It hasn’t been a great week for people who spread false claims about the 2020 presidential election.
First, Fox News settled its defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems and acknowledged that the court found some of its claims about the company to be false.
Now a private arbitration panel has ruled that My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell must pay $5 million to a man who won a “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge at Lindell’s 2021 “cyber-symposium” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, according to The Washington Post.
Lindell made the challenge after claiming that his data showed evidence of Chinese interference in the 2020 election. He offered to pay $5 million to anyone who could prove his material was not related to that election.
Robert Zeidman, a 63-year-old computer forensics expert and Donald Trump voter from Nevada, was the only one who filed a claim. He concluded that Lindell’s data was not proof of voter fraud and, worse (at least for Lindell), that the data displayed no connection to the 2020 election.
In a 23-page decision issued Wednesday, the panel ruled in Zeidman’s favor, saying the data used in Lindell’s challenge “unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.”
The panel directed Lindell’s firm to pay Zeidman within 30 days, but Lindell seems reluctant to go along with the rules of his own contest.
“They made a terribly wrong decision! This will be going to court!” Lindell told the Post via text.
The paper notes that Lindell is facing a $1.3 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems and a defamation lawsuit from one of Dominion’s former executives.
The award is the latest humiliation to befall Lindell as a result of his 2021 “cyber-symposium.”
The three-day event went viral for all the wrong reasons.
For instance, one of the experts hired to decrypt and analyze Lindell’s data reportedly said he could not prove that it constituted evidence of hacking.
Lindell also told a CNN reporter at the time that he couldn’t release the data he’d promised to release, because he didn’t “need the media driving the narrative before my case to the Supreme Court.”
Twitter users had strong feelings about Wednesday’s verdict.