By John McCormack
Friday, August 07, 2026
It’s not quite clear what possessed Ohio GOP Rep. Max
Miller to sit down for a 20-minute
direct-to-camera livestream on Sunday, August 2, to deny allegations that
he had abused his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, the daughter of Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie
Moreno. A couple of news stories—including a detailed Mother Jones report on July 18 and coverage in the New York Times on July 28
documenting Moreno’s claims that he had sprayed hot water on her, held a gun to
her head, and shoved her up against a wall—may have provided the motivation to
try to refute the allegations on camera.
What is clear is that Miller’s media tour has backfired
in the court of public opinion, and an increasing number of Republicans are
calling on Miller to resign from Congress.
“The whole thing is repulsive. Max Miller needs to drop
out and get help,” Aaron Baer, president of the Ohio-based Center for Christian
Virtue, told The Dispatch. “Even if you set aside the ‘he said, she
said,’ the bottom line is being a good father starts by taking care of your
child’s mom. Coming out the way Max did … publicly attacking the mother of his
child is all the evidence you need that this guy should not be in office right
now.”
“It’s sad to see that the only person this affects is our
daughter,” Miller told Newsmax this week, “and it’s something that I
don’t think [her mother Emily] cares about very much.”
In the X livestream
and follow-up TV interviews, Miller has displayed the demeanor of a movie
villain—the dimwitted high-school bully who exudes undeserved confidence
because his family’s money has protected him from ever facing any real-world
consequences.
In his livestream, Miller struggled to pronounce the word
“psychologist” while reading from a script and incredulously asked the “ladies
and gentlemen” viewing the video if his ex-wife really would have offered to
make him empanadas and go to a park with their daughter after he had
allegedly abused her. Why, yes, answered the “ladies and gentlemen” in a
resounding online chorus—there would be nothing unusual about a woman trying to
keep the peace with an abusive ex-husband who shares joint custody with their
toddler.
In a follow-up interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Miller didn’t even seem
to realize he was making arguments that were in direct contradiction to one
another. In one breath, Miller complained that CNN would not air “three
separate audio videos of my daughter saying, ‘I do not want to go to mommy’s. I
do not want mommy’s, and I do not feel safe.’” Moments later, Tapper asked
Miller about Moreno’s claim that she had heard their daughter say “Daddy kill
you” in the days leading up to the discovery of a bruise and clavicle fracture
(and that Moreno had also heard their daughter say “Daddy angry” and that
“Daddy’s house is scary”).
“Jake, I wish you could talk to my beautiful baby girl.
She can’t string together sentences like that,” Miller replied. “She’s 2 and a
half years old. She doesn’t have the ability to articulate any of what you just
said. That is an entire fabrication of the truth.”
When Tapper pressed Miller about his obviously
contradictory claims about his daughter’s verbal ability, Miller didn’t address
the contradiction and said: “This is incredibly disturbing. I am not going to
my child to say ‘Daddy kill you.’”
In an attempt to exonerate himself before the public,
Miller released a trove
of documents, including court filings and private messages with Moreno,
which show Moreno and Miller discussing the “Daddy kill you” remark.
On February 16, Moreno wrote to Miller: “She said the
same comment again that she said in front of us yesterday, so I feel obligated
to ask. ‘Daddy kill you’. Any idea where she picked that up or overheard it.”
Miller replied to Moreno: “There’s no way she is saying that, the only time I
heard that was with you the other day.”
Was that reply from Miller an admission that he had in
fact heard their daughter say “Daddy kill you” one time but only when he and
Moreno were together with their daughter? The Dispatch posed this
question by email on Wednesday and again on Thursday to Miller’s
representatives, Chris Vlasto of Haven Strategies and Abigail Angelos of his
official congressional office, but neither representative for Miller replied. A
cover letter in the Dropbox files released by Miller informed reporters that “written questions will receive
written answers.”
