Supreme Court Declines To Hear Mike Lindell's Defamation Appeal
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene Monday in a defamation lawsuit against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell filed by Dominion Voting Systems.
Lindell had asked the high court to consider his appeal of a federal judge’s August 2021 rejection of a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
The voting machine company hit Lindell, a staunch ally of Donald Trump, with a $1.3 billion suit in February 2021 over his repeated false claims casting doubt on Trump’s 2020 election defeat. Lindell’s baseless accusations of “fraud, election rigging and conspiracy” caused the company enormous harm, Dominion said, and Lindell repeated them to sell pillows, even though he knew they were false.
Lindell’s lawyers have argued that the lawsuit isn’t valid because Lindell genuinely believes his claims, despite having no evidence.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nicholas didn’t buy that argument. In his 2021 ruling, he called Lindell’s claims “inherently improbable” and his sources “unreliable.” The judge also found that Lindell appeared to benefit financially from the lies, peddling MyPillow products alongside his election conspiracies.
In November 2021, for instance, after months of promoting an explosive lawsuit he said he would file that would overturn the 2020 presidential election results, Lindell instead turned a livestreamed symposium on the supposed suit into a four-day promotion for his bedding.
Lindell also faces a separate lawsuit from Smartmatic, a different voting machine company that’s also accused him of defamation. A federal judge last month rejected attempts by Lindell and MyPillow to dismiss that case.
The conservative-dominated Supreme Court returned from summer break on Monday, four months after overturning Roe v. Wade, with a batch of highly consequential cases on its new docket.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
