Table of Contents
- Dominion filed a $1.3 billion defamation suit against MyPillow and CEO Mike Lindell in February.
- The litigation has led to people joking that Dominion will soon own the pillow company.
- Legal experts said there were two ways Dominion could end up owning MyPillow if it won in court.
Dominion Voting System’s spree of lawsuits fighting against 2020 election conspiracy theories have drawn wildly different reactions from the defendants.
Some have taken steps to address the allegations, like Fox News, which asked the court to dismiss the defamation lawsuit, parted ways with its codefendant Lou Dobbs, and has avoided giving a platform to conspiracy theorists like Sidney Powell in the past few months.
On the other end of the spectrum is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
As soon as Dominion filed its lawsuit in February, Lindell said he was “happy” to face the election-technology company in court. He filed a counterlawsuit, has refused to provide an answer to Dominion’s initial claims, and bankrolled and starred in three documentaries and one “cybersymposium” advancing the conspiracy theory that Dominion manipulated election results.
Memes have said Dominion will soon own MyPillow, Lindell’s company.
Dominion is asking for $1.3 billion in damages, suing both MyPillow and Lindell. It alleges Lindell used his company’s resources in pursuit of defaming the election-technology company and sold more pillows in the process.
“I’m the one that asked them to sue me,” Lindell told Insider on Wednesday, repeating baseless claims of election fraud. “I don’t care if it’s a scrillion, a billion, whatever. It’s all just a joke.”
Lindell said he was “not worried” about Dominion’s “frivolous” lawsuits. He added that Dominion wanted to suppress his voice “by trying to bankrupt Mike Lindell.”
But if Dominion wins its defamation lawsuit against Lindell’s company, will it end up owning MyPillow?
Bankruptcy-law experts said it was possible. If MyPillow loses, Dominion will have two opportunities to add a pillow company to its portfolio: seizing its assets or winning a bankruptcy auction.
Dominion could use a judgment to freeze MyPillow’s assets and seize them
Dominion has justified its $1.3 billion damages claim by saying that Lindell’s conspiracy theories have made it lose out on contracts and generated death threats against its employees.
A jury will ultimately decide how much to award in damages if the case goes to trial. If a jury agrees with Dominion’s assessments, the damages will almost certainly exceed MyPillow’s value and Lindell’s net worth.
As a privately held company, MyPillow doesn’t have a public valuation, and Lindell declined to comment on its value. The pillow mogul doesn’t appear on any billionaire lists.
Once the judge enters the jury’s verdict — and if MyPillow loses on appeal or fails in arguing the damages down to a manageable sum — Dominion will have an opportunity to seize MyPillow’s assets.
Dominion could go to Minnesota, where MyPillow is headquartered, and file what’s called a writ of execution to the local courts. From there, the local sheriffs or courts would be able to freeze assets like bank accounts and hand over Lindell’s MyPillow shares and the keys to his pillow warehouses.
“What you need to do is you need to go into all the states that MyPillow has assets. So they go into Minnesota where MyPillow is, and they file the judgment there,” Eric Snyder, a bankruptcy attorney at Wilk Auslander LLC, told Insider. “And then they go to the sheriff and say, ‘I want you to start seizing the assets of MyPillow — inventory, equipment, everything they own.'”
Dominion would have the ability to seize assets until the value of the judgment was satisfied. It could auction off those assets itself, or it could keep them and have them valued, according to Edward Adams, a professor of corporate and bankruptcy law at the University of Minnesota’s law school.
Dominion’s defamation lawsuit is moving through federal court in Washington, DC, but a judgment will still be recognized in Lindell’s hometown in Minnesota. Minnesota state law regarding seizures covers only assets that can be seized, Adams said.
Dominion might be able to take MyPillow’s office real estate, but it would have a tougher time getting Lindell’s house or personal items, like his honorary Liberty University diploma, Adams said.
Of course, Lindell can always decide to settle the lawsuit on his and his company’s behalf. But it’s hard to see that happening: Lindell has full control of the company, he told Insider. And he has refused to concede that President Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election and former President Donald Trump won’t be reinstated.
