My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell has decided to take the stand in his own defense in what the staunch MAGA supporter has coined “the trial of the century.”

The trial starts Monday morning with jury selection at Denver’s Alfred A. Araj United States Courthouse. Opening statements are expected to be 30 minutes long and will likely be over by the end of the day.

The upcoming two-week trial, overseen by U.S. District Judge Nina Wang, stems from a defamation lawsuit filed in 2022 by Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee, who alleges that Lindell accused him of rigging the 2020 election against President Trump during an “Antifa conference call.”

Lindell, who wants to see an end to voting machines in favor of paper ballots in U.S. elections, told The Rolling Stone that he’s a former crack addict who “has nothing to hide.”

Coomer, a Colorado resident who handled election security for Dominion, is suing Lindell and two of his companies, My Pillow, Inc and FrankSpeech LLC, now known as Lindell TV, for an undisclosed amount of money for allegedly ruining his reputation and causing him emotional distress when he claimed that Coomer threw the 2020 election.

This is not Coomer’s lone lawsuit. He has filed a series of them against conservative figures alleging the same basic sequence of events, but the lawsuit against Lindell is the first to go to trial.

Coomer’s claims originated with a November 2020 podcast recorded by Joe Oltmann, a Colorado podcaster and political activist .

Days after the presidential election, Oltmann alleged he had recently listened in on an “antifa” conference call — a reference to anti-fascist ideology.

On the call, an unnamed participant referenced “Eric … the Dominion guy.” Oltmann alleged “Eric” said, “Don’t worry about the election, (Donald) Trump is not gonna win. I made f-ing sure of that.”

Oltmann then conducted his own “investigation” by Googling the terms “Eric,” “Dominion,” and “Colorado.”

Based on limited other information found online, he concluded Coomer was the one who allegedly made the comments of election rigging. Oltmann repeated his story publicly, even after the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Coomer sued Oltmann, media figures, Trump’s 2020 campaign and Trump’s lawyers after they amplified the unproven accusations. Coomer alleged receiving credible death threats and that he was forced to hide for fear of his safety as a result of the incendiary story.

Witness list

Coomer and Lindell are expected to take the stand during what is expected to be an adversarial two-week trial. The witness list is a who’s who of Colorado election officials including embattled former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, Executive Director of the Colorado County Clerk’s Association Matt Crane and former Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, according to court documents filed in April.

Lindell has spoken with President Donald Trump to discuss Peters’ release from her 9-year prison sentence for giving supporters of Trump unauthorized access to the Mesa County election system in 2021 in an unsuccessful search for voter fraud.

Some of the testimony will revolve around the value of Coomer’s character when he was the director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems. In addition, Coomer’s psychiatrist will speak to his emotional suffering as a result of Lindell’s media campaign, which Coomer claims labeled him as a traitor, the motion said.

Kurt Olsen, a former attorney for President Trump and Lindell, is being called by both sides and will appear via video feed, court documents said.

Olsen’s role for the plaintiff is expected to be to reveal how speakers at the 2021 Cyber Symposium were coordinated. On the other hand, Lindell’s attorneys will question him about how much he knew and whether he things Lindell intended to cause the damages Coomer alleges, according to court documents.

Other witnesses include the podcaster, Oltmann, and Chris Ruddy, the CEO of the conservative television network Newsmax, according to court documents.

Four years ago, when Newsmax was facing a defamation lawsuit of its own, the company publicly apologized to Coomer and backed off claims that he manipulated voting machines and counts to thwart President Trump’s re-election. In a statement Newsmax said it “found

no evidence that Dr. Coomer interfered with Dominion voting machines or voting software in any way, nor that Dr. Coomer ever claimed to have done so,” it said in a statement.” There has been no evidence that the election was rigged.”

In the Denver trial, Coomer’s attorneys are expected to introduce a live-streamed Cyber Symposium which Lindell organized and led in 2021 to showcase his claims of 2020 election fraud. At the August 2021 Sioux Falls, South Dakota event, Lindell said that he had irrefutable evidence of election hacking and manipulation, particularly by foreign entities.

At the event, Coomer was painted as an insider who had access to and manipulated election levers during the 2020 election. In a motion filed in April, Coomer’s attorneys say they plan to prove that Lindell made up those claims, that the claims were intentional and malicious, and that Coomer suffered emotional distress and because of them.

In response, Lindell countered that the claims were not malicious, that he did not knowingly act reckless with no regard for the truth and added that Coomer’s claims of injury were exaggerated.

He has stated in media interviews that he did not know Coomer and wonders why Coomer picked on him.

Though President Trump and his attorneys have claimed election fraud through the introduction of more than 60 lawsuits in the United States, none of them have come up with enough evidence to prove that Coomer, Dominion or anyone else involved with vote-counting have changed election results.

Lindell, once a self-made multi-millionaire, told a court in Washington D.C. in a different case separate from Coomer’s lawsuit that he is out of money. “I borrowed everything I can. Nobody will lend me any money anymore,” he told the court. “I’m in ruins.”

This story was written with the help of Colorado Politics reporter Michael Karlik.