MyPillow CEO and staunch Trump ally Mike Lindell has retained celebrity attorney Charles Harder to go after the Daily Mail over a story claiming he had a secret affair with 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star actress Jane Krakowski, The Daily Beast has learned.
“Charles Harder is the attorney,” Lindell confirmed in a brief interview on Friday evening. “I never met this lady in my life and have never been to West Village and the Hamptons, where they said I was in the hit piece.”
Lindell added: “They’ve done so much damage to my reputation… I’m not just going for a demand letter or a retraction, I want to go after them with a lawsuit because they have damaged my integrity as a Christian and my network to help addicts everywhere.” He said that he has already discussed this with Harder, who he’s just retained, and said that the lawyer was working on the legal paperwork.
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“Mike Lindell has never met Jane Krakowski. The Daily Mail asked him to comment on a possible story that the two had secretly dated. He immediately told them he had never heard of her, and it was a ‘fake news story.’ The Daily Mail then recklessly published its false story, and defamed him in the process—falsely saying he gave her champagne and liquor. He is a recovering addict, and runs Lindell Recovery Network. Mr. Lindell plans to sue the Daily Mail,” Harder told The Daily Beast.
Lindell said he believed the Mail story to be another “hit job” that was written because he “won’t let up on the...machine election fraud,” regarding the Trump-Biden presidential election.
A rep for the Daily Mail did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday night.
The Gawker-killing attorney, who has represented everyone from now-former President Donald Trump to professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, has established himself as a go-to attorney for aggrieved celebrities looking to take on news outlets. In 2017, Harder helped wrestle a settlement and payment for Melania Trump from the Daily Mail, which was forced to retract and apologize for an article claiming she had once been an escort.
In what seemed to many like a scrapped plot line from 30 Rock, the Mail reported Thursday afternoon that Lindell—famous for his unwavering support of Trump and seemingly ceaseless pillow ads broadcast on Fox News—had carried on a secret romance with the TV sitcom and Broadway star.
According to the tabloid, Krakowski’s friends were puzzled by the alleged relationship and described it as tumultuous, but, per the Mail, Lindell won her over with champagne, liquor and flowers, and carried on a “passionate” affair that one source described as an “open secret” in Manhattan’s West Village. (Lindell, however, has publicly stated for years that he is now sober, having overcome his previous struggles with substance abuse, including crack cocaine.) Unfortunately, according to the tabloid, Krakowski would often throw away his gifts, and the duo reportedly split after a recent weekend together at a rented beach house.
One thing both parties seem to vocally agree on, however, is that the relationship described by the Mail never happened.
“Jane has never met Mr. Lindell,” the actress’ publicist said in a statement. “She is not and has never been in any relationship with him, romantic or otherwise.” Lindell told The Daily Beast on Thursday: “I have never met that person and I told the Daily Mail that. My lawyers are going after them.”
Since the 2020 election, Lindell had taken on a prominent role in conservative media and in the now-former, twice-impeached Republican president’s orbit of assailing the results of the 2020 election, in which Democratic nominee and now-President Joe Biden had decisively beaten Trump in the popular and Electoral College votes. Lindell was a major financial backer of certain pro-Trump legal efforts and rallies that sought to nullify Biden’s victory, and remained in close contact to such Trumpworld luminaries as Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn.
On one of the very last days of the Trump presidency, the MyPillow inventor and cable-TV spokesman was at the White House, briefing the then-president in the Oval Office on documents that focused on a conspiracy theory that China and other foreign countries had hacked the 2020 presidential election to tip it to Biden.
That meeting lasted five to ten minutes, by Lindell’s estimation, and he was escorted out and later shrugged off in an argument with other White House officials. Asked about that Oval meeting, the MyPillow creator said last week: “[Trump] was upset to hear that this was happening to all the people who backed him for all these four years. He said, ‘Can you believe how they’re treating us out there?’”
And while Harder has had several high-profile successes taking on media outlets, including Gawker and the Daily Mail, he’s also suffered some high profile setbacks in court. As The Daily Beast reported last year, Harder, working on behalf of Donald Trump’s brother Robert Trump, failed to block the then-president’s niece Mary Trump from publishing an explosive tell-all memoir about the family.
