Dominion has sued MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell over his election fraud claims. The voting machine company is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages.

• Dominion is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages from MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
• The lawsuit accuses Lindell of repeatedly falsely claiming Dominion's voting machines had "stolen" votes from Trump.
• Lindell's claims have caused MyPillow's sales to surge by up to 40%, Dominion said.

Dominion Voting Systems sued both pillow company MyPillow and its CEO Mike Lindell on Monday, after he spread baseless claims that Dominion's voting machines helped rig the 2020 US presidential election.

Dominion is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages. Lindell is a staunch ally of former president Donald Trump and a major GOP donor. He has repeatedly supported Trump's claims challenging the integrity of the election.

In December, Lindell said that "the biggest fraud is the Dominion machines." The conspiracy theory that Dominion's technology switched votes from Trump to President Joe Biden has been thoroughly debunked.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.

Lindell has welcomed a defamation suit for weeks.

In late December, Dominion Voting Systems sent him a cease and desist letter warning of "imminent" litigation if he did not retract his claims about the voting technology company. Lindell has doubled down, telling CBS News in January that "all the American people and the world to see the horrific things that these (Dominion voting) machines are capable of," and alleged China was involved in the nonexistent rigging.

And in February, he purchased airtime on the far-right media organization One America News - itself under a lawsuit threat from Dominion - to air a three-hour "documentary" about election fraud.

Dominion's lawsuit accused Lindell of repeatedly making false allegations while knowing there was no credible evidence to support his claims. He "knowingly lied about Dominion to sell more pillows to people who continued tuning in to hear what they wanted to hear about the election," the company wrote in the lawsuit.

Lindell "sells the lie to this day because the lie sells pillows," it added.

"As a result of the defamatory marketing campaign against Dominion, MyPillow sales are up 30 to 40% and MyPillow is the busiest it has ever been," Dominion said.

Lindell spread the "Big Lie," as Dominions calls the election-fraud theory, by speaking at rallies including events hosted by Women for America First, which Lindell got MyPillow to sponsor, Dominion said.

Lindell claimed Dominion machines were built to cheat

According to the false conspiracy theory about Dominion machines, Dominion and Smartmatic, a rival election technology company, developed technology that "flipped" votes from Trump to Biden through a method developed with the regime of now-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Powell and Giuliani pushed elements of the theory while filing a series of failed lawsuits seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Lindell told the Conservative Business Journal in December that Trump got so many votes in the election he "broke the algorithm" in the Dominion machines that he claimed had been programmed to give "1.3 to Biden and 0.7 to the president" for each vote cast, the company said in the lawsuit.

In January, Lindell claimed that the voting machines "are corrupt, they built them to cheat" in an interview with RSBN, before plugging a 66% MyPillow discount with the code "RSBN."

As well as rallies, interviews, and a three-hour movie, Lindell used his social-media profiles to spread his baseless claims of voter fraud. In December he tweeted that "Millions of votes were stolen by dominion machines!" and called it "the biggest crime ever." His Twitter account has since been suspended.

Trump met with Lindell in his final Friday in office. Their meeting notes were photographed by a Washington Post photographer, Jabin Botsford, and included references to investigating the 2020 election.

The next day, Lindell tweeted a photo of a document he claimed proved "Trump got around 79m votes to 68m votes for Biden." Twitter labeled the tweet as a "disputed" claim of election fraud and prevented it from being replied to, liked, or retweeted.

Dominion has already filed defamations lawsuit against pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell and Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, also seeking at least $1.3 billion in damages in both cases.

"Mike Lindell is begging to be sued, and at some point we may well oblige him," Michael Steel, a spokesman for Dominion, told CNN on February 7.