MyPillow founder Mike Lindell has lost yet another lawyer involved in a civil lawsuit he hopes will avoid him paying out $5m in award money he offered in an election fraud evidence competition.
Lindell, an avid Donald Trump supporter, launched the ‘Prove Mike Wrong’ challenge in 2021 and promised to pay the huge prize to anyone who could prove alleged evidence of 2020 election fraud false.
Computer forensics expert Robert Zeidman did just that, but Lindell refused to pay and tried to renege on his offer.
However, a private arbitration panel in April 2023 ruled that Lindell must pay Zeidman, which the businessman then tried to challenge. A district judge has ruled that the panel’s decision stood.
Lindell is appealing the February decision by the district judge, Newsweek reported, but has now lost members of his legal team.
During an appearance on a right-wing online show called The Glazov Gang, the pillow magnate said the prize would go to “anybody that can prove the election data that I have from the 2020 election was false, is not from the 2020 election”.
He claimed the data he had would show “an attack from China” on voting machines during the 2020 election.
Zeidman entered the contest and successfully showed that a tranche of internet traffic data Mr Lindell claimed was evidence of Chinese interference in the 2020 presidential election had nothing to do with that election at all.
However, when Lindell’s company, Lindell Management, refused to pay up, he turned to the binding arbitration specified as the venue for resolving any contest-related disputes in the rules Mr Lindell published when he made his offer.
In March, Lindell was greenlit to appeal the district court ruling that he must pay the $5m, but at the same time, two of his attorneys withdrew from his case, Law&Crime reported.
Now, a third attorney has also quit the lawsuit, according to the outlet, with Magistrate Judge Dulce Foster writing in an order on June 4 that “Counsel for Respondent has notified the Court by email that he can no longer serve as lead counsel for Respondent.”
After the arbitration panel ruled that Zeidman had won, Lindell filed in state court to try and vacate the award, but Zeidman appealed in federal court to enforce it. Both of the cases were consolidated and removed to federal court, the outlet said.
“The panel concluded that Zeidman proved that each file did not include packet capture data and thus was not related to the November 2020 election, so he had satisfied the Challenge rules, and was entitled to the $5 million reward,” U.S. District Judge John Tunheim wrote in the opinion in February upholding the arbitrator’s ruling, according to court documents seen by the outlet.
It is not the first case that Lindell has lost his defense lawyers after his attorneys also walked out en masse over unpaid legal bills amidst cases where he was sued for defamation by two manufacturers of polling station machines.
Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are both seeking millions of dollars in damages after the businessman claimed the machines had been tampered with to help President Joe Biden win the 2020 election; however, Lindell has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the cases.
He has also seen his brand’s advertising slots on a number of conservative cable news channels terminated, and his relationships with several major retailers severed over his political activism, with Bed Bath & Beyond, Kohl’s, QVC, JCPenney, and Wayfair all declining to stock his pillows.
