Lindell Must Pay $2.3M for Defaming Dominion Worker
Originally posted by Adam_PoE
A Colorado appeals court has handed a former Dominion employee a significant win, allowing his 2020 election-related defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress claims to proceed to trial against Donald Trump's campaign and "Kraken" lawyer Sidney Powell, among other individuals and entities.In late December 2020, Dr. Eric Coomer, formerly the director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems, filed a lawsuit in Denver County against Donald Trump's campaign, two right-wing cable news networks, and a collection of Trump-allied election-deniers, claiming that the defendants conspired to defame him and intentionally inflicted "severe" emotional distress by falsely accusing him of being an "anonymous Antifa activist."
Coomer found himself at the center of the conspiracy after a right-wing podcaster named Joseph Oltmann claimed without evidence that he had infiltrated an antifa conference call in which a Dominion employee named Eric allegedly said, "Trump is not gonna win. I made ****ing sure of that."
Oltmann's theory was picked up by other right-wing media and shared on X by one of Trump's sons. It eventually found its way to the St. Louis-based Gateway Pundit, which published a story that also included a 2016 video of Coomer presenting the security features of Dominion's systems.
Coomer said the accusations led to death threats and harassment, driving him into hiding. So in December 2020, he filed a defamation lawsuit in Colorado against the Trump campaign, two of its lawyers, and myriad right-wing media figures who helped spread the conspiracy, including Gateway Pundit.
Newsmax settled with Coomer in 2021 for an undisclosed amount. Others named in the suit include Rudy Giuliani, Michelle Malkin, Eric "Sucker Punch" Metaxas, Joseph Oltmann, and OAN.
Last month, Oltmann called for executing President Biden. In 2022, he claimed to be organizing a "well-armed" action to install Kari Lake as Arizona governor. And in 2021, Oltmann called for executing the 19 U.S. Senators who voted for a stop-gap bill to keep the government open.
A federal jury in Colorado on Monday found that one of the nation's most prominent election conspiracy theorists, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, defamed a former employee for a leading voting equipment company after the 2020 presidential election.
The employee, Eric Coomer, was awarded $2.3 million in damages. He had sued after Lindell called him a traitor and accusations about him stealing the election were streamed on Lindell's online media platform.
Coomer was the security and product strategy director at Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, whose voting machines became the target of elaborate conspiracy theories among allies of Donald Trump, who continues to falsely claim that his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 was due to widespread fraud.