CLEVELAND — U.S. Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio, and his personal attorney published a nude photograph of Miller’s 2-year-old daughter to the open internet during the congressman’s Aug. 2 online defense against domestic abuse allegations, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday on the child’s behalf.
Emily Moreno, Miller’s ex-wife and the daughter of U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, brought the suit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio on behalf of the girl, who is identified only by her initials. It names Miller, Cleveland-area attorney Aaron Minc and Minc’s firm, Minc LLC, and asserts claims under a federal law barring the nonconsensual disclosure of intimate images, along with state-law claims for civil liability for criminal acts, invasion of privacy, negligence and civil conspiracy.
Subodh Chandra, lead counsel for the plaintiff, issued the following statement:
This child is an entirely innocent victim who has become collateral damage to her father’s political ambition. In a desperate attempt to keep his job and attack his ex-wife, the suit alleges, Congressman Max Miller and his attorney Aaron Minc engaged in incomprehensible recklessness by blasting to hundreds of thousands of people on the internet a nude photo showing this helpless two-year-old girl’s genitalia. Any parent—and any lawyer—knows the grave danger of posting nude photos of a toddler on the public web for pedophiles and bad actors to download. They victimized an innocent child to score political points, and we intend to hold them fully accountable under federal and state law.
The filing describes a sequence that unfolded over a single Sunday morning. Miller, facing renewed attention to allegations that he abused Moreno and their daughter, livestreamed a roughly 20-minute defense on X and told viewers he would post the records behind it. At 10:23 a.m. he posted a link to a public Dropbox folder titled “Miller Media Folder,” writing, “Here is a Dropbox with all the records I referenced today. I invite everyone who is interested to take a look.” The complaint says Minc created and owned the folder, and that Miller urged viewers to look inside it at least seven separate points during the broadcast.
Inside a subfolder of custody-exchange records, according to the complaint, was a PDF of messages exchanged through the court-ordered co-parenting app the couple was required to use. On page 53 of that document, the suit says, was an unredacted nude photograph of the toddler. The child’s name appears unredacted in the same document more than 70 times, the filing states. The complaint also says the photograph shows bruising on the girl’s shoulders and was taken after she had been in Miller’s care; she was later diagnosed with a broken collarbone.
The link briefly went down. “Apparently, there are people who don’t want this information out. Strange. Don’t worry, Dropbox will be back up momentarily,” Miller posted at 11:12 a.m. Minc later wrote that members of the public had been granted editing privileges and had deleted the files, and that he restored the folder to an earlier saved state to bring it back. That restoration, the suit alleges, republished the unredacted image. Miller then posted the link a second time: “Dropbox back online. Take a look.”
Minc has not disputed that he was responsible for the folder’s contents. In an Aug. 3 email to Moreno’s lawyers, attached to the complaint, he wrote that he published a pre-redaction version of the document and did not catch the error until about 9:40 the next morning — roughly 23 hours after the folder first went live. “I was under an enormous amount of pressure to get the files and link live again as quickly as possible,” he wrote. He added: “I am truly sorry and deeply regret the error. It was completely my fault and unintentional. Max Miller did not know.”
What Minc has disputed is what the photograph shows. He told POLITICO the day after the release that there were no images of genitals and that the picture showed a 2-year-old with her shirt off, calling the opposite characterization “deliberately false, sensationalized, and disgusting.” The complaint attaches a letter from Bradley Gascoigne, a pediatrician who says he has practiced for 43 years and reviewed the image without charge. He writes that the photograph depicts the child’s external genitalia. Moreno’s lawyers say the folder contained two separate images and that Minc has been pointing to the wrong one.
The federal statute the suit invokes provides liquidated damages of $150,000 for each disclosure or transfer of an intimate image, plus attorney fees and injunctive relief. That makes the total exposure a function of how many times the file was accessed — a number the complaint says the defendants have refused to produce despite repeated requests for download logs. The suit also asks the court to order the material preserved. TiffinOhio.net first reported on the contents of the evidence dump in the days after the Aug. 2 broadcast.
Miller has denied every abuse allegation against him, including claims that he threw scalding water at Moreno, held a gun to her head and injured their daughter. He has not been criminally charged. He sued Moreno for defamation in May over a Daily Mail report on the hot-water allegation, a case Minc is handling and that Moreno has moved to dismiss under Ohio’s anti-SLAPP law. The complaint filed Wednesday argues the toddler’s photograph had nothing to do with that case and served no legitimate litigation purpose. Cleveland’s WOIO reported it had sought comment from Miller and Minc.
The suit lands in the middle of a campaign Miller has refused to leave. The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation this month, at Miller’s own request, into whether he engaged in domestic violence or illegal drug use. The window for Ohio Republicans to put a different name on the November ballot has closed. He faces Democrat Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker and Brook Park councilman, in a Cleveland-area district President Donald Trump carried by about 11 points in 2024 and that the Cook Political Report now rates a toss-up.
None of that is on a ballot in Seneca or Sandusky county. But Miller’s name still appears on the endorsement page of Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign for governor.
