DENVER (KDVR) — MyPillow founder Mike Lindell was found to have defamed a former employee of a leading voting equipment company by a jury in Denver on Monday.
Lindell, a prominent election conspiracy theorist and ally of President Donald Trump, has promoted false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the 2020 election from Trump.
The CEO testified last week that he didn’t make any statements he knew to be false about Eric Coomer, the former product strategy and security director for Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems. Among other things, Lindell accused Coomer of being “a part of the biggest crime this world has ever seen.”
Coomer sued after Lindell called him a traitor and made accusations that he stole the election.
Coomer was the security and product strategy director at Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, whose voting machines became the target of elaborate conspiracy theories among allies of President Donald Trump, who continues to falsely claim that his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 was due to widespread fraud.
Lindell also distanced himself from a story told by a conservative podcaster who accused Coomer of helping to rig the 2020 election. It was discussed during a 2021 symposium that Lindell hosted to discuss election fraud. Lindell said he did not know about the story before it was discussed onstage at the event and only learned about it during the trial.
Coomer said his career and life have been destroyed by statements Lindell made about him and allowed to be promoted through his online media platform, FrankSpeech.
During a sometimes rambling testimony in federal court in Denver, Lindell painted himself as the victim of “lawfare” — when people are sued to scare them into silence.
Several conservative news organizations, including Fox News, Newsmax and One America News, have settled defamation lawsuits from voting machine companies over allegations that they promoted falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. In 2021, Newsmax also apologized to Coomer for airing false allegations against him.
In April, Lindell and his legal team were forced to explain themselves to a federal judge after she discovered a brief submitted by the team pointed to fake court cases as evidence.
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