MyPillow CEO faces defamation lawsuit from second voting machine maker
The MyPillow CEO, Mike Lindell, is facing another defamation lawsuit for promoting his conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump.
Smartmatic, a UK-based voting machine company, filed a lawsuit against Lindell on Tuesday claiming that Lindell espoused lies about the company switching votes from Trump to Joe Biden in order to better sell his products.
“Crazy like a fox. Mike Lindell knows exactly what he is doing, and it is dangerous,” Smartmatic said in the lawsuit, filed to a federal court in Minnesota. “Lindell intentionally stoked the fires of xenophobia and partydivide for the noble purpose of selling his pillows.”
The company noted that the MyPillow brand was “a ubiquitous feature” and was “strategically placed” during his media appearances.
Lindell is already facing a $1.3bn lawsuit from Dominion, another voting machine company, that was filed last February. In August, a federal judge gave the green light for the lawsuit against Lindell to move forward to a trial.
Smartmatic is seeking unspecified monetary damages in its suit.
Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have found no evidence of the widespread voter fraud that Lindell and other Trump allies have been claiming. Lindell has spent the last year advancing his conspiracy theory, funding a three-week bus tour and a threeday “cyber symposium” on the election.
In response to Smartmatic’s lawsuit, Lindell said he was “excited” to present evidence that he has against the company.
“They’re guilty. They’ve attacked us and were part of the biggest crime in history against our country. And they’re going to all go to prison,” Lindell told Business Insider. Lindell also pointed out that he had lost more than $80m after large retailers dropped his product and that he had spent $30m of his own money trying to prove his election fraud theories.
In addition to Smartmatic’s lawsuit, the state of Idaho on Tuesday sent Lindell a cease-and-desist letter ordering him to remove false statements about the state’s election from his website. The state, which voted for Trump in the 2020 election, also billed Lindell $6,558.83 to cover the cost the state spent refuting Lindell’s claims.
Despite the multiple lawsuits that he faces, Lindell is still actively promoting his theories on the 2020 election. Most recently, Lindell was seen on a conservative media site saying that he had “enough evidence to put everybody in prison for life, 300 and some million people”, though 159 million people voted in the 2020 election.