Jury finds MyPillow founder defamed former employee for a leading voting equipment company

DENVER — A federal jury in Colorado on Monday found that one of the nation's most prominent election conspiracy theorists, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, defamed a former employee for a leading voting equipment company after the 2020 presidential election.
The jury found that two of Lindell's statements about Eric Coomer, the former security and product strategy director at Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, including calling him a traitor, were defamatory. It ordered Lindell and his online media platform, formerly known as Frankspeech, to pay Coomer US$2.3 million in damages, far less than the $62.7 million Coomer had asked for to help send a message to discourage attacks on election workers.
'This is hurting democracy. This is misinformation. It's not been vetted and it needs to stop,' Charles Cain, one of Coomer's attorneys, told jurors in closing arguments Friday.
Lindell said he would appeal the financial award, saying Coomer's lawyers did not prove Coomer had been harmed. He also said he would continue to speak out about election security, including criticizing the makers of election equipment like Dominion.
'I will not stop talking until we don't have voting machines in this country,' said Lindell, who backs paper ballots counted by hand.
Lindell stuck by his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen during the trial, but did not call any experts to present evidence of his claims.
Cain faulted Lindell for being 'all hat and no cattle.' Even though the damage award was smaller than he had asked for, Cain said he thought it would still send a message that people who work behind the scenes of elections should not be attacked. But he said Coomer, who has recevied death threats, is 'still going to be looking over his shoulder.'
Dominion's voting machines became the target of elaborate conspiracy theories among allies of President Donald Trump, who continues to falsely claim that his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 was due to widespread fraud.
Dominion won a $787 million settlement in a defamation lawsuit it filed against Fox News over its airing of false claims against the company and has another lawsuit against the conservative network Newsmax.
Newsmax apologized to Coomer in 2021 for airing false allegations against him.
Coomer said during the two-week Lindell trial that his career and life were destroyed by the statements. His lawyers said Lindell either knew the statements were lies, or conveyed them recklessly without knowing if they were true.
Lindell's lawyers denied the claims and said Frankspeech was not liable for statements made by others. The jury found that eight other statements made by Lindell and others appearing on Frankspeech were not.
Lindell said he went to trial to draw attention to the need to get rid of electronic voting machines that have been targeted in a web of conspiracy theories. He said he used to be worth about $60 million before he started speaking out about the 2020 election and is now $10 million in debt.
Reviews, recounts and audits in the battleground states where Trump contested his loss in 2020 all affirmed Democrat Joe Biden's victory. Trump's attorney general at the time said there was no evidence of widespread fraud, and Trump and his allies lost dozens of court cases seeking to overturn the result.
Lindell said his beliefs that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud were influenced by watching the 2020 HBO documentary 'Kill Chain' and by the views of Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. In an interview for a documentary Lindell made in 2021, Flynn said foreign interference was going to happen in U.S. elections, and Lindell said he had no reason to doubt the claim since Flynn had worked for both political parties in intelligence.
Lindell distanced himself from an account by a Colorado podcaster who claimed to have heard a conference call from the anti-fascist group Antifa before the 2020 election. The podcaster claimed that on the call someone named Eric from Dominion said he would make sure that Trump would not win, a story that was recounted on Frankspeech during a 2021 event. Lindell said he only learned about that during the trial.
Lindell said he never accused Coomer of rigging the election, but he did say he was upset because he said Newsmax blocked him from being able to go on air to talk about voting machines after it apologized to Coomer. Coomer denied there was any such deal to block Lindell under his agreement with the network.
Coomer's lawyers tried to show how their client's life was devastated by the conspiracy theories spreading about him. Lindell was comparatively late to seize on Coomer, not mentioning him until February 2021, well after his name had been circulated by other Trump partisans.
Coomer said the conspiracy theories cost him his job, his mental health and the life he'd built and said Lindell's statements were the most distressing of all. He specifically pointed to a statement on May 9, 2021, when Lindell described what he believed Coomer had done as 'treason.'
Lindell's attorneys argued that Coomer's reputation was already in tatters by the time Lindell mentioned him. They said that was partly because of Coomer's own Facebook posts disparaging Trump, which the former Dominion employee acknowledged were 'hyperbolic' and had been a mistake.
Lindell denied making any statements he knew to be false about Coomer and testified that he has called many people traitors. His lawyers argued the statements were about a matter of public concern — elections — and therefore protected by the First Amendment.
But Coomer's lawyers said the statements crossed the line into defamation because Lindell accused Coomer of treason, a crime.
Colleen Slevin, The Associated Press

