I Won a $5 Million Judgment Against the MyPillow Guy. Now I’m Taking Him to the Supreme Court.

Sign up for the Slatest^[1] to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Earlier this summer, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8^th Circuit overturned my $5 million judgment against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for having won a challenge to prove that his claims of election fraud in 2020 were nonsense. This decision is not only bad for me, but bad for America. It upends the century-old Federal Arbitration Act and it diverts resources from legitimate investigations for improving our voting system to crazy conspiracies from wealthy plutocrats. I’m hoping the Supreme Court will reconsider this harmful ruling.

Here is some background: In the summer of 2021, Lindell announced that he was going to hold a “Cyber Symposium” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to release data that proved that U.S. voting machines were hacked by China. He said he would pay $5 million to anyone who could “Prove Mike Wrong.” At the insistence of friends, I got myself invited but told them that examining this kind of data would take weeks or months using specialized tools. But I was wrong. It took me three hours to prove that the data was completely bogus. I wrote up a report on my findings, submitted it to Lindell’s symposium director, and waited.

After a month with no response, I approached lawyers, and Brian Glasser and Cary Joshi at Bailey Glasser agreed to take my case. We went to arbitration, as Lindell’s contest rules required. We prepared our case, held depositions, went to the hearing in front of three experienced arbitrators and, after a year and a half, in April 2023, we got a unanimous decision. I had proved Mike wrong; he owed me $5 million.

Lindell took the arbitration ruling to federal court in October 2023. Each party submitted a short brief to the court and then lawyers from both parties each got about half an hour to present their arguments to Judge John R. Tunheim. Months later, in February 2024, he ruled that his hands were tied. In his decision, he questioned whether he would have ruled the same way as the arbitrators but confirmed that he had no ability to overrule their binding decision. That’s how the Federal Arbitration Act has worked since it was enacted in 1925.

One year ago, Lindell appealed this decision to a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 8^th Circuit. In July, the panel issued its ruling overturning the federal court decision and the arbitration decision. Their order was essentially based on the fact that the arbitration agreement that Lindell had me sign at the Cyber Symposium stated that to win his $5 million challenge, I must “prove that the data Lindell provides … unequivocally does NOT reflect information related to the November 2020 election.” Lindell’s lawyers claimed that I had only proven that the data was not a particular kind of data—electronic data known as “packet” data, which demonstrates something was sent along a network, usually the internet—but that I had not proven that it was not any kind of data related to the election. (Lindell’s false claim was that election vote tallies, which are not supposed to be connected to the internet so as not to be hacked, were in fact being sent all over the internet.)

There’s important precedent that explains why Lindell should not have prevailed. The Supreme Court made it crystal clear in Oxford Health Plans LLC v. Sutter that an attempt to vacate an arbitration decision because the losing party disagrees with the interpretation of the contract is “not properly addressed to the Court.” This is exactly what happened in this case.

In his brief to the appeals court, Lindell simply restated the same arguments he made in our original arbitration hearing and his appeal before Judge Tunheim, without providing any new evidence that the arbitration panel might have overlooked. Lindell simply didn’t like the arbitration outcome.

Digging further, Lindell’s brief to the circuit court claims that I didn’t do a full or correct analysis of the data that he presented at his symposium. However, I submitted a report to the contest judges (available here^[2]) that explained that I used a well-known tool to examine Lindell’s data and found that the data contained no packets in any standard format, which clearly demonstrated that it wasn’t what he claimed. In any case, Lindell’s own experts, during four days of arbitration, could not show any packet data or any other kind of legitimate election data to dispute my findings.

