Mike Lindell gives a thumbs-up as he passes by a rally for supporters of former President Donald Trump on Tuesday, April 4, 2023, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)
A company owned by Minnesota pillow magnate Mike Lindell must pay $5 million to a man who proved him wrong, a federal court ruled Wednesday.
In 2021, the outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump issued the “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge at a South Dakota election fraud symposium — showcasing data purportedly proving the People’s Republic of China had interfered with the 2020 U.S. election.
Engineer Robert Zeidman — a Trump supporter himself — picked up the poly-foam gauntlet thrown down by the QVC star. Despite a less-than-stalwart belief in his own abilities, Zeidman won the contest.
When issuing the challenge, Lindell said his team of experts would provide “cyber data and packet captures from the 2020 November election” and said the upshot of the challenge was to “find proof that this cyber data is not valid data from the November Election.”
Contestants who could prove the data was not from the 2020 election would be awarded $5 million, the announcement promised.
The challenge rules signed by Zeidman categorized the contest in the following way: “participants will participate in a challenge to prove that the data Lindell provides, and represents reflects information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally does NOT reflect information related to the November 2020 election.”
The rules of the challenge also provided that any disputes about winning or losing would be decided by mandatory arbitration.
Zeidman was interested then in claims about election interference. The engineer believed he was likely to witness “history in the making” if Lindell’s claims could not be disproved.
So, he reasoned when entering the contest, that he would lose — because “Lindell would not offer a $5 million prize if Mr. Lindell had not had his own experts vet all the data to be presented,” an April 2023 arbitration decision in Zeidman’s favor explains.
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.
“The panel concluded that Zeidman proved that each file did not include packet capture data and thus was not related to the November 2020 election, so he had satisfied the Challenge rules, and was entitled to the $5 million reward,” the Wednesday opinion enforcing the award reads.
In enforcing the award, U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim says the arbitration panel “was tasked with the difficult job of interpreting a poorly written contract” but that the federal court’s only real job is to make sure the arbitrators “acted appropriately” and did not act “outside the scope of its authority” when issuing the award.
The judge says that he might very well have reached a different conclusion based on the contract terms and how the facts unfolded — but there is simply no recourse for Lindell here.
“A court’s review of an arbitration award is very limited,” the opinion reads. “Where parties agree to arbitrate, a court cannot substitute a judicial determination for the arbitrator’s decision. Courts may not review the merits of an arbitration award ‘even though the parties may allege that the award rests on errors of fact or on misinterpretation of the contract.’ Even if the Court is convinced that the arbitrator committed serious factual or legal error, so ‘long as the arbitrator is even arguably construing or applying the contract and acting within the scope of his authority,’ arbitration awards must be confirmed.”
Still, the court notes, arbitrators are not allowed to rewrite contracts — doing so would take them beyond the scope of their authority. So, Turnheim quickly assessed how the panel of arbitrators interpreted the contract between Zeidman and Lindell.
“The panel’s conclusion that the contract referred to data specifically from the election process considered the fact that anything even remotely connected to the election, as Lindell LLC proposed, could include newspaper articles and broadcast news which would effectively negate the purpose of having a challenge to begin with,” the opinion reads. “The Court finds this step in the interpretation to logically honor and harmonize the contract. Thus, the panel did not modify the contract or exceed its scope by imposing this interpretation.”
In ruling for Zeidman, the federal court also tacked on post-judgment interest that began to accrue since April 2023 — when the arbitration panel first ruled in his favor. Now, the engineer can sleep a bit easier.
Law&Crime reached out to Lindell Management LLC’s attorneys for comment on this story but no response was immediately forthcoming.
Marisa Sarnoff contributed to this report.
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