If you’ve ever thought about buying a MyPillow, Cockburn advises that you do so now — they may not be around for much longer. After months of lawsuits, the company’s owner and Donald Trump devotee Mike Lindell announced last week that he is broke and millions of dollars behind in unpaid legal bills. “We’ve lost everything, every dime,” Lindell told NBC News. “All of it is gone.”
Last Thursday, the legal team representing Lindell in three defamation lawsuits filed to separate themselves from the company due to millions in unpaid bills. The pillow magnate said he is not trying to stiff his attorneys but simply cannot afford to pay them. Cockburn, who owns several MyPillows himself, would feel sorry for Lindell if he hadn’t brought this ruin upon himself by insisting rigged election machines stole the 2022 election. But alas, he’s just another Nero burning his empire to the ground.
Parker Daniels Kibort LLC, the law firm representing Lindell, said the pillow magnate is now months behind on legal bills in three defamation cases and that they can no longer afford to represent him. “At this time, Defendants are in arrears by millions of dollars to PDK,” the filing said. “PDK is a small litigation and trial firm in Minneapolis, MN and cannot afford to finance Defendants’ defense in the Litigations.”
Lindell is facing billions in defamation lawsuits filed by voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, as well as a third lawsuit brought by former Dominion employee Eric Coomer. All three claim their reputations were damaged by Lindell’s repeated claims of 2020 presidential election fraud. Cockburn finds it hard to believe that a pillow manufacturer — especially one who is a former drug addict turned born again Christian divorcé — could hurt anyone’s reputation. But Lindell, who has fascinated both liberal and conservative conscience for years now, does wield an inexplicable amount of cultural power.
Lindell is also fighting an arbitration court’s decision that he owes $5 million to the claimant of his “Prove Mike Wrong ” contest in which he invited anyone to come forward with evidence that his claims about the 2020 election were false in exchange for the prize money. When software developer Robert Zeidman won the challenge, Lindell refused to pay.
Lindell said MyPillow’s revenue plummeted after several retail outlets cut ties with him over his claims about the 2020 election. “It was a massive, massive cancellation,” Lindell said at the time. “We lost $100 million from attacks by the box stores, the shopping networks, the shopping channels, all of them did cancel culture on us.” In March, Lindell said he had been forced to borrow $10 million to pay for his legal fees and this summer the company began to auction off hundreds of pieces of equipment, as well as subleasing manufacturing space.
Of course, Lindell’s lawsuits are only the tip of the iceberg in the businessman’s rapid descent into madness. Following the 2020 election, Lindell proposed that Trump declare martial law to nullify and rerun the election. When he was subsequently kicked off Twitter, Lindell spent millions creating his own social media platform, Frank. The platform, which is filled mostly with videos of Lindell raging against the 2020 election, looks more capable of downloading a virus onto your laptop than serving as the right’s new social media outlet.
Despite his financial woes, Lindell is adamant that MyPillow is not going out of business. “We’re not going under. We have support all over the country,” Lindell said of his company. “I shift my marketing where I have to go, and we have so much support in this country for what MyPillow is,” he said. “This is an employee-owned company, we just get attacked all the time, and you know what? We’ll come through by the grace of God.”
