Patrick Byrne faces $5 million penalty for ignoring Hunter Biden defamation case

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Former Overstock.com CEO and adamant 2020 election denier Patrick Byrne is looking at possibly $5 million in punitive damages for failing to defend himself in a defamation lawsuit brought by Hunter Biden over false claims that former President Joe Biden’s son sought an $800 million bribe from Iran.

At a hearing Monday in Los Angeles federal court, U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson said he will need to finalize his thinking about the amount of punitive damages the Florida millionaire will have to pay Biden but added that it would be somewhere around $5 million.

“The question is what amount punitive damages would be appropriate — not to compensate Hunter Biden but to punish the wrongdoer,” Wilson said at the brief hearing.

The judge, a Ronald Reagan appointee, found Byrne in default last October — a week before the case had been scheduled a second time to go to trial — because he continued the ignore the court’s orders and failed to have lawyers represent him at hearings.

On Monday, a new lawyer for Byrne showed up in the courtroom, but Wilson denied his request to appear in the case, calling it another “ploy” in Byrne’s ongoing efforts to avoid a trial on Biden’s claims.

Byrne, 63, resigned as Overstock.com’s CEO in 2019 after a reported relationship with convicted Russian spy Maria Butina. He later became involved in efforts to challenge the legitimacy of President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

Byrne, who is no stranger to conspiracy theories, has repeatedly claimed that the younger Biden tried to get an $800 million bribe from Iran in exchange for his father’s administration releasing $8 billion in Iranian funds that are frozen in South Korea and for the U.S. to “go easy” in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

“These defamatory statements by Byrne are not merely false and not merely malicious — they are completely outrageous,” Biden said in his complaint. “Byrne knows his statements are baseless and yet published and republished them anyway, and he continues to propagate his lies to anyone who will listen, including his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.”

Last July, when the jury trial was about to start, Byrne dodged default over his failure to appear in person at court in downtown LA. Instead, Byrne fired his lawyers and had a new defense team show up for the first time.

Wilson refused to allow Byrne’s new set of lawyers to join the case, noting that the lead attorney, Michigan-based Stephanie Lambert, had been disqualified last year for violating federal court orders in a Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against Byrne.

The judge, while calling Byrne’s tactics a “three-ring circus,” declined to order him in default at the time and rescheduled trial for October 2025. He also gave Biden’s team another chance to subpoena Byrne about his finances, which they had intended to do at trial in reliance on assurances by Byrne’s former lawyers that he would testify in person.

Because public policy requires that trials should be decided on the merits, a sanction of default would be too severe for improper conduct alone, Wilson said last summer.

However, at a hearing last October on Biden’s request for financial sanctions against Byrne over his no-show, once again no attorney appeared for Byrne.

At that point, Wilson told Biden’s attorneys that he would grant their request for sanctions and order Byrne in default for his continuing refusal to obey the court’s orders.

Biden was seeking $1 in nominal damages for his “defamation per se” claim, which doesn’t require proof of emotional or reputational harm from Byrne’s accusations. However, he also sought punitive damages, citing what he says is Byrne’s malice in spreading a false bribery story.

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