As Mike Lindell campaigns for Minnesota’s highest office, a pack of creditors is chasing him in court, seeking more than $25 million from his company, MyPillow.
A longtime slipper supplier won a $15.4 million judgment against MyPillow in December, while a court awarded Federal Express nearly $9 million in August. MyPillow has also been hit with at least six more court judgments in the past 18 months totaling $2.3 million.
The company’s mounting unpaid bills are in addition to court rulings that could cost Lindell nearly $1 billion for the prominent role he played in promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election when Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump.
Lindell’s financial straits didn’t stop Trump — who had his own history of business bankruptcies and stiffed creditors before running for president in 2016 — from endorsing Lindell over House Speaker Lisa Demuth and retired health care executive Kendall Qualls, who won the Republican Party endorsement for governor in May.
The primary election is Aug. 11, with the winner expected to face a formidable Democratic ticket led by U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
Despite Trump’s endorsement, the Republican Party of Minnesota released a statement saying Lindell has “serious financial baggage” and insists his candidacy could allow Democrats to win not just the governor’s race but also full control of the Minnesota Legislature.
Lindell has dismissed those concerns, insisting he’s electable because he built a successful business while fighting off political criticism and government investigations.
In court filings, Lindell blames MyPillow’s woes on “lawfare” from voting machine firms; feckless big-box retailers that dropped his products; and more recently, a Biden-era investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
MyPillow “is the most attacked company in the history of the United States,” Lindell said in an interview. “Every single thing that happened to MyPillow comes from its CEO exercising his right of free speech.”
The Minnesota company lost tens of millions of dollars since 2022, and it was so pressed for cash in 2024 that it sought funding from the business equivalent of payday lenders.
MyPillow’s creditors got stiffed, legions of the company’s workers were laid off and employee stockholders likely took a hit from the company’s torrent of red ink.
Lindell said recently that MyPillow has stabilized and is making money.
“My company is still standing and we’re in great shape,” he said. But he ended the interview before addressing whether MyPillow has paid anything to creditors.
Lindell was warned 10 years ago about the perils of mixing business with politics.
“I thought it was a terrible mistake,” Jim Furlong, a longtime Lindell friend and former MyPillow president, said in a 2024 deposition.
Furlong, who couldn’t be reached for comment, was one of two MyPillow executives who cautioned Lindell about the commercial risks of taking a political stance when he publicly supported Trump for president in 2016.
“It was the beginning of the downfall of MyPillow,” Furlong said in the deposition.
Payments are ‘on the way’
Lindell invented MyPillow in 2004 and hawked the product personally on television.
By early 2012, Lindell’s pitch became the country’s top infomercial based on an independent ranking. In popular culture, the self-professed former crack-addict-turned-startup CEO became known as “the MyPillow Guy.”
MyPillow had several outstanding years in the mid-tolate 2010s. But by 2020, it had “fatigued and we had to come up with other products,” Lindell said in a 2024 deposition.
It began selling mattress covers and slippers, the latter having a “huge profit margin.”
But slipper sales tanked after Lindell questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and big box retailers dropped MyPillow products.
MyPillow fell behind in its payments to its slipper supplier.
He said in his 2024 deposition that “they call me every single day looking for hope, every day.”
But Los Angeles-based ACI International is looking for more than hope now. The footwear maker sued MyPillow in California state court last year and won a $15.4 million default judgment in December after MyPillow didn’t respond in court.
MyPillow has since asked the court to rescind the judgment, claiming the suit wasn’t properly served. MyPillow also sued ACI in federal court in Minnesota for breach of contract.
ACI put a levy on MyPillow’s Amazon account to enforce the judgment, which could freeze customer payments to MyPillow.
If the levy isn’t lifted, MyPillow said in a court filing, the company “could go out of business.”
ACI hasn’t yet answered MyPillow’s suit, and its attorneys did not return calls for comment.
Federal Express sued MyPillow and Lindell personally in February 2025 after MyPillow stopped paying its bills the previous year.
The Memphis-based shipping giant accused Lindell of fraud by misrepresenting MyPillow’s ability to pay its bills.
“A continuing theme in Lindell’s communications with FedEx was that funds were available, on the way, and that FedEx would receive payment at any moment,” FedEx said in a court filing.
Lindell maintained that MyPillow’s promises to pay were made in good faith.
In mid-2024, Lindell told a FedEx senior manager that an upcoming initial public stock offering (IPO) by FrankSpeech, another Lindell company, would enable MyPillow to pay its bills, the FedEx suit said. Lindell told FedEx he expected to raise $20 million from the IPO.
But Lindell later acknowledged in a court filing that the IPO “was not as successful as others promised me,” and he never received any money from it. (FrankSpeech, a conservative news website, has been rebranded as LindellTV).
After the IPO flop, Lindell told FedEx that he would pay up with proceeds from loans he was obtaining for MyPillow — but that never happened either, FedEx claims.
At one point, Lindell promised he’d pay MyPillow’s bills through a “high-end stock option opportunity he was offered,” which included shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, FedX claims. “This too never happened,” the suit says.
In August, a federal judge in Tennessee granted an $8.8 million default judgment in favor of FedEx after MyPillow didn’t respond to the lawsuit. Lindell is personally on the hook for $2.7 million of that amount.
