Fox News stops running MyPillow commercials in a payment dispute with election denier Mike Lindell
MINNEAPOLIS– MyPillow CEO and prominent election denier Mike Lindell said Friday that Fox News has stopped running his company’s commercials, disputing the network’s claim that this is simply because he hasn’t paid his bills.
Lindell went public by tweeting that Fox, one of MyPillow’s biggest advertising channels, had canceled him. He said in his tweet that he didn’t know why, but that he suspected the network was trying to silence him. Vos denied that.
Fox’s loss was just the latest in a series of financial and legal setbacks for Minnesota-based MyPillow and Lindell, which continues to promote former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him, in part by rigged voting machine systems. Several major retailers, including Walmart, have discontinued his products, and lawyers defending him against defamation lawsuits from voting machine companies dropped out.
“Once their bill is paid, we will be happy to accept their ads,” Fox spokeswoman Irena Briganti said.
“They are 100% lying,” Lindell said in an interview with The Associated Press. But he acknowledged that MyPillow owes money to Fox. He estimated the amount at $7.8 million, but he emphasized that the amount is within his credit limit with the network. He said MyPillow has long spent an average of $1 million a week to run its ads on Fox. And he said the network had long given him 12 weeks of credit, until recently cutting that to eight weeks.
“This has nothing to do with money. That is a fact,” Lindell said.
Lindell said he believes Fox wants to silence him “because I want to secure our election platforms.” And he said he suspects the network is bad because his online channel Lindell TV/FrankSpeech recently hired former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, whose debut Monday night show featured an interview with Trump, who made further false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
Fox agreed last April to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to avoid a lawsuit in the voting machine company’s lawsuit, which allegedly exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 election on shows hosted by Dobbs and other presenters. Fox canceled Dobbs’ show three years ago.
Lindell acknowledged in an October interview that he owed two law firms that defended him against lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic millions of dollars that he couldn’t pay, so they quit. He said MyPillow had been “decimated.”
But Lindell emphasized Friday that MyPillow is “doing great.” He said it continues to run ads on another conservative network, Newsmax, and on its own platforms. But he admitted that losing Fox would hurt the company and said he would put his ads there again if Fox took them on.
“Obviously it would be great if Fox said, ‘Hey, come back,’” Lindell said.