Michael James Lindell, also known as the My Pillow Guy, speaks before a rally for former U.S. President Donald Trump at The Farm at 95 on April 9, 2022 in Selma, North Carolina.
Allison Joyce | Getty Images
An arbitration panel ordered MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to pay $5 million within 30 days to a Nevada software developer for proving Lindell was wrong in his claim that certain data was related to the 2020 presidential election and purported voting machine fraud.
The panel, in its 23-page ruling issued Wednesday, said that the Robert Zeidman “proved the data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.” Zeidman, a software developer, entered the “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” contest in during a cyber symposium in August 2021.
The American Arbitration Association panel, which held a three-day hearing in January in the case, also said that the Lindell LLC’s “failure to pay Mr. Zeidman the $5 million” offered as the stated prize of the contest “was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”
Zeidman called the ruling “great” in an interview with CNBC.
“I knew from the beginning that I would win,” Zeidman said, citing his review of the data, which Lindell believed showed that China had interfered in the 2020 election in several states and effectively swindled then-President Donald Trump out of reelection.
When Zeidman dug into the source of some of the data “I got a [Microsoft] Word document which was basically a big table of numbers.”
“This was obviously manufactured bogus data,” Zeidman said.
He said the data pushed by Lindell is part of a “fraud among right-wing people” who argue that Trump is the true winner of the 2020 election.
“I’m a right-wing conservative,” Zeidman said, adding that he voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020.
But Zeidman also said, “I don’t expect to see the money” that Lindell was ordered to pay him.
“I think that Lindell’s got bigger issues with the Dominion case,” he said, referring to a $1.3 billion lawsuit Lindell faces from Dominion Voting Systems for allegedly defaming that voting machine company with his allegations.
Lindell faces a separate defamation lawsuit by another voting machine company, Smartmatic.
“He’ll delay paying me and I don’t know if he’ll have any money after Dominion.”
Lindell called the arbitration ruling “a horrrible decision.”
He also told CNBC that he will challenge the arbitration panel’s decision in court.
“The evidence was from 2020,” Lindell said of the data that was the subject of the contest. “This is the only guy who says it wasn’t.”
Lindell is one of the most prominent advocates of claims that Trump was swindled out of a victory in the 2020 election by voting machine results that were tampered with.
He told CNBC in December 2021 that he had spent $25 million of his own money to promote claims that the election was stolen from Trump.
Bill Barr, who worked as attorney general under Trump, has said there was no widespread voting fraud in the election.
The U.S. intelligence community, according to a declassified report in 2021, has said there are “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
On Tuesday, Fox Corp. and its cable networks agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a lawsuit over false claims about Dominion’s machines swaying the outcome of the 2020 election.
