That autobiography by MyPillow.com CEO Mike Lindell needs a new ending, now that he's filed for divorce from his June bride.
"It seems like you are so distant and distraught," Lindell told me he said to Dallas Yocum, in one of their last conversations in early July. "She said Just leave me alone or you're going to hear something you don't want to hear," Lindell told me "And of course, I said 'What do you mean?' and she looked at me while I was driving and said I don't love you. I never loved you. You're boring. We don't have anything in common and you've ruined the last two years of my life."
She also reportedly complained to Lindell that being in Minnesota with him meant she couldn't see her family. "A lot of her family relocated here," said Lindell. "I have four of her relatives; two of [Yocum's] kids, one stepson and one niece working for MyPillow," now that Yocum and her brother have left the state.
"I filed for divorce in mid-July," said Lindell. "She responded [as required by law]. On Wednesday we are going to file [more court documents]; I want to find out what money she had here. Now I can think back and I look at pictures and she doesn't have the same look I have, that's for sure." He laughed hard.
Hmmm, something was up
I knew something was up June 26 when I got an e-mail reading "Do you have an update on Mike Lindell?"
AN UPDATE? What in the world could need to be updated about Lindell? June 28 I got another e-mail asking: "Mike and Dallas Lindell still together?" Lindell and I began playing phone tag and in the meantime, somebody mailed me a detailed letter.
Monday, after a long interview with Lindell, I left a message with Yocum's mother in Arizona in an attempt to get a comment from Dallas.
"I get stronger every day," Lindell said. "I have not [gotten] angry. There was a sadness of how somebody could do something like that. God got me through it. A lot of prayer. You wake up one day and go 'What?'… I've never been this blindsided. After days of her not responding to texts or calls I got on a plane in the middle of the night July 13 and flew out to Nevada" from where he drove to Arizona. "Then people started telling me stuff out of the woodwork. People told me at the wedding she told people I'm not going to be married very long. This is very short-lived."
"What was your take?" Lindell asked me.
I found Yocum very detached the day I spent with the couple in January. We were having lunch at Eden Prairie's Lions Tap. Lindell was gushing about how the romance had blossomed. He sounded very much in love. Yocum had very little to say, so I assumed she was reserved or guarded because I was media. As he prattled on with endless details, about the romance and plans for the marriage, which was held at Chaska's Oak Ridge Hotel and Conference Center, Yocum added almost nothing.
"Right," he said Monday. "Now that I think about that, you're right. I can look back now and see that. Everybody's got the same story you do. Everybody's got a story about how something wasn't quite right. She didn't have that gleam in her eye, she didn't have any stories to tell."
At the marriage ceremony — his second, he believes it was Yocum's fourth; of course there's video at startribune.com/video — where I was among the 300 invited guests, I kept teasing Lindell about a pre-nup. I couldn't tell whether he didn't hear me or was ignoring me, because I never got an answer.
"Yeah, there was a prenup," he said Monday. "When I thought of a prenup I thought years down the road. This was like crazy when the second day [after they married] she leaves and then she comes back and leaves again a couple weeks later. I was traveling with QVC [selling MyPillow] and stuff so I was gone half of June."
What about the ring? "She took the ring with her. The ring was worth a lot, so was the jewelry," he said.
Lindell made Yocum director of MyPillow's customer service center, and she was in line to become VP of compliance, except for the fact that she had avoided coming to work for months, he said.
"She was getting paid. I kept justifying it with the work she was going to do down the road," said Lindell. "We kept telling the board she was going to finish my book in July."
Ah, the book.
That's the autobiography, "Against the Wind," which Lindell is cowriting with Michael Levine. The book was supposed to end on the marriage day, June 8. "Now that book is going to end with her telling me I'm boring and then there's book two, which I'm living now. We don't know how that's going to turn out," said Lindell.
C.J. can be reached at cj@startribune.com and seen on FOX 9's "Buzz." E-mailers, please state a subject; "Hello" does not count. Attachments are not opened.
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