Dominion probably doesn’t want to settle, either, Snyder said.
“It’s not in the best interest to settle. They’re trying to make a point,” Snyder told Insider. “If I’m Dominion, I don’t even want the money. It’s not what it’s about. It’s about the reputation.”
Lindell doesn’t want the company he spent decades building to be seized by a company that sued him, so he’ll most likely take another route.
“MyPillow is not going to want any of that,” Snyder told Insider. “So MyPillow is going to probably file bankruptcy.”
Winning a bankruptcy auction would be harder for Dominion, but it would still have a chance
If MyPillow filed for bankruptcy protection, it would liquidate itself with court-supervised auctions to pay off creditors and debts.
In that scenario, Dominion would be unlikely to recover all the damages a jury may award it. Companies going through bankruptcy have an obligation to pay “secured” creditors first, including lenders and employees who are owed wages.
Dominion wouldn’t be high on the priority list for getting proceeds from a bankruptcy auction because judgments are considered “unsecured” creditors.
“In a typical corporate bankruptcy, unsecured creditors get $0.10 on the dollar,” Adams said. “It’s not a great place to be.”
Lindell told Insider that MyPillow didn’t have any creditors or debts. He said he owned the majority of shares in the company and had given some employees shares as well.
But even if Dominion got knocked down the priority list for a bankruptcy auction’s proceeds, Dominion could try to acquire MyPillow’s assets as a bidder. And any judgment it may be awarded would be as good as money.
“They can place what’s called a credit bid, which basically means they bid not with money but with what’s owed them,” Adams said. “It’s effectively money.”
With a massive judgment, Dominion would almost certainly be able to win any auction and own the pillow company.
“Maybe some competitor wants to buy MyPillow, and they’re willing to pay $100 million,” Adams said. “If their credit is $1.3 billion, I mean, they’re going to win.”
Does Dominion want to own a pillow company?
It’s an open question whether Dominion wants to own MyPillow, since producing and selling pillows requires a different skill set than administering election technology.
It’s also impossible to predict how much in damages Dominion might win at trial. The “big money,” according to Clay Calvert, a press-freedom expert at the University of Florida, would be in the punitive damages, where a jury could impose massive numbers on Lindell.
“The punitive damages are beyond the compensatory damages, whether it’s general compensatory or special damages,” Calvert said. “They’re designed to punish and to deter conduct like this in the future.”
Dominion may also be competing against Smartmatic, a rival election-technology company that has been the subject of the same conspiracy theories and has filed its own defamation lawsuits. Smartmatic hasn’t sued Lindell, though.
For his part, Lindell has shown no interest in owning an election-technology company.
In his interview with Insider, Lindell predicted that state attorneys general would file a lawsuit later this month that would result in the Supreme Court overturning the 2020 election results and getting rid of all voting machines in the US.
“I want to take Dominion, the company, melt down the machines, and use the metal for prison bars and the plastic for the little trays they served breakfast on in prison for all the Dominion people that were involved in this, and all the other criminals like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, the CCP, everyone that was part of the biggest crime in the history of the world,” he told Insider, referring to the Chinese Communist Party, which he baselessly claimed was involved in hacking election results.
Asked if he was worried about Dominion’s lawsuit succeeding, Lindell said Insider was “wasting my time” and speculated Dominion’s executives would go to prison.
A representative for Dominion pointed Insider to its original lawsuit in response to questions about its litigation.
“He is well aware of the independent audits and paper ballot recounts conclusively disproving the Big Lie,” the lawsuit says. “But Lindell — a talented salesman and former professional card counter — sells the lie to this day because the lie sells pillows.”
If a jury awarded Dominion $1.3 billion, it would almost certainly be the biggest-ever verdict in US history for a defamation case. It would be far beyond the $177 million Disney had to pay in the “pink slime” case, which is believed to be the biggest award in recent years and involved an ABC News story that misled viewers about a beef company’s products.
The beef company in that lawsuit hired Tom Clare, a famed defamation attorney, to represent it in the litigation, which ended in 2017.
Clare is now representing Dominion.