***
Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno explained to reporters this
week that he believes Miller is unfit for office but had avoided public comment
until his former son-in-law’s public livestream. “My daughter specifically did
not want this to be out in the public,” the senator told reporters. “When you
have a child, you have to co-parent with that individual for the rest of your
life. That means scheduling pickups, scheduling drop-offs.”
“This is truly the seventh level of hell,” the senator
added. “My daughter lives in constant fear of this man, not like something
that’s existential, but deeply in her heart, she fears what this guy is capable
of.” A handful of fellow GOP senators, including Roger Marshall of Kansas, Katie
Britt of Alabama, Tim
Sheehy of Montana, and Rick Scott
of Florida, have called on Miller to drop out. But they’ve gotten little
help from the GOP leadership that matters most.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said he wouldn’t call for
Miller to step aside while a House Ethics Committee investigation was pending
(Miller himself triggered the investigation because he said it would clear his
name). According to Miller, President Donald Trump told him in a private call
that it would be difficult to win reelection but did not call on him to resign.
Miller said he reminded Trump that he had prevailed after multiple allegations
of abuse in the 2016 presidential campaign. When a reporter asked Trump earlier
this week if Miller should resign, he said:
“Well it’s a very sad thing. I know Max, he’s a good person, I mean I always
thought he was a very good person. And I’m going to let the families figure
that out.”
The Max Miller scandal now threatens to cost Republicans
not only what ought to be a safe House seat in Ohio—the deadline
to certify a replacement candidate is Monday, August 10—it could damage the
party more broadly. Ohio GOP Sen. Jon Husted, locked in a tight race with
former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, initially took a deer-in-the-headlights
approach to the matter. “Let’s focus on letting them sort through this at a
family level,” Husted told Newsmax earlier this week. On Thursday
afternoon, Husted wrote on social media that Miller should step aside because that’s
in the best interest of his daughter.
***
The predicament Republicans now find themselves in is a
direct consequence of Trump’s actions leading up to January 6, 2021, and its
aftermath. Barely a month after the House had voted to impeach Trump over his
role inciting the Capitol riot, Trump offered his “complete and total” endorsement to Miller in a primary campaign against Ohio
GOP Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, a former Ohio State football and NFL player who was
one of 10 House Republicans to vote in favor of impeachment.
By February 2021, Miller had done little to distinguish
himself other than sucking up to Trump. Through family connections, he had
gotten a job working on the “advance” team for the Trump campaign and worked a
similar job in the Trump White House, where he also did a stint in the office
vetting administration appointees. Trump had taken a shine to Miller, known as
“The Music Man” for his role in queuing up playlists for Trump rallies.
In June 2021, Trump traveled to Wellington, Ohio, to
boost Miller at a rally, his first since leaving office. “Max Miller. You know Max?
Great guy,” Trump said. “He loves our country. He loves the people of Ohio.”
During that rally, Trump did one of his favorite anti-illegal
immigration routines, reciting a poem about a snake taken in by a kindhearted
woman, who can’t understand why the deadly snake bites her. The concluding
lines: “‘Shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin, ‘You knew damn
well I was a snake before you took me in.”
Before Trump had ever stepped on that stage—before he had
endorsed Miller in February—he ought to have known that Miller was a snake.
Stephanie Grisham, who had worked as press secretary and communications
director at different times for first lady Melania Trump and President Trump,
claimed that she had told both the president and first lady in 2020 that her
ex-boyfriend had become abusive, but neither Donald nor Melania seemed to care,
she wrote in her October 2021 book.
The ex? Max Miller. The allegation became public a month
after the Trump-Miller rally in Ohio, which should have given other Republican
leaders and voters all the information they needed to oppose Miller. In an exhaustive profile for Politico, journalist Michael
Kruse reported in July 2021 on Miller’s troubled life, including the allegation
that Miller had gotten violent with Grisham, whom he’d dated for 18 months.
Kruse reported that “according to three people familiar with the incident, Miller
… pushed her against a wall and slapped her in the face in his Washington
apartment after she accused him of cheating on her.” Miller categorically
denied the allegation at the time through his lawyer.