Operation Arctic Frost
In Tennessee court filings, Lindell blamed MyPillow’s financial problems on “Operation Arctic Frost,” a code name for a federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
“Beginning in mid-2022, MyPillow began suffering a string of what were at that point in time inexplicable financial reversals, which have recently been revealed to be triggered as a result of Operation Arctic Frost, which had targeted MyPillow,” Lindell said in a court filing.
Lindell made a similar claim earlier this year in MyPillow’s lawsuit against its slipper supplier.
Records from the federal investigation show the inquiry included a 2022 subpoena of MyPillow’s records at one bank.
As a result, the bank terminated its relationship with MyPillow, Lindell said in a court filing.
“Biden’s government attacked MyPillow — the DOJ [Department of Justice], the FBI and the IRS went full force to cancel our events,” Lindell said in an interview. “We were canceled.”
U.S. Senate Republicans, led by Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, have criticized how Special Counsel Jack Smith led the investigation. The U.S. Attorney’s office appointed Smith in 2022, but the investigation was dropped after Trump’s reelection in 2024.
Another major shipping company, DHL, sued MyPillow for not paying its bills in September 2024. Three months later, a Hennepin County judge ordered the pillow maker to pay DHL $777,730. MyPillow paid off that judgment, court records show.
However, court records indicate MyPillow has not fully paid several 2025 judgments in favor of six companies, including an arm of UPS and St. Cloud-based Spee-Dee Delivery. Most were default judgments, meaning my Pillow never responded to the suits.
“Those (judgments) are just kind of percolating right now,” said Barbara Podlucky Berens, an attorney for MyPillow and Lindell. MyPillow may challenge some or all of them, she said.
Defamation case could cost MyPillow
Lindell personally could end up paying hundreds of millions in damages for defamation lawsuits spurred by his election conspiracy theories. MyPillow may be on the hook in one of those cases, too.
A federal judge in Minnesota ruled last September that Lindell and MyPillow had defamed Smartmatic, which Lindell claimed had rigged its voting machines during the 2020 election.
“Smartmatic offers undisputed evidence that MyPillow was aware of Lindell’s conduct,” wrote Judge Jeffrey Bryan. “Members of MyPillow’s board of directors admitted they were aware of Lindell’s defamatory statements.”
Smartmatic is seeking “nine figure damages,” though a jury must determine any award and whether Lindell acted with malice.
In an interview, Lindell said he plans to seek dismissal of the Smartmatic case based on declassified election security records recently released by President Trump.
The documents will prove to the court that “Mike was right all along, 100 percent right,” Lindell said, referring to himself in the third person.
No independent reviews of the 2020 election have found widespread voter machine fraud or irregularities, a conclusion also reached by former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who served during Trump’s first term.
In a separate case, a Colorado jury last year found that Lindell and one of his companies, FrankSpeech, defamed a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems, Eric Coomer.
The jury awarded Coomer $2.3 million but did not find MyPillow liable for defamation. Lindell appealed the verdict.
Lindell got one big dose of financial relief last year. Dominion, which won a $787 million defamation settlement against Fox News in 2023, was sold last year to a GOP election official and renamed Liberty Vote. In June it dropped its $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against Lindell and MyPillow.
Mixing business and politics
Lindell sees his crusade to challenge the 2020 election and eliminate voting machines as nothing short of rescuing the republic, depositions show.
And he has spent tens of millions of his own dollars promoting and defending his views.
“I burned through money because I didn’t care — I don’t have a company — if we don’t save our country,” Lindell said in a 2024 deposition.
In Lindell’s view, expressed in his depositions, MyPillow is totally separate from his election claims. MyPillow “has nothing to do with what I am saying,” he said in 2024.
But regardless of context — political or commercial — he is often introduced as MyPillow’s CEO. At the start of “Absolute Proof,” the first of Lindell’s documentaries on his 2020 election claims, he introduces himself as the CEO of MyPillow, court records say.
MyPillow stored Absolute Proof DVDs in its warehouse, and MyPillow employees were involved in shipping them, Darren Lindell, Mike Lindell’s son and MyPillow’s chief operating officer, said in a 2024 deposition.
Court records show that Lindell’s election complaints were often mixed with promotions for MyPillow when he appeared on conservative radio shows and podcasts. Judge Bryan, who concluded Lindell and MyPillow had defamed Smartmatic, cited such promotions in his ruling.
Bryan also found that Lindell used MyPillow employees and resources to essentially publish his conspiracy theories. For instance, a MyPillow employee distributed Absolute Truth to the company’s advertisers.
MyPillow’s board members were aware of Lindell’s defamatory statements, Bryan’s ruling said, but they didn’t do anything.
Lindell effectively controlled MyPillow’s board, Furlong, Lindell’s longtime friend and a MyPillow director, said in a 2024 deposition. Lindell owned just over half of the company in 2024, while MyPillow employees mostly owned the rest, according to Lindell’s depositions.
At a board meeting in 2016, Furlong and MyPillow’s then corporate attorney both told Lindell of their unease over his public support of Trump, court records show.
“Mike said he was going to do it, and if we didn’t like it, that was just too bad,” Furlong said in a deposition.
Walker Orenstein of the Star Tribune contributed to this story. mike.hughlett@startribune.com