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Emily Moreno, the ex-wife of Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), has filed a lawsuit on behalf of their two-year-old daughter against him and his lawyer, accusing them of having “recklessly published and distributed on the internet an unredacted nude photograph” of the toddler.
With President Donald Trump reportedly remaining in the embattled congressman’s corner, he has refused to quit his campaign. Meanwhile, the custody battle between Miller and Moreno seems to grow nastier by the day — and play out in the public eye, with Moreno accusing her ex-husband of pointing a gun at her head, throwing scalding hot water on her, pushing her into a wall, and physically abusing their two-year-old daughter, fracturing the toddler’s collarbone. Miller’s ex-father-in-law Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) has accused the congressman of “increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior” and called on him to drop his re-election bid.
Miller has denied wrongdoing, defending himself in eyebrow-raising social media posts and television interviews that have only sparked new questions and concerns. Earlier this month during a livestream, Miller posted a Dropbox link online containing files that reportedly included a nude photograph of their daughter and her unredacted full name. In a statement to Mediaite, Miller’s attorney Aaron Minc apologized and said the release of the photo was “completely my fault.”
On Wednesday, Moreno’s attorney Subodh Chandra announced Moreno had filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court on behalf of her daughter against Miller, Minc, and the law firm Minc LLC over the release of the photograph.
The 20-page complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio and seeks to bring “federal claims under 15 U.S.C. § 6851 (civil action relating to disclosure of intimate images), state-law claims for civil liability for criminal acts under R.C. 2307.60, wrongful-intrusion invasion of privacy, negligence, and civil conspiracy,” Chandra said in a statement.
The federal law alone mandates “statutory liquidated damages of $150,000 for each disclosure and transfer, in addition to attorney fees and injunctive relief,” the lawyer emphasized, in addition to the other relief being sought.
A photograph “featuring an intimate visual depiction of the two-year-old girl, displaying her uncovered genitalia” was included in the Dropbox folder that was owned by Minc and his law firm and posted by Miller, said Chandra. “A veteran pediatrician reviewed the photo and confirmed it depicts the child’s genitalia, contradicting Minc’s claims to the media that the child is partly clothed.”
“Faced with a mostly self-inflicted dumpster fire of public attention to his reputation for abusive behavior, Miller so desperately wanted to salvage his political job, that he recklessly and intentionally provided Minc a trove of documents and photos, indifferent about what they contained or how they were used,” the complaint stated, going on to describe how the congressman then “blasted out” the link to the Dropbox folder.
Two of Miller’s social media posts sharing the link were seen by “[m]ore than 400,000 people,” the complaint added, and Minc had admitted the photograph “remained online for about 23 hours.” The complaint further accused Miller and Minc of “lying” about the photograph:
Rather than answering questions about the extent of the damage and what the plan was the clean up the mess, Minc first started lying to the media about the seriousness of their offense, falsely insisting that there was no nude image in which genitals were visible. He and Miller diverted attention to a different, topless image of the girl. But they knew these were lies because Ms. Moreno’s counsel had written to Minc with the actual document’s title and told Minc the image is labeled IMG_9158—a different image.
Besides the photograph, the files in the Dropbox folder included the child’s name “unredacted, more than 70 times,” the complaint added.
“This child is an entirely innocent victim who has become collateral damage to her father’s political ambition,” said Chandra, accusing Miller and Minc of having “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” as part of Miller’s “desperate attempt to keep his job and attack his ex-wife.”
“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,” she added. “They victimized an innocent child to score political points, and we intend to hold them fully accountable under federal and state law.”
The post Ex-Wife of Embattled Republican Sues Him for Posting Nude Photo of Two-Year-Old Daughter: ‘Incomprehensible Recklessness’ first appeared on Mediaite.
