On August 2, 2026, Ohio Congressman Max Miller was under heavy pressure to drop out of his re-election race. His answer was to prove he had nothing to hide. He posted a Dropbox folder to his X account containing the records from his divorce and custody case, and said he was staying on the ballot.

Eleven days later, his ex-wife sued him in federal court over what was in that folder.

Emily Moreno filed the lawsuit on August 13 in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, on behalf of the couple's 2-year-old daughter. It names both Miller and his attorney, Aaron Minc, and it says the folder Miller posted publicly contained a nude photograph of the child.

According to the suit, the image was available for download for 23 hours.

What the lawsuit says

Moreno's attorney, Subodh Chandra, said Miller and Minc "engaged in incomprehensible recklessness."

"This child is an entirely innocent victim who has become collateral damage to her father's political ambition."

The complaint puts it more bluntly still. Any parent, it argues, knows better — in a world "filled with pedophiles, creeps, and AI-generated image alteration and video generation" — than to put a nude picture of a child on the public internet.

The suit accuses Miller and Minc of negligence, civil conspiracy, and civil liability for criminal acts, citing one of Ohio's child pornography statutes. It seeks $150,000 for each disclosure and transfer of the photo.

It also asks a judge to order that the download records be preserved, because — the filing says — Minc has still not said how many people downloaded the image.

The lawyer says he built the folder

Minc has not denied assembling the file. He told Politico he was the one who collected the documents and built the Dropbox folder so Miller could post it, that he alone was responsible for its contents, and that releasing the photo was completely unintentional and a mistake.

He also said there were no photos showing the girl's genitals — only one of her without a shirt on.

The lawsuit disputes that directly. Chandra wrote that a different photo than the one Minc described was in the released cache, and that a veteran pediatrician who reviewed it says it shows the child's genitalia. The photo also showed a large yellow bruise on the girl's shoulder.

Chandra says he emailed Minc the day after the release demanding answers.

He may have broken his own custody agreement to do it

There is a second problem with posting your child's photograph to win a news cycle: Miller had already agreed in writing not to.

Days after the documents went up, Moreno's attorneys in the custody case asked Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Judge Debra Boros to hold Miller in contempt. Their shared-parenting agreement says neither parent may use their daughter's image for any political campaign without the other parent's consent.

Judge Boros has not ruled.

The pressure he was trying to escape

The document dump did not happen in a vacuum. It was the move Miller made when the exits were closing.

By early August, two Republican senators had publicly told him to quit, a conservative group had called him unfit for office, and a poll had him down 14 points. Miller's response was to loan his own campaign $1 million and stay in the race. His former father-in-law — Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, the plaintiff's father — had already said publicly that Miller is a danger and should not serve in Congress.

Ohio Republicans were prepared to move him off the ballot. Trump's political team asked them to back off, and the meeting that could have replaced him never happened.

On August 4, the House Ethics Committee announced it was investigating whether Miller "may have engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use." Miller says he requested that investigation himself, to "clear my name from these horrific attacks on myself and family."

That is the context for the Dropbox link. Releasing everything was supposed to be the proof of innocence. Instead it produced a federal lawsuit alleging he published a nude image of his own toddler.

What is and isn't established

Miller has repeatedly denied abusing his ex-wife or their child, and he has not been criminally charged. A Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services investigation opened after the girl was diagnosed with a broken collarbone found neither parent responsible for that injury. We reported on the 2,000 pages of records behind those allegations when Mother Jones obtained them in July.

The lawsuit filed this week is a civil complaint. Its allegations have not been tested in court, and Minc's account — that it was his error, not Miller's — may hold up.

But two things are already on the record and not in dispute. Miller chose to post his family's private legal file on a social media account with hundreds of thousands of followers. And he did it because he was trying to hold onto a seat in Congress.

The seat he's holding onto

Miller is seeking a third term in Ohio's 7th District, which covers western Cuyahoga County, northern Wayne County, and Medina and Ashland counties. Both of Ohio's U.S. senators have asked him to get out. He has declined.

His constituents are entitled to ask what they are getting for that stubbornness. Not one of the last six weeks of headlines out of this office has been about Medicaid, or grocery prices, or the hospitals in Wayne County. Every one of them has been about Max Miller's ability to stay on a ballot.

That is what a safe seat buys a member of Congress: the freedom to spend a full campaign season on his own problems.

Source

Lawsuit accuses U.S. Rep. Max Miller, attorney of releasing nude photo of 2-year-old daughter — Adam Ferrise and Sabrina Eaton, cleveland.com, August 13, 2026. Additional reporting from Forbes and The Guardian. Photo: The Guardian.