Abcarian: Did the MyPillow guy, clinging to the Big Lie, defame a Dominion exec?
There's a line in Eric Coomer's defamation lawsuit against Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, that strikes me as the perfect description of what happens when influential partisans belch lies about innocent people in these insanely charged political times:
'The real world consequences for the subjects of those lies,' says the lawsuit, 'have been devastating.'
Indeed.
Think of Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, whose lives were destroyed when Rudy Giuliani, once President Trump's top campaign lawyer, claimed the pair had rigged the 2020 election outcome in their state. Giuliani even invented a blatantly racist story about the women passing drugs to each other at their Fulton County polling place. Trump amplified the claims. The two women received death threats, were loath to leave home even for groceries and had to go into hiding. I will never forget how sad and broken they seemed during their testimony before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Happily, Freeman and Moss won a $148-million settlement from Giuliani, leading the former New York mayor to unsuccessfully sue for bankruptcy in an effort to dodge his obligation. Now stripped of his license to practice law in New York, Giuliani has fallen so far he's not even a punchline on late night TV anymore.
Just like Freeman and Moss, Coomer, the former director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems, was subjected to a torrent of false claims about election rigging by Lindell and other right-wing conspiracy theorists and media outlets. Like Freeman and Moss, he was terrorized and driven into hiding.
He left his job, moved to a new location, placed guns around the house he borrowed from a friend, experienced depression and panic attacks, and believes he will not be able to return to his profession.
'People were essentially taking bets on how my brother's corpse would be found and which nefarious shadow group would be behind his death,' Coomer's brother told the New York Times in 2021. 'He would be executed by the state or he would be found with a falsified suicide note and two gunshots in the back of his head.'
Coomer, like others, became collateral damage in the misbegotten MAGA campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Fox News hosts, including Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs, completely lost their minds, and the company allowed its highest-profile stars to spew lie after lie about the election in general and Dominion Voting Systems in particular, knowing full well (as News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted under oath) that Dominion was blameless and that Joe Biden had won fair and square.
That unsavory chapter ended up costing Fox $787.5 million in a settlement to Dominion, which allowed the right-wing network to avert a trial.
Coomer, who has filed lawsuits against Giuliani and several others who spread lies about him, now gets his day in court against Lindell. The defamation trial, which began Monday, is expected to last through the end of this week. (Coomer settled suits against conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell; Newsmax; One America News Network, or OAN; and an OAN correspondent. His suit against Guiliani is pending.)
The false claims against Coomer were dreamed up by a conservative Colorado podcaster, Joseph Oltmann, who told listeners that he had infiltrated an 'Antifa conference call' in which 'Eric, the Dominion guy' claimed to have rigged the election against Trump. (Coomer's defamation suit against Oltmann is also pending.)
'Oltmann,' says Coomer's lawsuit, 'claimed this supposed call happened on some unspecified date months before the election, but that he did not think to take action until after the election was called for President Biden …. Oltmann's story is inherently implausible.'
Not to mention, outlandish and preposterous.
In his campaign against Coomer, Oltmann posted a photo of the Dominion executive's home on his social media and urged his followers to 'blow this sh— up. Share, put his name everywhere. No rest for this sh—bag … Eric we are watching you.'
Lindell, who seems never to have come across a right-wing conspiracy theory he couldn't embrace, picked up on Oltmann's fantasies about Coomer and began spreading them far and wide — in interviews, on his website, in social media, etc.
On his FrankSpeech media platform, Lindell addressed Coomer directly: 'You are disgusting and you are treasonous. You are a traitor to the United States of America.' (Classic case of projection, imho.)
Lindell could have settled as so many others have done. Instead, he has chosen to fight on, hawking pillows, sheets and slippers to pay his legal bills as he goes. His attorney said that because he believed what he was saying was true, it's not defamation. 'It's just words. All Mike Lindell did was talk,' Lindell's attorney told the jury. 'Mike believed that he was telling the truth.'
Before the trial, Lindell stood on the federal courthouse steps in Denver and proclaimed that his only goal in all this was to ban electronic voting machines and replace them with paper ballots.
'If we can get there,' he said, 'I would sacrifice everything.'
If Coomer wins his defamation case against Lindell — and I really hope he does — Lindell will have lost a lot and gained very little. First, the case has nothing to do with the validity of voting machines. Second, an estimated 98% of American voters already cast ballots that leave a paper trail because that's one way voting machines record votes.
But Lindell, like so many of his MAGA compatriots, still won't let reality stand in the way of Trump's Big Lie.
@rabcarian.bsky.social Threads: @rabcarian
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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