Max Miller

CLEVELAND - U.S. Rep. Max Miller on Wednesday filed a defamation lawsuit against his former wife, Emily Moreno, and her attorney, Andrew Zashin, and his law firm, alleging they falsely portrayed him as a domestic abuser to multiple media outlets.

The lawsuit assigned to Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Joy Kennedy seeks compensatory damages in excess of $25,000, punitive damages “in an amount sufficient to punish Defendants and deter future similar conduct,” and attorneys fees.

Miller, a Bay Village Republican, claims the defendants engaged in a coordinated defamation campaign against him, providing false statements published by national media outlets including the New York Post, TMZ, the Daily Mail and The Daily Beast, that falsely depict him as violent and abusive towards Moreno and the couple’s two-year-old daughter.

Moreno and Miller, who divorced last year, are engaged in a bitter custody battle over their daughter.

The lawsuit notes that “no judicial finding has ever been made that Plaintiff committed any act of domestic violence, assault, or battery against Moreno,” and that Miller has not faced any criminal charges over the abuse claims that Moreno and Zashin disseminated. Moreno is the daughter of U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Westlake Republican.

Zashin declined comment on the case Thursday morning, as he had not seen the legal filings.

A statement issued on Moreno’s behalf through a spokesman said Miller is upset because she won’t let him silence her.

The statement from Moreno spokesman Stefan Mychajliw noted that in 2021, Miller sued his ex-girlfriend, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, for defamation over accusations that Miller physically abused her while the two dated as White House staffers during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Miller voluntarily dismissed that lawsuit in 2023.

“Now, he’s running the same playbook against a woman with photographs of her bruises and burns,” as well as ”a letter in his own handwriting calling himself ‘worthless’ with guilt ‘eating me alive,’” said the statement from Mychajliw.

Miller’s lawsuit denies that letter exists and says the attack that Moreno claims preceded the letter didn’t happen either. Miller’s lawsuit says a civil protection order was issued in his favor against Moreno, and that a forensic psychologist warned the defendants the day before Moreno’s statements were published that media attacks were harming the child.

The lawsuit also notes that the Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services investigated claims from 2025 and 2026 that Miller abused their daughter. It closed the cases after the allegations were found to be unsubstantiated and provided written dismissal notices to Miller.

The lawsuit says that Moreno’s “false and defamatory statements are entirely extrajudicial, designed to deliberately destroy Plaintiff’s reputation, and were completely unnecessary to any claim or defense that she had raised or intended to raise in the custody litigation.”

Miller’s legal complaint says statements that Moreno and Zashin made to “national press outlets with circulation measured in the tens of millions of print and online readership” have been “read, viewed, and discussed by Plaintiff’s constituents, his colleagues in Congress, his political supporters and donors, the media, and the general public.”

“As a direct and proximate result of the publication and republication of the Zashin Statements and the Moreno statements, Plaintiff has suffered, and continues to suffer, substantial injury to his personal and professional reputation, ... public hatred, contempt, and ridicule, the impairment of his standing in his community and in Congress, mental anguish, humiliation, and emotional distress, and pecuniary losses including but not limited to harm to his career and to his ability to raise campaign funds,” it claims.

Earlier this year, Miller himself was sued for defamation by a Westlake doctor who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges in a road rage incident. The doctor, Feras Hamdan, claims he never threatened the politician.