One of Trump’s Most Deranged Backers Lost His Defamation Trial. He’s Declaring Victory.

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Mike Lindell, most famous as “the MyPillow Guy” who made a small fortune marketing his sleep wares to millions of Americans, can’t stop selling. Not even during his own defamation trial, with tens of millions of dollars at stake and the sales pitch threatening his very defense.

The high-energy founder of MyPillow was stuck in a federal courtroom in Denver for most of the first half of June, facing a lawsuit from Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems executive, whom Lindell had accused of being part of a criminal conspiracy to rig the 2020 election. But that didn’t prevent America’s foremost peddler of overhyped bedding from using the occasion to tell his followers that they were witnessing “the trial of the century,” and offering them “the sale of the century”: a whopping discount on MyPillow merchandise, available through use of the promo code JURY.

Coomer’s lawyers complained to U.S. District Judge Nina Wang about the huckstering, arguing that it was proof that Lindell wasn’t taking the matter seriously enough. Lindell soon ran afoul of the judge’s rulings, by defying her ban on texting or tweeting in court or making public statements while the trial was underway. Lindell promised to do better, but silence does not come easily to him—which is why he was in the courtroom in the first place.

Most of the civil lawsuits brought by state officials and voting machine companies against 2020 election deniers and the media outlets that amplified their baseless claims were settled long ago. But Lindell, who has driven his business into the ground with his obsessive and shambolic crusade to prove that Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 was tainted by fraud-producing voting equipment from Dominion—including a vow to “melt down the machines”—won’t back down. He has refused to retract, or apologize for, anything. Instead, he chose to mount what could best be described as the Stupid Defense: There was no intent to defame Coomer because he actually believed all the false statements he was making, despite the lack of evidence—and still does.

Selling the Stupid Defense to a jury takes some doing. His attorneys maintained that Lindell burned through oodles of cash—around $40 million, by Lindell’s reckoning—investigating alleged security breaches in the 2020 election process, and that he was exercising his right to free speech when he aired his concerns on social media, in podcasts and press interviews, and on his own online platform, FrankSpeech (since rebranded as LindellTV). Coomer’s team countered that Lindell pushed a “science fiction” narrative of a stolen election, heedless of all evidence to the contrary, and defamed their client repeatedly to millions of viewers, falsely accusing Coomer of treason and playing a key role in “the biggest crime this world has ever seen.”

Lindell took the stand for three days of meandering, combative, and often emotional testimony. He choked up as he described how pressing his election claims had cost MyPillow support from major retailers and led to layoffs and struggles to meet payroll. He lashed out bitterly at Coomer and his attorneys, portraying himself as a victim of “lawfare.” (“What did I do? Nothing to this guy,” he insisted. “I was an ex-crack addict. I never voted in my life. … You took everything. I’m $10 million in the hole.”) And he provided jurors a glimpse into a rabbit hole teeming with conspiracy theorists, grifters, bogus data purveyors, purported spooks, provocateurs, and yes, true believers, who have embraced and continue to spread the tale of widespread election fraud, long after the election was certified, the Trump campaign’s dozens of legal challenges failed, and even after their man was restored to power in the 2024 election.

Lindell was an early critic of Dominion Voting Systems, which provided voting machines used by 28 states. After Trump lost, he quickly became one of the most vocal propagators of the claim that Chinese hackers somehow penetrated the air-gapped systems and changed votes. He was relatively late, though, to join in the attacks on Eric Coomer, who was then Dominion’s director of product strategy and security. On Nov. 9, 2020, a right-fringe podcaster in Colorado named Joe Oltmann claimed to have infiltrated an antifa conference call held several weeks before the election, during which a speaker identified only as “Eric the Dominion guy” boasted, “Trump is not gonna win. I made fucking sure of that.” After Googling “Eric” and “Dominion,” Oltmann concluded that the speaker was Eric Coomer.

Coomer denies ever saying any such thing or being part of such a call. But the flimsy account spread rapidly on the internet; Coomer was harassed, doxed, threatened, went into hiding, and began experiencing panic attacks. Oltmann gave a barrage of interviews to other conservative pundits on Newsmax, One America News Network, and Lindell’s FrankSpeech platform, fanning the flames. On May 9, 2021, months after the Jan. 6 insurrection failed and Joe Biden was inaugurated, Lindell joined the bandwagon, ranting on FrankSpeech about the “corrupt people” at Dominion and calling Coomer a traitor.

“Eric Coomer, if I’m you right now … I’m turning myself in and turning in the whole operation so maybe, just maybe, that you get immunity and you only get to do, I don’t know, ten, twenty years,” Lindell said. “These are things that I have evidence of. The evidence is there.”

The evidence wasn’t there. In fact, two days before Lindell’s outburst, Newsmax had aired an apology for its coverage of the Coomer rumors and settled a lawsuit brought by Coomer for an undisclosed sum. (Coomer’s defamation cases against Oltmann, the Trump campaign, and numerous other defendants are still pending.) The news organization’s retraction stated that it had found no evidence that Coomer had interfered in the election or “ever participated in any conversation with members of Antifa.”

