Mike Lindell gives a thumbs up as he passes by a rally for supporters of former President Donald Trump, Tuesday, April 4, 2023, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee).
The pillow business owned by infamous election denier Mike Lindell has been ordered to fork over more than three-quarters of a million dollars owed to a shipping and delivery company that sued MyPillow Inc. last year for failing to pay its debts.
A judge in Hennepin County, Minnesota last month ordered MyPillow to pay DHL $777,729.73, an amount that includes principal, interest, and attorneys fees, according to a report from CBS News.
As Law&Crime previously reported, DHL initially filed the suit against MyPillow in September 2023 claiming the company owed nearly $800,000 for DHL’s pillow delivery services, which spanned several years. The companies reached a settlement in May 2023 requiring MyPillow to pay monthly installments totaling $775,000, but DHL said the company handed over less than $65,000 before payments stopped.
DHL in July 2023 initially threatened to take legal action against MyPillow, alleging that Lindell’s company had 22 outstanding payments of $32,291.67. The filed complaint sought additional interest of 18% annually as well as the legal expenses incurred in litigating the case.
Lindell last year reportedly told The Associated Press that he was not sure what DHL’s lawsuit was about, claiming MyPillow stopped using DHL more than a year before the lawsuit was filed following a “dispute over shipments.”
The DHL suit was similar to another complaint lodged against MyPillow last year by a different shipping company seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid debt. In that case, Extend, Inc. in August 2023 filed a federal lawsuit in the Northern District of California claiming MyPillow owed the company $564,151.39.
Extend alleged in its lawsuit that MyPillow had been in breach of contract by being delinquent on payments for years.
“In November 2022, My Pillow and Extend entered into a contract under which Extend would provide My Pillow’s customers with certain shipping and product protection services in exchange for a percentage of revenues generated by the sale of those services,” the lawsuit reads.
Well over a year passed, however, and certain debts owed to the San Francisco-based company remain unpaid, according to the lawsuit.
“In March 2024, My Pillow was overdue on amounts it owed to Extend under the Agreement,” the original petition continues. “And so, on March 29, 2024, the parties entered into a Termination Agreement under which the Agreement was terminated.”
Extend last month asked the court to enter a default judgment in their favor, claiming that they properly served MyPillow and the company’s counsel with the complaint and summons but never received a response from Lindell’s company.
“After repeated further inquiries, Mike Lindell, Chief Executive Officer of My Pillow, emailed on June 23, 2024 that he “[w]ill connect this week.” But Mr. Lindell did not connect, and never did,” a court filing from November 2024 states. “Further, My Pillow ignored repeated inquiries and demand for payment since June 2024 and did not pay any of the amounts due under the Termination Agreement.”
In addition to lawsuits, Lindell also remains in the throes of long-running litigation over the $5 million he owes to an engineer who proved that data the Minnesota pillow magnate claimed was definitive proof of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election was nothing of the sort.
A federal magistrate judge in the North Star State on Monday said Lindell had again failed to provide court-ordered financial information to plaintiff Robert Zeidman as the latter litigates the collection of the multimillion dollar prize he earned by winning the 2020 “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge.
The case stems from Lindell issuing his disastrous “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge at a 2021 “Cyber Symposium” he hosted in South Dakota with the purpose of showing data that he said proved Chinese interference in the election.
Lindell promised that at the symposium, he would reveal “cyber data and packet captures from the 2020 November election.” The purpose of the challenge, Lindell said at the time, was to “find proof that this cyber data is not valid data from the November [2020] Election.”
In other words, contestants were asked to prove that the data Lindell presented was not “from the 2020 presidential election.” The prize: a not-inconsiderable sum of money.
After proving Lindell wrong, the MyPillow founder’s hand-selected three-member panel ruled against the engineer. Arbitration ensued and Zeidman won. Lindell filed in state court to vacate the award. Zeidman appealed in federal court to enforce the award. Both cases were eventually consolidated and removed to federal court.
In February 2024, a Minnesota federal court vindicated the arbitrator’s analysis and Zeidman’s $5 million victory.
Since then, the company sustained a steady stream of legal losses. Lindell’s attorneys dropped out of the case — repeatedly. Meanwhile, the court repeatedly ruled in Zeidman’s favor on discovery issues.
In August 2024, Zeidman was awarded attorneys fees over Lindell Management’s discovery-related delinquencies.
Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report.
