MyPillow CEO is sued over claims of vote fraud
Dominion Voting Systems sued Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, on Monday, alleging that he defamed Dominion with baseless claims of election fraud involving its voting machines. The company is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and also named MyPillow, alleged that Lindell “exploited” false claims about election fraud to support his company's sales.
“Lindell — a talented salesman and former professional card counter — sells the lie to this day because the lie sells pillows,” Dominion said in the filing. It said that MyPillow’s “defamatory marketing campaign” — with promo codes such as “FightforTrump” and “QAnon” — increased the company's sales by 30 percent to 40 percent.
“I’m very happy that they’ve done this,” Lindell said in a phone interview Monday. “I’m ready to go to court. I have all the evidence that anyone would ever want to see.”
Lindell is a fierce supporter of former President Donald Trump and rose to new prominence this year as he promoted debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud. The claims, particularly those made after the Jan. 6 uprising at the Capitol, prompted a backlash against Lindell and MyPillow. A number of retailers, including Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl’s, cut ties with the company while Twitter permanently suspended Lindell’s account.
Dominion said Monday that it had written to Lindell multiple times, “put him on formal written notice of the facts, and told him that Dominion employees were receiving death threats because of the lies.”
“Instead of retracting his lies, Lindell — a multimillionaire with a nearly unlimited ability to broadcast his preferred messages on conservative media — whined that he was being ‘censored’ and ‘attacked’ and produced a ‘docu-movie’ featuring shady characters and fake documents sourced from dark corners of the internet,” Dominion said in the filing.
Dominion said that through discovery, it “will prove that there is no real evidence” to support conspiracy theories claiming that the election was stolen.
“I would not go out and risk everything I own, everything I have, if I wasn’t 100 percent being truthful,” Lindell said Monday.
Dominion also filed defamation suits last month against two of the former president’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.