The Newsmax surrender was an early warning sign of the morass of legal troubles looming for election deniers, culminating in the $787 million settlement Fox News eventually reached with Dominion. But Lindell was undaunted. He claimed to have spent millions culling stolen election data found on the dark web and acquiring a software program supposedly developed by the CIA to disrupt foreign elections. He announced that he would unveil his proofs of election fraud in August of 2021 at a “Cyber Symposium” sponsored by MyPillow in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The three-day symposium was a disaster from start to finish. Lindell had sought to whip up interest in the event by offering $5 million to anyone who could prove that his evidence wasn’t valid data from the 2020 election. One software forensics expert who took up the challenge soon determined that the “evidence” was a mélange of random IP addresses, gibberish, files that had been modified long after the election, and so-called packet captures of vote heists that didn’t fit any known packet-capture format. The contest judges refused to acknowledge his findings; the expert took his claim to the $5 million to arbitration and won. Lindell is still appealing the award.

It got worse. Never a detail guy, Lindell would later claim he had little or no involvement in lining up speakers for the event, which became a showcase for a procession of prominent election deniers, including Oltmann and Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk who is now serving a nine-year prison sentence for unauthorized use of election data and other acts of official misconduct. The great we-was-robbed reveal never happened.

Lindell says he put massive amounts of cash and time into his election research both before and after the symposium, consulting dozens of experts and vetting every source and nugget of information. “I probably did more due diligence than anyone ever in history,” he testified.

Somehow that effort failed to raise any flags about one of the main sources of his data, former defense contractor Dennis Montgomery, even though a simple Google search of Montgomery’s name would turn up a host of articles with headlines such as “The Man Who Conned the Pentagon” and “Software Fraudster Fooled CIA.” Lost in his own pillow-strewn echo chamber, Lindell surrounded himself with people who would take his money and tell him what he wanted to hear.

Coomer, on the other hand, was telling him what he didn’t want to hear, namely: “Cease and desist.” On April 4, 2022, Lindell headlined a “Colorado Truth Rally” on the steps of the state capitol in Denver. He was served papers notifying him of Coomer’s defamation lawsuit right before he was scheduled to speak. Lindell had been upset when he learned of Coomer’s settlement with Newsmax, suspecting that the deal was the reason Newsmax was no longer seeking out Lindell for commentary, appearances which had offered free publicity for his pillow business. (Coomer’s attorneys say that the settlement had no provision about Lindell.) The lawsuit was a further provocation. He made a point of mentioning Coomer in his speech, declaring that he “will be the first one behind bars when we melt down the machines.”

The next day, he taunted Coomer at length on FrankSpeech. “Eric Coomer, you are a criminal,” he said. “You’ve been a part of the biggest crime this world has ever seen. … You’re disgusting, you’re evil, you belong behind bars, and we will not stop until you are behind bars. We’re going to melt down your little machines, and you’re going to hang on to your little prison bars. ‘Let me out, let me out!’ Should have thought about that, Eric Coomer, before you did crimes against the United States, and quite frankly, all of humanity.”

At trial Lindell’s legal team tried to characterize his attacks on Coomer as the constitutionally protected speech of a man who believed passionately in his cause. “Mike Lindell calls hundreds of people traitors,” attorney Jennifer DeMaster noted in her closing statement. “It’s free speech.”

But Coomer’s lawyers insisted the Stupid Defense couldn’t excuse the vilification of Coomer or the impact on his reputation. The issue, they said, wasn’t whether Lindell still stubbornly believed his own nonsense, but his reckless disregard of the facts, his inadequate “due diligence,” and his personal animosity toward their client. Rather than take accountability for his wild accusations, they said, he was blaming Coomer for his problems, a theme that surfaced again and again in Lindell’s testimony. Asked about what evidence he had that Coomer was involved in any crimes, Lindell shot back, “My evidence is what he did to me and MyPillow.”

“It was reckless of you to accuse Dr. Coomer when you have no evidence,” persisted Coomer attorney Charles Cain.

“The evidence I have is that he sued me,” Lindell replied.

Ultimately, the verdict, released June 16, was a split decision, one that afforded both sides some degree of consolation. On one hand, the eight-person jury found that two of Lindell’s statements about Coomer were defamatory and that and he and FrankSpeech were liable for $2.3 million in damages, including $300,000 in punitive damages. But several other statements made by Lindell and others on his platform weren’t found to be defamatory, and MyPillow was cleared of liability entirely. Given that Coomer had sought $62 million in damages, Lindell was more than happy to describe the judgment against him as a plus—or, as a Mike Lindell Legal Defense Fund press release put it, “a resounding affirmation that free citizens have a right to say what they believe is true.”

“A hundred percent victory,” Lindell told his viewers on LindellTV. “We won.”

And, instead of a promo code, he offered his supporters a link to his defense fund website, MyPillowtrial.com, now accepting donations to finance his appeal.

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