Kruse reported in that same story, replete with firsthand
accounts of Miller’s lifelong anger management problems, that in high school
“Miller pushed a girl out the door of his room and she fell down some stairs
after he became enraged when she resisted his attempts to touch her, according
to three people who were there and many more who heard about the incident in
the aftermath.”
“He flipped a switch,” one witness told Kruse. “I know
what I saw,” another witness said. Miller again categorically denied the
allegation through his lawyer.
But there was more evidence of a lifelong problem with
violence. Shortly before graduating from high school in 2007, Miller was
charged with “resisting arrest after punching a male in the back of the head
and running from police,” Kruse reported, adding that the case was “dismissed
in part because he was a first-time offender. The file in Shaker Heights is now
sealed.” A few years later, Miller needed surgery after punching his hand
through a glass door following an argument at a hookah bar. “Miller said rather
than striking a person,” an officer wrote in a police report, “he hit the door and his hand went through
the glass.”
But the July 2021 report didn’t sink Miller. Gonzalez,
the pro-impeachment Republican congressman, dropped his bid for a third term
that September amid concerns for his family’s safety and an uphill campaign—and
Trump stood behind Miller. “Max is a tremendous person who will represent Ohio
well,” Trump wrote in September 2021.
In October 2021, after Grisham published her book and Washington Post excerpt, Miller sued Grisham for
defamation. The suit was withdrawn before a 2023 settlement between Miller and
Grisham, which included a non-disparagement agreement. Grisham recently filed a
restraining order against Miller related to his recent comments about her.
Miller also filed a defamation lawsuit against his
ex-wife in May after a Daily Mail story reported Moreno’s abuse
allegations that she had shared with police. How does a congressman—whose
résumé before the White House included a stint as a Lululemon retail employee
and a Marine Corps reservist (who never deployed)—afford these pricey lawyers?
The same way he could afford to drive a Porsche to the White House: His family is very
rich. In 2018, the family’s real estate company sold for nearly $7 billion.
Moreno first told police about her allegations of abuse
after she said she discovered a large bruise on her daughter’s shoulder and
neck in February of this year and couldn’t rule out the possibility her husband
had done it—something Miller categorically denies. An investigation by child
protective services found the allegation against Max Miller was
“unsubstantiated”—meaning there wasn’t evidence to prove it—and local
prosecutors declined to charge anyone in the case. Miller himself countered in
a court document that the injury may have been sustained due to a seatbelt and
his ex-wife’s alleged reckless driving (a theory that makes little sense given
that the bruise was on one side of the child’s neck, and car seat harnesses
cover both sides). A child coordinator for Miller and Moreno speculated it
could have happened if the toddler climbed and fell out of her crib. But
investigators simply don’t know what happened.
“The injury itself is common in ambulatory children, but
there is a bruise that accompanies the injury that appears to be in a
handprint,” a child protection specialist reviewing the case told local investigators, “so it appears it was inflicted.”
Should it really have gotten to this point for
Republicans to turn against Max Miller? “If someone wants to say the Stephanie
Grisham accusation was enough to disqualify Max, that’s certainly a valid
opinion,” Aaron Baer of Ohio’s Center for Christian Virtue told The Dispatch.
But, he added, “people can make very serious accusations against people that
turn out not to be true.”
“Now we have multiple accusations, and we have public
behavior and public displays that are shameful,” Baer said, pointing to
Miller’s use of his large platform to attack the mother of his child. “That’s
not how you lead a family. That’s not how a man should act. That’s not how a
father should act.”
On Thursday afternoon, another grassroots Ohio
conservative leader called on Miller to resign. “Too many Republicans are
afraid to call @MaxMillerOH
what he is. Unfit for office,” Donovan O’Neil, the leader of Americans for
Prosperity in Ohio, wrote on social media. “We were willing just four short
weeks ago to call out Graham Platner - and lambast (appropriately so) our
Democrat colleagues who only did so once the blessing was granted by party
bosses. We should be just as willing to call out Max Miller and exorcise our
own demons from the GOP.”
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