Embattled MyPillow founder Mike Lindell will not have to cough up the promised $5 million prize for his ill-fated “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. In 2021, Lindell offered the hefty reward to anyone who could disprove his claim that Chinese interference caused Joe Biden to win the 2020 election. When software developer Robert Zeidman entered the challenge with a 15-page dossier he said would prove Lindell’s “evidence” was faulty, he was told by contest judges that his entry provided insufficient proof. Zeidman later sued Lindell over the decision. In 2023, an arbitration panel ruled that Zeidman should have been the challenge’s rightful winner, as his dossier had successfully disproven Lindell’s election claims. Although the panel ordered Lindell to pay Zeidman the $5 million reward, that ruling was overturned Wednesday by the appeals court, which ruled that the rules of Lindell’s contest were too broad to declare Zeidman the unequivocal winner. The news will come as a relief to Lindell, whose last several years have been fraught with lawsuits. Just last month, a judge ordered the longtime election denier to pay $2.3 million to a former Dominion Voting Systems employee who successfully sued him for defamation.
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