Is it a good idea — or a great idea?
“I’m going to testify!” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and staunch Donald Trump ally, tells Rolling Stone. “Of course I’m gonna testify at my own trial! … I have nothing to hide. I am a former crack addict, I’ve always been open about that. I’ve always been open about everything! I’m as transparent as they come … So I have nothing to hide at this trial.”
Lindell said he was calling from the Denver area ahead of his defamation trial in a federal courthouse, slated to begin in early June, and laid out some of his plans for taking the stand and what he intends to personally present to the court and jury.
The MAGA diehard and pillow magnate, who flooded Fox News with commercials as the network’s pivot towards extremism frightened off prominent blue chip advertisers, has been one of the foremost — and certainly one of the loudest — promoters of the false idea that Trump won the 2020 election. Lindell has particularly pushed conspiracy theories about voting machines being rigged against Trump.
The trial set to begin next week stems from a defamation lawsuit filed in 2022 by former Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer. Coomer alleges Lindell targeted him as part of his disinformation campaign, including by claiming “Eric, the Dominion guy” conspired to rig the election against Trump on an “Antifa conference call.” The leadup to the trial has been fraught, with Lindell’s lawyers admitting they used generative AI to file legal documents, and the judge slamming them for dozens of defective citations, including of legal cases that do not exist.
Lindell has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and speaks about his decision to testify as if it’s a public good. “I didn’t go into this haphazardly. I want to help this country,” he tells Rolling Stone “I want these machines gone!”
Defense attorneys sometimes advise their clients not to take the stand and testify under oath, arguing it won’t help their case and could even harm them considerably. Lawyers offer this recommendation, often in criminal trials, when their clients are particularly divisive public or political figures, and especially if they have a lengthy track record of making the kinds of bombastic public statements or admissions that can be used against them in a court of law. This is why several of Trump’s top advisers and lawyers did not want him to testify at his own Manhattan criminal trial, or before the House committee investigating the deadly Jan 6. Capitol attack Trump instigated. Trump ultimately agreed with his attorneys.
Civil proceedings are different, and sometimes a refusal to testify can be used against the individual in a way that it can’t in a criminal trial. Regardless, even in civil defamation trials defense attorneys frequently counsel the client to say as little as possible on the stand, and to avoid grandstanding of any stripe.
Lindell is taking a markedly different approach in the days leading up to the trial. “If any attorney advised me not to testify or to take a deal, I’d tell them: Never!” Lindell says. “I speak the truth … I’ve been in many courts in my life, and ‘don’t testify’ is what they tell the guilty people, in my mind.”
“I’m not going to incriminate myself! I’ve done nothing wrong,” he adds. “Do you think I want to make a deal? I’ll spend every dime I have to save this country and I’ll borrow money if I have to.”
Lindell isn’t, as he’s said repeatedly in the past, “just some pillow guy.” He still enjoys access to the president of the United States. He was also a major financial backer of pro-Trump efforts to subvert Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election win. He has for years been a prominent booster — much to his legal and financial detriment — of election and voting machine-related conspiracy theories, to the point that some of his efforts have been too extreme even for some other leading election deniers in Trump’s orbit.
“The biggest thing I plan to say on the stand is that I didn’t know who this guy [Eric Coomer] was — so why are you picking on MyPillow and Mike Lindell? What did I ever do to him? I didn’t even know who the guy was!” Lindell says, adding that he wants to go on the offensive and explain how much Coomer’s defamation lawsuit against Newsmax and the right-wing network’s subsequent settlement hurt his company:
“Those numbers don’t lie, and I plan to show them in court, and show what he did to MyPillow, or my lawyers might do it … Eric Coomer’s settlement with Newsmax has cost MyPillow in sales over $20 million dollars because Newsmax will never have me on to talk about MyPillow products anymore! … I’m going in there [to testify] to help save our country, and help get rid of these electronic voting machines. I got vocal cord surgery a month ago. In 2016, I had my first surgery, and I couldn’t talk for 45 days straight. … But I’m not gonna stop talking.”
That much is clear, seeing as how Lindell has talked himself into an abundance of trouble in the past several years.
In 2021, Lindell appeared on the now-defunct Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, and asserted that he had concrete evidence that Dominion’s machines had been used to steal the election from Trump. “I dare Dominion to sue me because then it will get out faster,” Lindell said. The voting machine company did just that within days. In 2022, the FBI seized Lindell’s phone while at a Hardee’s fast food restaurant in Minnesota, that same year he was sued by Smartmatic — another voting systems company — for defamation. In 2023, as Lindell continued to spread conspiracy theories about election fraud despite the various lawsuits, his lawyers withdrew from the case over millions in unpaid legal fees. That same year, Lindell claimed MyPillow was going broke under the barrage of legal drama associated with himself and the company, as the company effectively acted as a cash fund for Lindell’s political endeavors.
Earlier this year, Lindell was found in contempt of court in Minnesota after failing to turn over discovery materials related to the Smartmatic lawsuit. Weeks before the ruling, the MyPillow founder had told the judge in the case through tears that he was “in ruins.”
“I borrowed everything I can. Nobody will lend me any money anymore,” he told the court. “I can’t turn back time […] but I will tell you, I don’t have any money.”
When the trial to sort out Coomer’s defamation suit begins in June, we’ll see how much Lindell follows through on his vows to turn his testimony into an extremely Lindell showcase.
“I will never stop until we go back to paper ballots,” he insists. “I’m gonna be there every day. … I believe it’s one of the most important cases in history. … I’ll be there every minute of every day until the last minute of the trial! … I’m going to list every single [expert I’ve talked to] on the stand.”
Lindell adds: “Ask me if I have any money left? No, I don’t! I have no money left. I keep borrowing to keep going” in his battle against the “deep-state globalists” and “traitors” and “uniparty Republicans.”
George Conway, a former fixture of the conservative legal elite who emerged as a strident MAGA critic during Trump’s first term, doesn’t think it’s such a good idea for Lindell to testify: “If there were an insanity defense to defamation, sure, I’d put him on the stand,” he says. “But apart from that, I probably wouldn’t want him anywhere near the courtroom.”
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