The MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who spread baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, defamed a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems, a federal jury in Denver found on Monday.
The jury awarded $2.3 million in damages to the former employee, Eric Coomer, after a two-week trial, according to one of his lawyers, David Beller.
Mr. Lindell claimed without evidence that the vote had been rigged to prevent President Trump from winning re-election. Among his targets was Dr. Coomer, who is a former director of product strategy and security at Dominion, a Denver-based manufacturer of voting machines that was falsely accused of flipping votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Lindell called Dr. Coomer “a traitor to the United States” and said he should turn himself in to the authorities, according to court filings. Dr. Coomer sued Mr. Lindell in 2022, arguing that those attacks had effectively ended his career in the election industry and led to “frequent credible death threats.”
“Mike Lindell not only hurt Eric Coomer with his baseless lies — he hurt the American people and the democratic process,” Mr. Beller said in a statement. “Dr. Coomer is now one step closer to putting his life back together.”
The verdict was the latest in a long string of legal rulings that have upended the false theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump. In 2023, Dominion reached a $787.5 million settlement with Fox News after filing a defamation suit against the network, which had spread misinformation about the company’s voting machines. That same year, an arbitration panel ordered Mr. Lindell to pay a forensics expert who had met his $5 million challenge to debunk claims about election interference.
Dr. Coomer became a target of election conspiracists partly because of posts on his Facebook page that were critical of Mr. Trump. In the complaint against Mr. Lindell, his lawyers wrote that Dr. Coomer was respected in his field and had worked with “elections officials — Republican, Democratic and independent — across the country to make sure the process was safe, secure and fair.”
But his life was upended when Mr. Lindell and other conspiracy theorists turned him into “the face of an imagined criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scope in American history,” the lawsuit said.
Lawyers for Mr. Lindell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
David Yaffe-Bellany writes about the crypto industry from New York. He can be reached at [email protected].
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