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

CTV News

37 minutes ago

• CTV News

Amazon's premium beauty push may be a buffer against Trump's tariffs

Amazon's defence against tariffs for its coming Prime Day? Luxury goods. U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs have spurred some Amazon sellers who source products from China and other heavily tariffed countries to bow out of the company's Prime Day, one of its biggest sales events of the year, to protect their margins. Amazon Prime Day is now a four-day shopping event exclusively for Amazon Prime members, taking place this year from July 8 to July 11. The Seattle-based e-commerce company is hoping that recent sales growth in high-margin cosmetics in its Amazon Premium Beauty category will cushion the impact of tariffs on Prime Day sales revenue and consumer sentiment. 'Beauty has become, in the past few years, more of an essential item in consumers' minds,' even in hard financial times, said Anna Mayo, vice president of NielsenIQ's Beauty Vertical unit. Amazon Premium Beauty was initially shunned by luxury cosmetic players who feared the platform would harm their image when it was launched in 2013. But those days are gone. Now, the online retailer is promoting products from top beauty and haircare brands including Estee Lauder's Clinique, Olaplex and L'Oreal's Urban Decay. During last year's Prime Day event, U.S. shoppers spent $14.2 billion, up 11% year-over-year, according to Adobe Analytics. Top cosmetics brands can charge high prices and often do not offer steep discounts on Prime Day compared with electronics, apparel and home goods. This year, Adobe Analytics expects beauty product discounts to have 'milder' discounts of 10% to 17%, whereas electronics deals are expected to range from 14% to 22% off, said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights. That, coupled with the ease of shipping small packages of most products, means that Amazon Premium Beauty merchandise has higher margins than other products sold on Prime Day. Amazon 'doesn't make a huge margin in most of the categories of stuff that it sells online,' said Renee Parker, co-founder of consultancy firm Invinci and a former Amazon executive. 'They are making a lot of money on premium beauty products because ... (they're) small and expensive, and you can ship a ton of them.' Vitamins and supplements are successful for similar reasons. Amazon Premium Beauty sales gathered steam after the e-commerce giant began clamping down on counterfeits and top beauty companies needed new ways to reach customers, said Alfonso Emanuele de Leon, a beauty industry veteran and partner at FA Hong Kong Consultancy. Amazon was previously viewed as a pariah by luxury beauty brands because of the cheap merchandise on the website, but is no longer perceived that way, said Emanuele de Leon. 'Huge Acceleration' Sales at Amazon Premium Beauty rose by nearly 20% to $15 billion between April 2024 and April 2025, outpacing the 14% growth for beauty products outside the specialized e-commerce store, according to NielsenIQ. It also outpaced the year-over-year growth of 5% for online store sales in the first quarter, NielsenIQ said. L'Oreal Chief Executive Nicolas Hieronimus said during the company's annual meeting in April that having products on Amazon led to a 'huge acceleration' in expanding its U.S. market share. Estee Lauder has launched 11 brands on Amazon's U.S. site since March 2024. More than 75% of Estee's finished goods sold in the U.S. originate from the U.S. or Canada and are therefore protected by existing trade agreements, Roberto Canevari, Estee Lauder's global supply chain executive vice president, said at a conference in June. Lauren Gordon, vice president of Amazon at Estee Lauder, said that Prime Day and Amazon's other 'high-traffic shopping moments' give the company a chance to 'attract both new and existing customers.' Melis del Rey, general manager for health and beauty for Amazon U.S. stores, said her team has been 'very proactive' in working with premium brands to determine tariff impacts. 'At a high level, most of the premium brands' sourcing strategies are local, and therefore, the (tariff) impact is less imminent,' del Rey said. Amazon Premium Beauty is an invite-only program for brands shipped and sold by Amazon and third-party sellers. The department has grown to more than 10,000 products, and brands' eligibility is determined on a case-by-case basis. Brands like Dyson and Estee Lauder's Aveda pay an extra 15% commission to Amazon for every website sale, and the third-party seller approach allows major brands to control pricing and inventory. Adding prestige brands including Unilever's Dermalogica has helped the company compete with beauty retailers Ulta Beauty and Sephora, which is owned by LVMH, and also attract older, higher-income shoppers at a time when TikTok Shop is scooping up younger customers. (Reporting by Arriana McLymore in New York City; Additional reporting by Dominique Patton in Paris; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Matthew Lewis)

CTV News

38 minutes ago

• CTV News

US strikes Iranian nuclear sites

Atlantic Watch The United States inserted itself into Israel's war against Iran on Sunday striking three nuclear sites.

