, “is too charitable.”
For its part, Childhelp said it told Thomas “at least three times that the $10 donation … was monthly,” pointing to emails that refer to it as such. Thomas said those emails were not sent to him and maintains that he was never told that his donation would be recurring.
“Childhelp understands Mr. Thomas is unhappy about his donation but disagrees with the allegations in his lawsuit,” the charity told Businessden in a statement. “Mr. Thomas was fully refunded for his 20 dollars in donations before he filed his lawsuit. Childhelp remains committed to meeting the needs of abused, neglected and at-risk children.”
Thomas’ lawsuit accuses Childhelp of using deceptive trade practices in violation of the state’s Consumer Protection Act. Denver District Judge Kandace Gerdes threw the lawsuit out last year because Thomas failed to show he had been harmed in any way by Childhelp, because his $20 was reimbursed by his credit card company. The Court of Appeals found that because the refund didn’t come from Childhelp, Thomas still can sue.
“In so ruling,” Gerdes wrote when she dismissed the case, “the court is not condoning (these) fundraising activities, which the record strongly suggests are indeed deceptive.”