Niamh Shackleton
Mike Lindell's 'Prove Mike Wrong' challenge has come back to bite him in the ass.
After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Lindell was one of many people to wrongly claim that the election had been rigged.
Back in 2021, Lindell claimed that he had data showing China had interfered with the election of President Joe Biden and he was so confident with his claims that he challenged someone to prove him wrong - offering a whopping $5 million to do so.
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Fast forward to 2023 and the businessman was in fact proven wrong.
Computer forensics specialist, Robert Zeidman signed up for the challenge and managed to debunk the claims that Lindell was making.
In response, Zeidman penned a 15-page report to debunk Lindell's claims.
At the time, Lindell refused to pay the cybersecurity expert his money - sparking private arbitration proceeding in Minnesota.
At the end of the three-day court hearing, arbitrators agreed that Zeidman had debunked Lindell’s claims and that the material 'unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data'.
Lindell was ordered to pay the large sum at the time of the hearing, but requested that the decision was overturned.
But in a 12-page order released on Wednesday (February 21), a judge explained that 'the Court is not at liberty to review the outcome of an arbitration award simply because one party believes it to be incorrect'.
"The Court's responsibility in reviewing an arbitration award is not to reevaluate the merits but rather ensure that the panel acted appropriately," Judge Tunheim went on, according to Raw Story.
"Lindell LLC's only basis for Court action was that the panel acted outside the scope of its authority in issuing the award."
However, the Court didn't find that the panel 'exceeded its authority' and therefore upheld their ruling of Lindell having to cough up $5 million to Zeidman.
While he's been ordered to pay the large sum of money, Zeidman doesn't think he'll actually get it.
"I don't think I'll see it," he told Minnesota Reformer. "I do think he's going to go bankrupt from all the lawsuits and all his expenditures on these illegitimate voting fraud cases.
"So I think he'll delay things until he's out of money, and I probably won't see anything."
In July of last year, Lindell claimed that MyPillow had lost a whopping $100 million due to 'massive cancellation'.
While the alleged huge losses in mind, the 62-year-old turned to asking his supporters for donations.