MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell announced Monday he filed a lawsuit against voting-machine maker Dominion Voting Systems, seeking over $1.6 billion in damages.
Lindell, a supporter of former President Donald Trump’s claims the election was stolen from him as a result of widespread fraud, is filing a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota to protect free speech and remedy damages that MyPillow claims it has suffered, the CEO announced during a live broadcast on Frankspeech.com, his new social media platform.
“This lawsuit is brought in support of the marketplace of ideas and to remedy the grave harm that has been suffered by MyPillow as a result of Dominion’s suppression of speech and attacks on the Company,” the suit states, according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
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The suit, filed by attorney Andrew Parker, claims Dominion is a governmental actor through its contracting with state and local agencies to provide voting tools and that Dominion’s legal pursuit of Lindell violated MyPillow’s First and 14th Amendment rights as well as “tortious interference with prospective business.”
“MyPillow employees have been subjected to ridicule in their personal lives, and death threats necessitating protection from local law enforcement,” Parker said of the lawsuit filed Monday, adding, “employees are subjected to daily hateful and barbaric calls, emails, and comments on the company’s social media platforms.”
Dominion called Lindell’s filing “a meritless retaliatory lawsuit, filed by MyPillow to try to distract from the harm it caused to Dominion,” in an email to the Washington Examiner on Monday.
Lindell’s lawsuit follows a $1.3 billion defamation case filed against him over repeated claims of election fraud he has lobbed at Dominion since the Nov. 3 presidential election, though Monday’s filing is not a countersuit.
The voting machine company has filed a barrage of lawsuits against proponents of Trump’s election-fraud narrative, such as attorney Sidney Powell, who is being sued for more than $1.3 billion in damages for alleging Dominion’s voting software was compromised, with the company arguing her claims caused “unprecedented harm” and were tantamount to defamation.
Dominion alleged in its lawsuit that Lindell used claims of election fraud to increase his pillow sales, selling advertisements to right-wing media outlets that echoed his claims.
MyPillow’s suit says there is a difference between statements made by Lindell and the company, arguing that his views on election fraud have nothing to do with his company.
Speaking at a conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the weekend, Lindell teased his Monday announcement, saying there would be “big news.” Lindell paired the announcement with the debut of his “free speech” platform, Frankspeech.com, a website that aims to be a way to avoid some tech censorship from platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which suspend and ban users who violate policy terms. The MyPillow founder was suspended from Twitter in January.
Lindell said on Saturday that Dominion caused harm to MyPillow and employees that work for the company, citing the removal of his product from 20 major retailers, including Costco, Bed Bath & Beyond, and several others.
Alan Dershowitz, an informal adviser to Lindell in the case, argued Lindell’s freedom of speech was impinged.
“I’ve been defending the First Amendment for 60 years, and I’m not going to stop now,” he said.
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Dershowitz also defended Trump during his first impeachment trial. Trump, who was impeached on two Ukraine-related charges in 2019, was then acquitted in the Senate. He was impeached a second time earlier this year on the charge of inciting an insurrection before he was again acquitted in the Senate.
The Trump campaign filed several lawsuits alleging voter fraud in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, the vast majority of which were rejected by the courts.