CBC

2 hours ago

• CBC

How a coastal Maine town almost became part of Canada

Social Sharing When U.S. President Donald Trump started talking about annexing Canada to make it the 51st state, people in Castine, Maine, took notice. The town, after all, was twice occupied by Great Britain two centuries ago. The British wanted to carve out a new colony that would be part of British North America — in effect doing the opposite of what Trump has been musing about. "When I do walking tours, I jokingly tell people that this could have been Canada very easily," said Lisa Lutts, the recently retired executive director of the Castine Historical Society. "If the War of 1812, if the Treaty of Paris had been different, this would have been Canada. And I always joke and say, well, I would have had better health care. That's my joke, and people love it." Castine's history of occupation is visible in the historical markers and remnants of British forts that dot its small grid of streets overlooking Penobscot Bay. Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump here by 47 percentage points in the presidential election last fall, and the president's aggressive comments about Canada were deeply unpopular in Castine and nearby coastal communities. "This isn't how you treat your allies," said Pete O'Brien, a resident of nearby Rockland who was showing relatives from California the earthworks of Fort George, built by British troops in 1779. "We're about as close as it gets to you politically, culturally, geographically." Liam Riordan, a historian at the University of Maine at Orono and an expert on the revolutionary period, said Trump's rhetoric represents "a failure to understand the close ties and close relationships that we share." "I think in Maine, the reaction to that has really been one of being appalled and embarrassed." WATCH | 'I see us as a borderland': Occupied Maine then and now: The Maine town that almost became a Canadian border community 1 hour ago Duration 4:58 The British occupied eastern Maine twice. Americans who live there have thoughts on U.S. President Donald Trump's annexation talk. Castine's elevated geographical location at the tip of a peninsula on the eastern side of Penobscot Bay made it a strategic location for colonial powers fighting over North America. A newspaper correspondent referred to its capture in 1814 as "perhaps one of the most admirable military positions in the world." In the 1600s, present-day Castine was the western edge of the French colony of Acadia, with the British-held Massachusetts Bay Colony on the other side of the bay. France gave up all its North American territory in 1763, but when it backed the rebels in the American Revolution, the British seized Castine in case the French decided to take it back. A revolutionary fleet sailed to Castine to push out the British but failed miserably. "A lot of Americans have no idea about the Penobscot expedition and the battle that took place here, because we lost," Lutts said. "We remember the ones that we won." When the revolution ended and the British recognized U.S. independence, "any reasonable person during the treaty negotiations … would have said almost certainly the Penobscot River would be the border," Riordan said. But John Adams, one of the negotiators, pushed for the St. Croix River to be the border because he recognized how Castine would give the Americans better access to lucrative fish stocks and trade routes. Four hundred loyalists who had come to Castine during the Revolution to remain under the British Crown moved again, this time settling what would become Saint Andrews, N.B. Several even moved their houses there on boats and placed them on a street grid similar to Castine's, the reason the two towns resemble each other. Three decades later, during the War of 1812, the British returned to capture Castine again. The story goes that American troops at Fort Madison knew they were outnumbered, fired one perfunctory cannon shot for honour's sake and quickly fled. A local pastor, William Mason, grabbed a white table cloth from his dining room and headed down to the harbour to wave it as a signal of surrender. Castine was a boomtown under British occupation thanks to trade with other British ports such as Halifax and Saint John. "Business is brisk and speculators are daily flocking in from every quarter," the Hartford Courant reported in November 1814. "The war, or rather peace, with the British is becoming very popular here." But the treaty that ended the War of 1812 returned Castine to the U.S. again. Thousands of pounds collected by the British customs house in Castine remained with the British and was used by Nova Scotia's governor, Lord Dalhousie, to establish a college that later became Dalhousie University. "Another reason why we feel very close to Canada is that our money is up there at that university," Lutts joked. "They're not letting us in for free though. They should let Castiners in for free, don't you think?" The end of that war also marked the end of Castine changing hands, but the town's history remains a touchstone for residents to this day. "We understand ourselves by thinking about our relationship with the past," Riordan said. "And Castine really leans into this more than many other local towns." Some local residents aren't sure life would be that different here if history had taken a different turn. "If the Canadian border had been here, I don't think a lot would have changed, because when I look at Maine, I see us as a borderland between Canada and the United States anyway," O'Brien said. "I think there's also a lot of understanding and acceptance and appreciation of the Canadians down here as well. And so it would have just pushed all of that a little farther south, right?"