For months, the loudest thing about the abuse allegations against Ohio Congressman Max Miller was Republican silence. Nobody in his party would say much of anything. The one Republican with the most obvious reason to speak — U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, the father of Miller's ex-wife and the grandfather of their 2-year-old daughter — said only that he doesn't "litigate these matters in the media."

That ended on Sunday, August 2.

Miller went live on X for more than 15 minutes to deny everything, blame the press, and put his ex-wife's mental health on public display. Hours later, Sen. Moreno posted a statement that a sitting senator does not write lightly about a colleague in his own party:

"If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives. I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake. I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does."

Moreno also wrote that Miller "is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter."

Miller's response was to accuse the senator of doing it for show: "You know this isn't true and the only reason you are speaking out now is to hide from your own media circus."

A necessary note up front: none of the allegations against Miller has been proven in court. He has never been criminally charged over any of them, and a Cuyahoga County child abuse investigation closed as unsubstantiated. Everything below is what people said, what they filed, and what Miller himself has said — on the record.

The timing is the whole point

This did not happen in a vacuum. Wednesday, August 5, is Ohio's deadline for Republicans to put a different name on the ballot in the 7th District. Moreno spoke two days before that door closes.

A person close to the family told Politico that Bernie Moreno had wanted to speak out earlier, but Emily Moreno didn't want their daughter reading someday about her grandfather attacking her father. Sunday's livestream changed her mind.

Miller's answer to the deadline was unambiguous:

"I'm not getting out of this race, and I'm winning in November."

What he actually said on the livestream

Miller's defense rests on one true fact repeated many times: no court or agency has substantiated a claim of abuse against him, and no criminal charge has ever been filed. That is accurate. He then built a much bigger argument on top of it.

He said the accusations came from a woman with "medically diagnosed" mental health challenges — while insisting he wasn't "raising that to embarrass her, to attack her." He said the media had already "chopped it up into reality." He said the coverage had produced death threats aimed at his own staff. And in a move almost no sitting member of Congress makes, he said he'd dump documents from his divorce and custody case into a public Dropbox folder so anyone could read them.

His central claim was this:

"These are incredibly serious criminal accusations, and if these accusations were true, I would be in jail."

That is not how domestic violence cases work, and the record in this one shows why. Emily Moreno never filed a police report about what she says Miller did to her. She told a detective investigating her daughter's fracture that she feared no one would believe her.

Emily Moreno's spokesperson, Stefan Mychajliw, called the livestream "shameful," and said Miller "can lie and spin on X, but he cannot do so under oath in a court of law."

The hot water story changed

Here is the part worth slowing down on.

Emily Moreno's May court filing says Miller threw hot water on her from a skillet he was using to cook eggs. On the livestream, Miller offered a new explanation: it was "horseplay in our kitchen," and the water came from the sprayer attached to the sink.

But Miller has already been recorded discussing that incident with his ex-wife — a recording he gave to the New York Post, hoping it would clear him. On it, Moreno says he poured steaming hot water on her. Miller doesn't say it never happened. He says this:

"The water incident…I never thought that that hurt you. It was never done to hurt you with intent. It never was done to hurt you, and you know that."

Those two accounts cannot both be the full story. "I never thought that that hurt you" is not something you say about a playful spritz from a sink sprayer. Moreno's lawyer has made exactly that argument in court: "It is true or substantially true that Congressman Miller soaked her with hot water. Miller admits it in his own audio recording."

We walked through that recording, and the 2,000 pages of court filings and police reports Mother Jones obtained, in our earlier piece on the two lawsuits.

What's happened in court while he's been campaigning

The livestream was the public version. The court docket is the other one, and it has been busy.

• Miller sued his ex-wife for defamation. She has asked a Cuyahoga County judge to throw the suit out under Ohio's anti-SLAPP law, which exists to stop lawsuits designed to punish people for speaking about matters of public concern.
• Last week, Emily Moreno asked a judge to order Miller to stay away from her attorney, Andrew Zashin, after she said Miller made physical contact with him following a July 28 hearing. In a sworn affidavit, she says Miller's own attorney told the judge that Miller "just can't control himself." The filing also describes a May 7 courthouse hallway encounter in which she says Miller made disparaging remarks about Zashin's fiancée.
• Judge Debra Boros has scheduled the child custody trial to begin November 5 — two days after voters decide whether to send Miller back to Congress.

His office's position on a House Ethics investigation has not moved. Spokeswoman Abigail Angelos has rejected the calls for a probe, pointing out that a court still permits Miller joint custody of his daughter.

The rest of his party is still mostly quiet

Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, said the claims "must be investigated, and if true, he should resign immediately." That's about it from the GOP side, aside from Bernie Moreno.

Ohio's own Jim Jordan, asked directly on CNN whether Miller should step aside, called it a family matter and said he hopes Miller wins — a standard he did not extend to a Democrat facing similar accusations weeks earlier.

Republicans have otherwise kept their heads down. It took the accuser's father, a sitting United States senator, to say the obvious thing out loud.

Why Ohio's 7th District should care

Ohio's 7th covers southern and western Cuyahoga County, northern Wayne County, and all of Medina and Ashland counties. The people who live there are entitled to a representative who is not spending his re-election campaign litigating his own custody case in public.

Miller's report card already documents a record that works against the people he represents — on health care, on cost of living, on the votes that took money out of this district and moved it up the ladder. This story adds something different: a question of basic fitness, raised not by Democrats but by a Republican senator from his own state.

The race has tightened. Sabato's Crystal Ball moved it from "Likely Republican" to "Leans Republican" on July 30, citing the allegations and a New York Times report that Republicans close to Donald Trump had seen polling they considered "alarming" for Miller. He still has the money — $1.38 million in the bank at the end of June against Democrat Brian Poindexter's $312,290 — though $970,000 of Miller's campaign debt is a loan he made to himself.

Poindexter, a Brook Park council member and union ironworker, put it plainly after the livestream: nobody facing the allegations Miller faces "belongs in the halls of power."

Miller says he's staying. Voters get the last word on November 3 — two days before the custody trial starts. We deserve better.

Every allegation described here comes from court filings, police reports, or public statements by named individuals. Max Miller denies all wrongdoing and has not been criminally charged. The Cuyahoga County child abuse investigation was closed as unsubstantiated, meaning investigators did not find sufficient evidence of abuse or neglect.

Sources

Reporting by Sabrina Eaton for cleveland.com and Mia McCarthy for Politico, both August 2, 2026, with the underlying court records from Abby Vesoulis' investigation for Mother Jones. Photo: Sabrina Eaton / cleveland.com.