A judge has ordered MyPillow founder Mike Lindell to pay $5 million to a man who debunked his alleged “data” proving China helped steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump.
In 2021, Lindell organized a “cyber symposium” gathering for people promoting election falsehoods. He issued the “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge.” If anybody could debunk his data, Lindell would pay $5 million.
Robert Zeidman
Robert Zeidman took him up on the challenge and quickly showed Lindell’s data was merely random characters. He requested the $5 million. As BNG reported last fall, Lindell refused.
Zeidman, a software engineer who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, first sought help from an arbitration panel, which said Lindell should pay up. Lindell refused, saying, “This will end up in court.”
It did. Zeidman asked a federal court to uphold the arbitration panel’s verdict. Late last month, a judge ordered the financially troubled pillow icon to pay Zeidman the $5 million, with interest.
The judge’s ruling is the latest in a series of setbacks for Lindell, who has used up $60 million of his company’s profits to fund election denial events, publications and websites including FrankSpeech.com and electioncrimebureau.com.
These activities have harmed his company’s reputation and sales and torpedoed his net worth. Walmart and other major retailers have dropped MyPillow products. Fox News and Salem Radio Network no longer provide cover for his false claims as they did in the past.
He also faces three defamation lawsuits from voting machine companies and a company executive seeking more than $1 billion in penalties for the tall tales he spread far and wide about how voting machines switched tens of thousands of votes from Trump to Biden.
Lawyers defending Lindell in one of these cases asked permission to quit the case because he owes them millions of dollars he doesn’t have.
In 2022, Lindell launched the Lindell Legal Offense Fund on the far-right Christian fundraising platform GiveSendGo.com.
“LINDELL LEGAL FUND TO ‘SAVE AMERICA’S ELECTIONS’ LAUNCHES ON GIVESENDGO,” said a press release from the company. “Permanent Vigilance Needed for Voter Integrity.”
But a search for Lindell’s fund campaign page on GiveSendGo yields this cryptic message: “This campaign is unpublished.”
Conservative Christian groups — including Focus on the Family and health and wealth preacher Andrew Wommack — have rallied around Lindell, who spoke at a recent rally of pro-Trump “prophets” at Wommack’s Charis Bible College in Colorado.
Lindell also appeared on Eric Metxas’ Salem Podcast Network program from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort with a report on “the unraveling of shenanigans in the 2020 election.”
Metaxas also has been sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems, which won a $787.5 million settlement with Fox News last year.
In depositions for his lawsuits, Lindell hasn’t always comported himself in a Christ-like manner.
“I have lost everything I’ve had so far, you got it?” he said in one of many angry moments during one of three depositions. “I’ve lost millions of dollars.”
Lindell also “swore, called lawyers names, banged his fist on a table and repeatedly slammed down a pile of legal documents” during his testimony, reported the Minnesota Reformer. He also took phone calls while testifying and halted his testimony at one point to provide commentary to Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
He called opposing lawyers traitors, criminals, slime, evil and “ambulance chasing assholes.”
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