Mike Lindell, founder of MyPillow, has been ordered to pay a former employee millions in damages after he was found liable for defamation.
Lindell called the former employee, Eric Coomer, a traitor and accused him of stealing the 2020 presidential election on his online media platform.
Coomer, was awarded $2.3 million in damages.
Who is Eric Coomer?
Coomer was the security and product strategy director at Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion was also the system used during the 2020 presidential election between President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden.
Dominion won a $787 million settlement in a defamation lawsuit it filed against Fox News over its airing of false claims against the company and has another lawsuit against the conservative network Newsmax.
Newsmax apologized to Coomer in 2021 for airing false allegations against him.
Coomer sues Lindell
During the two-week trial, Coomer said his career and life were destroyed by the statements Lindell made. His lawyers said Lindell either knew the statements were lies, or conveyed them recklessly without knowing if they were true.
Lindell said his beliefs that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud were influenced by watching the 2020 HBO documentary “Kill Chain” and by the views of Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
In an interview for a documentary Lindell made in 2021, Flynn said foreign interference was going to happen in U.S. elections, and Lindell said he had no reason to doubt the claim since Flynn had worked for both political parties in intelligence.
Lindell distanced himself from an account by a Colorado podcaster who claimed to have heard a conference call from the anti-fascist group Antifa before the 2020 election. The podcast claimed that on the call someone named Eric from Dominion said he would make sure that Trump would not win, a story that was recounted on Frankspeech during a 2021 event. Lindell said he only learned about that during the trial.
Lindell said he never accused Coomer of rigging the election, but he did say he was upset because he said Newsmax blocked him from being able to go on air to talk about voting machines after it apologized to Coomer. Coomer denied there was any such deal to block Lindell under his agreement with the network.
Lindell’s attorneys argued that Coomer’s reputation was already in tatters by the time Lindell mentioned him. They said that was partly because of Coomer’s own Facebook posts disparaging Trump, which the former Dominion employee acknowledged were “hyperbolic” and had been a mistake.
Lindell denied making any statements he knew to be false about Coomer and testified that he has called many people traitors. His lawyers argued the statements were about a matter of public concern — elections — and therefore protected by the First Amendment.
But Coomer’s lawyers said the statements crossed the line into defamation because Lindell accused Coomer of treason, a crime.
