Audio By Carbonatix
Advertising Can't Do It Alone
The challenges facing local news organizations are very real. That's why reader support matters more than ever. If you believe independent journalism matters, make a contribution today and help us reach our summer fundraising goal of $25,000 by August 9.
Todd Romero, a prominent Denver television personality for nearly three decades, is facing a charge of indecent exposure to a child after being recorded on a nanny cam masturbating while laying on the floor near a sleeping child he was babysitting.
The accusation against Romero, who is best known as a sportscaster for 9News and Altitude TV, is a class 6 felony that carries a potential penalty of 12 to 18 months in jail, one year of parole and fines up to $100,000.
Romero did not respond to Westword’s outreach about the case. However, he is quoted in the arrest report, provided by the Office of the Douglas County Clerk and Recorder, characterizing the incident as an innocent lapse in judgement caused by agony from a chronic neck injury.
The 23rd Judicial District Attorney’s office, which is prosecuting Romero, offered no comment.
As outlined on his Linkedin page, Romero is a University of Denver graduate who first made his mark on the Denver airwaves via a 1995-1999 stint at 9News, where he acted as a sports reporter, anchor and host. He subsequently served as the sports director for KSHB in Kansas City, a play-by-play announcer for World Wrestling Entertainment and a sports anchor and producer at WKMG-TV in Orlando before joining the staff at Altitude TV. There, he delivered coverage of the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche, as well as NCAA football, basketball and more during more than 11 years on the job.
He was laid off by the network in October 2023.
At the time of his departure, Romero was involved in litigation against Altitude. In 2021, he filed a lawsuit arguing that the prominence of his on-air roles had steadily diminished following a sabbatical in June and July 2016 necessitated by rehabilitation for prescription-drug dependency. One section of the complaint reads: “After Romero used his vacation time to successfully receive in-patient treatment primarily for prescription medication addiction related to a severe neck injury, Altitude/Kroenke regarded Romero as disabled and intentionally and unlawfully discriminated against him by not renewing his contract, falsely claiming that all on-air talent was being moved to at-will employment (when they were not) and systematically taking away all of Romero’s on-air host duties in favor of other hosts who are non-regarded as disabled, non-Hispanic, non-brown-skin colored and younger than forty-years old.”
The matter finally went to trial in March 2024, and the jury sided with Altitude. “It’s hard going up against the 12th-richest man in the world,” Romero told Westword after the verdict was announced. “Basically, I brought a knife to a gunfight.”
At the time, Romero was still contributing to Sparta Media Group, but his association with that firm ended in November 2025. The previous month, he concluded an eight-month run selling Audis for a local dealership.
Cut to January 19, the date of the incident at the center of Romero’s arrest report. According to the document, which is heavily censored to protect the identity and age of the child in question, Parker Police officers responded to a local home after receiving a report about a concerning video captured by a Nanit Smart Baby Monitor. The images are said to have shown Romero “laying directly next to [deleted] with his penis exposed” as he masturbated.
Three days later, on January 22, the report states, investigators contacted Romero, who was not surprised by their visit. “They caught it on the nanny cam,” he’s quoted as saying. “That’s all it is. I have no child porn. You guys can search what you want.”
He went on to explain that he’d been babysitting the child two-to-three times per week for the past six months; he described the youngster’s parents as family friends. Typically, his child-watching duties lasted a couple of hours, he maintained, but this time, the parents asked him to keep an eye the child for triple this length of time. That was difficult, he told police, because he’d just started a new job at 24 Hour Fitness that required him to wake up very early — 3:45 a.m. Hence, he was exhausted and in great discomfort from his neck injury.
The account goes on to maintain that Romero laid down on the floor in the child’s room, where he said he generally stayed when the juvenile slept even though the Nanit video could be accessed remotely from anywhere in the house. Flat surfaces tended to give him at least some relief from the pain, he said. Nonetheless, he was unable to doze off, so he pulled up some porn on his cellphone and, in his words, “rubbed one off;” he stressed that he’d used the images on his phone as inspiration, not the child. He then headed downstairs and went to sleep, only to be awakened by the child’s father “threatening him,” according to report.
On numerous occasions, the report points out, Romero said “he had no ill intents toward [deleted] and was so tired he did not think about what he was doing.”
Although a search of Romero’s cellphone confirmed multiple visits to porn sites, all of which focused on adults rather than children, no timestamps were available that could confirm he’d been viewing pornography amid the January 19 incident. Because Romero allegedly “could not articulate why he chose the one room in the residence that that had a camera that was recording in it to masturbate,” the report’s author concluded, there was probable cause for a charge of indecent exposure. Romero was arrested on March 27.
As noted by the Sawyer Legal Group, “indecent exposure is normally a class 1 misdemeanor” that tends to be bumped up to a class 6 felony only if the individual in question has had a prior conviction, which isn’t true of Romero. Yet Douglas County prosecutors charged him with a felony anyway. He is scheduled to be arraigned in Douglas County court on August 24.
