The right-wing conspiracy theorist and pillow entrepreneur has become a central figure in the US ‘stolen election’ myth.
An arbitration panel in the United States has ordered MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell to pay $5m to a software engineer for breach of contract in a dispute over data that Lindell claims proves China interfered in the 2020 US presidential elections, tipping the outcome to Joe Biden.
But Lindell told The Associated Press on Thursday that he has no intention of paying and expects the dispute to land in court.
Lindell has been a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from former Republican President Donald Trump.
He launched his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” to further his theories, offering — through one of his companies — a $5m reward for anyone who could prove that “packet captures” and other data he released were not valid data from the 2020 election.
The challenge was part of the “Cyber Symposium” Lindell staged in South Falls, South Dakota, in August 2021.
Robert Zeidman entered the challenge with a 15-page report that concluded the data from Lindell did not “contain packet data of any kind and do not contain any information related to the November 2020 election”.
A panel of contest judges that included Lindell lawyers declined to declare Zeidman the winner. So Zeidman filed for arbitration under the contest rules.
After conducting an evidentiary hearing in Minneapolis in January, the three arbitrators on Wednesday ordered Lindell to pay Zeidman $5m.
“He proved the data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data,” the arbitrators wrote. “Failure to pay Mr Zeidman the $5m prize was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”
The arbitrators ordered Lindell to pay up within 30 days.
“They clearly saw this as I did — that the data we were given at the symposium was not at all what Mr. Lindell said it was,” Zeidman said in a statement Thursday. “The truth is finally out there.”
Zeidman’s lawyer Brian Glasser said the arbitrators’ ruling marked “another important moment in the ongoing proof that the 2020 election was legal and valid”. He added that Lindell’s claims about the validity of his data had been “definitively disproved”.
Lindell disputed that and said he intends to release additional data in the coming weeks or months that will prove his claims of Chinese interference in the 2020 elections and validate what he put out earlier.
“It’s going to end up in court,” Lindell said. “I’m not going to pay anything… He didn’t prove anything.”
Lindell is already the subject of a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems in the District of Columbia that says the MyPillow entrepreneur falsely accused the company of rigging the 2020 presidential election. He is also the target of a separate defamation lawsuit in Minnesota by a different voting machine company, Smartmatic.
Lindell said it was strange that the arbitrators ruled a day after Dominion settled its defamation lawsuit against Fox News for nearly $800m and suggested the ruling was an effort to get him to end his crusade against electronic voting machines.
“I’ll spend everything I have to save the country I love,” Lindell said.
