MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell says products were dropped from major retailers after voter fraud claims
Election experts have uniformly declared that the 2020 election was conducted fairly.
Image: Mike Lindell
President Trump with Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, in the Rose Garden on March 30, 2020.Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images file
Jan. 19, 2021, 10:44 AM EST
By Elisha Fieldstadt
MyPillow CEO and ardent Trump supporter Mike Lindell says his products have been dropped by major retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl's after his repeated false claims of voter fraud in the presidential election.
Lindell told NBC Minnesota affiliate KARE on Monday that HEB Stores, Wayfair and Canada's Today's Shopping Choice channel had also stopped selling his products. MyPillow, the bedding company with commercials starring Lindell, is based in Chaska, Minnesota.
In an email to NBC News Tuesday morning, Lindell said that "a group has attacked my vendors" and that the retailers called him saying they had been threatened with "a boycott if they don’t comply" and drop his products.
A representative for Today's Shopping Choice confirmed that MyPillow products would no longer be sold on the channel. Spokespeople for the other retailers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Lindell has maintained that fraud led to President Donald Trump's losing the election in November. He has used his Twitter account, where he has nearly 474,000 followers, and the MyPillow account to specifically spread falsehoods that machine voter fraud led to President-elect Joe Biden's victory.
Claims of voter fraud have been widely rejected.
Election experts have uniformly declared that the 2020 election was conducted fairly. A union of every senior federal and state official who oversaw the election declared it “the most secure in American history."
MyPillow was dropped from the retailers' shelves and sites after lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems, one of the biggest election equipment manufacturers in the U.S., sent a letter to Lindell threatening legal action if he did not retract his defamatory accusations and issue an apology after accusing Dominion of election fraud and stealing "millions of votes."
"Your smear campaign against Dominion has been relentless, and you have leveraged your significant social media following to inflict the maximum amount of damage to Dominion’s good name and business operations," said the Jan. 8 letter.
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"Despite your repeated promises — not to mention your considerable and costly efforts to bankroll a so-called investigation into Dominion — you have failed to identify a scintilla of credible evidence that even suggests that Dominion is somehow involved in a global conspiracy to harvest millions of votes in favor of President-elect Biden," the letter said. "Of course, this is because no such evidence exists."
The letter followed a Dec. 23 warning from Dominion lawyers to Lindell. It noted that Dominion sued lawyer Sidney Powell this month for falsely claiming that "Dominion had rigged the election, that Dominion was created in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chávez, and that Dominion bribed Georgia officials for a no-bid contract." Dominion is requesting damages of more than $1.3 billion.
Powell has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
In his email to NBC News, Lindell said: "All the evidence against Dominion is before the Supreme Court. ... China and others used the machines to corrupt our election! Here is one page of the proof."
The email did not include an attachment. When asked if he had mistakenly omitted it, Lindell sent another email with an empty attachment and a third with screenshots of illegible text.
Elisha Fieldstadt
Elisha Fieldstadt is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.
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