When pressed about the data at the arbitration, Lindell’s fact witness, Todd Sanders, claimed that the packet data had been transformed into a spreadsheet that had also been given to the cyber experts at the symposium. I explained in my report that this spreadsheet did not contain packet data or any other kind of data related to the 2020 election. The fact that the spreadsheet contained information that could not have possibly come from the packets was confirmed by Sanders when he acknowledged at arbitration that some unknown person had manually added most, if not all, of the information in the spreadsheet. This was further confirmed at the arbitration by Lindell’s own expert witness, Doug Gould, who in a Perry Mason–like moment of grilling by my attorney, Brian Glasser, admitted that it wasn’t possible for the data to have originated from or been transmitted to a voting machine.

In fact, I testified at the arbitration that I had used all of the tools at my disposal, including off-the-shelf tools and tools I developed over two decades as a software forensic scientist, to examine the data for any kind of relationship to the 2020 election. I found none. Since Lindell, his fact witnesses, and his expert witness all claimed that Lindell’s data contained packet data, a specific kind of electronic data transferred along networks like the internet, the arbitrators focused on that particular issue throughout their decision. In fact, Lindell’s own brief to the appeals court explicitly stated this claim.

And yet despite admitting that everyone on Lindell’s team said the key to the analysis was packet data—before arbitration, after arbitration, and most importantly, at arbitration while testifying under oath—which I proved wasn’t contained in the data and with which Lindell’s own expert witness concurred, Lindell argued in his appeals brief that the arbitration panel incorrectly “relied on statements made by Mr. Lindell and a Lindell expert witness, Dr. Douglas Frank, to conclude that ‘if the data is not PCAP data, it is not from the election, and it therefore cannot be “related to the November 2020 election.” ’ ”

Lindell also objected to how the arbitrators interpreted the contest rules, arguing that the standard should have been having to prove that there was no connection whatsoever between the data and the 2020 presidential election, no matter how far removed. As the arbitrators made clear, such an understanding of the contest rules would make the contest unwinnable because Lindell’s own proclamations that some random data was related to the election would, under such a ridiculous interpretation, cause any such random data to be ipso facto related to the election. They stated this in their decision:

Defining data as being merely “about the election” or “relating to the election” ignores the Contest rules’ reference to data “from the election” and reference to “election data.” These terms require that the data not merely be about the election, but must be from the election process itself … In fact, it would be unreasonable to conclude that any data about the election is “election data.” Newspaper articles and broadcast news about the election are transmitted as data over the internet, for example. It is unreasonable to conclude that any data file containing those accounts—or excerpts from such a file—would qualify as election data in a contest. If such data qualified, the Contest would not really be a contest at all.

Ultimately, the circuit panel’s ruling is a disappointing decision and one that my lawyers and I believe is incorrect, not just factually but based on all legal precedent. There are only rare cases where a binding arbitration decision has been overturned. Those cases typically involve some grievous error such as illegal activity (e.g., bribing of the arbitrators), unethical behavior (e.g., obvious bias by the arbitrators), or a ruling that is contrary to the law under any reasonable interpretation. None of those things happened here.

My lawyers and I have decided to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

My effort to overturn this decision is not about the money. This case is about our country and its principles. First, I believe that most Americans want voting to be fair and dependable. We also don’t want any foreign government, large corporation, political organization, wealthy individual, extremist activist, or misguided hacker interfering with our voting systems by any means. But when a fanatic like Mike Lindell spreads lies about our voting system, we all waste resources and tie up our legal system, distracting us from the real voting issues.

Second, the U.S. arbitration system is intended to allow a person of modest means to get quicker decisions at lower costs than having to deal with the long, expensive, labyrinthian legal system. I know this from experience because I’ve been waiting four years, at great expense, to get a final decision in this case, and now the wait gets even longer. We can’t let wealthy plutocrats twist the legal system in this way. If this decision stands, it will be a devastating blow to arbitration in America because it means any “binding arbitration decision” can be brought to court and litigated at great length and with potential success. Arbitration outcomes will become a war of attrition, with the wealthier party having the resources to wait out a possible victory rather than taking the clear loss. This is not the system as it is designed, nor is it the system we should want.

Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.