MyPillow founder won’t have to pay $5M to Summerlin man, court rules

The Summerlin man who proved infomercial pillow salesman Mike Lindell wrong about election fraud will not receive the $5 million award that a panel of arbitrators had ordered, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

In August 2021, computer forensics expert Robert Zeidman completed Lindell’s “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge,” in which Lindell claimed to have data that proved that China hacked the 2020 election and offered $5 million to anyone who could prove him wrong.

Zeidman examined the data and found it was “nonsense,” but Lindell refused to pay him the award. A private panel of arbitrators ruled in favor of Zeidman in 2023, ordering Lindell to pay him.

On Wednesday, however, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the MyPillow founder doesn’t have to pay the award, ruling that the arbitration panel overstepped its authority in 2023.

“It’s a great day for our country,” Lindell told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Thursday. “It’s great that the justice was done.”

Lindell said the ruling helps him in his efforts to get rid of electronic voting machines, which is one of the reasons why he is thinking about running for governor of Minnesota. He claimed the lawsuits were part of a “coordinated attack” to get him to stop talking about voting machines.

The MyPillow founder is one of the country’s most prominent propagators of false claims that the 2020 election was a fraud. Last month, he lost a court case in Colorado when a jury ruled that Lindell defamed a former employee of a voting equipment company by accusing him of treason and awarded the employee $2.3 million in damages.

Zeidman called the ruling a “real injustice” and said he and his lawyers are deciding the next steps to take.

“We think this is an incredibly important case, and it needs to be addressed,” he told the Review-Journal.

Zeidman highlighted two big issues from this ruling. One is voter integrity and ensuring people have confidence in the systems, which Lindell harmed by spreading “made-up” claims, said Zeidman, who is also a Republican.

The other issue is what the case means for the arbitration process, which has allowed people with modest means to resolve a dispute through an impartial third party without going to court, he said. Judges have ignored years of precedent, and now people with wealth can string another party along through the legal system, Zeidman said.

“I hope there’s a lot of people concerned about this ruling because it undermines these two really important issues,” he said.

The case stems from a “Cyber Symposium” Lindell hosted in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 2021. Lindell offered $5 million for anyone who could prove that “packet captures” and other data he released there were not valid data from the 2020 election.

Zeidman, who has written a book on IP theft detection and software infringement, entered a 15-page report that he said proved the data wasn’t what Lindell claimed. Zeidman ran “every kind of data analysis” and figured out Lindell’s data was “bogus.”

Contest judges declined to declare Zeidman a winner, so he filed for arbitration under the contest rules. A panel of three arbitrators, including one named by Lindell, concluded that Zeidman had satisfied the rules and awarded him $5 million.

Contact Jessica Hill at jehill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jess_hillyeah on X. The Associated Press contributed to this report.