If you are following the battle for control of the House in the midterms, you know the name of Representative Max Miller. He is a Republican from Ohio's 7th District, a Cleveland-area seat. According to his official website, he is 37, served in the Marine Corps Reserve, worked on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and then in the White House from 2017 to 2021, and was elected to Congress for the first time in 2022. His opponent in his current re-election bid is Brian Poindexter, a Democrat and Cleveland ironworker with union backing.
Mr. Miller is at the red-hot epicenter of an ugly drama with pivotal political implications. Two women have accused him of domestic violence. The first is his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, a conservative policy adviser; the second is his ex-girlfriend Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary. The Congressional Ethics Committee is investigating, and pressure is mounting. The New York Times reports that President Trump's inner circle fears the seat may flip Democratic.
Mr. Miller has remained angrily defiant. "Texas is turning blue like I'm losing my seat," he texted to a reporter from The Times. "Take a hike." Taking a Trumpian tone, he wrote, "You're disgusting," and added that any suggestion he would harm his child was "trash."
In court testimony, Mr. Miller's ex-wife has accused him of throwing scalding water on her, holding a gun to her head, and breaking their toddler daughter's collarbone. In response, he has attacked his ex-wife in public statements and on social media. According to The Times, he has said she "sadly isn't all there," suggested she has bipolar disorder, that she was "vindictive and unpredictable," a dangerous driver, and a stalker.
Then, in a livestream on X on Aug. 2, Mr. Miller said, "Ask yourself: If I had assaulted her, would she have offered to cook me dinner six days later?" He also offered the fact that he hadn't been jailed as proof that he must not have done these things.
On Tuesday, the Retreat, East Hampton's shelter for victims of domestic violence, issued a strong statement in response: "[T]hose two arguments ask the public to believe: that survivors behave in predictable ways after abuse, and that the criminal justice system reliably converts abuse into arrest and incarceration. Neither premise holds."
The Retreat statement continues: "A survivor may cook dinner after an assault. He or she may send a warm text, return home, apologize, forgive, or try to restore the relationship. Continued contact . . . can reflect fear, shared children, financial dependence, housing, love, isolation, or an imbalance of power that does not disappear because violence occurred."
We do not know what happened behind closed doors. But the way Mr. Miller has conducted himself through this scandal has revealed him to be a man lacking self-control and unable to argue a point logically — not someone with the character to be a congressman. It may not be politically correct in Washington these days to say so, but we still believe that, when it comes to domestic abuse, we start by believing the woman.