What Can We Do About Abusers in Congress?

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1:04How bad does a Republican need to be to get kicked out of the congressional club? Right now, it seems like Ohio Congressman Max Miller is on a one-man mission to try and find out. Emily Moreno, Max Miller's ex-wife, has accused him in court documents of scalding her with hot water. He has said that was horseplay in the kitchen, quote unquote. quote. She's accused him of holding a gun to her head. And she's also accused him of fracturing their two-year-old daughter's collarbone. It is so upsetting and specific and graphic. Yeah. And I think the specificity to me lends the accusations credibility.

1:51And then you have Max Miller, who is trying to speak out in his own defense, and I think is kind of making every woman and frankly many men's like spidey sense tingle a little bit. Slate writer Jill Filipovic is no stranger to covering bad guys or allegedly bad guys. Max Miller is the latest. In his narrative, he's both victim and hero. He really thinks if he just pushes through and just denies, denies, denies, denies, then he can win this election. And what I think is really sad is that that might actually be what happens. Today on the show, with midterms looming, what does it mean if Ohio Congressman Max Miller stays in until November?

2:35And what does it mean if he doesn't? I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around.

2:52Jill, thanks for hopping on the show with me. Thanks for having me. You're a feminist and a journalist and an attorney. And I feel like I call you up to talk about gender and elections a lot. So I got to ask, how surprised are you to be talking about another Republican elected official who's been accused of abuse and is in full public denial mode? I'm not surprised. This has obviously been a repeated problem on both sides of the aisle, right? Men who behave badly toward women are not solely a conservative problem. I think where I, maybe this is naive of me, but I think where I am surprised is in the aftermath of the Graham Plattner scandal, seeing so few Republicans have anything resembling morality or the courage of their convictions to stand up and say, actually, this guy who now has three credible abuse allegations against him maybe shouldn't be our nominee for this congressional seat.

4:00That surprises me, even with the Republican Party of Donald Trump. You know what's funny? I feel like the way I introduced this, we could be talking about a few different people. But we're actually going to spend the most of the show talking about Ohio Congressman Max Miller and the actual allegations against him are really troubling with the caveat that many allegations are made in the context of divorce proceedings which it's just an important context to give but Emily Moreno Max Miller's ex-wife has accused him in court documents of scalding her with hot water he has said that was horseplay in the kitchen quote unquote She's accused him of holding a gun to her head.

4:49And she's also accused him of fracturing their two-year-old daughter's collarbone. It is so upsetting and specific and graphic. Yeah, and I think the specificity, to me, lends the accusations credibility. But frankly, the fact that Stephanie Grisham, who's Max Miller's ex-girlfriend, former White House press secretary, leveled similar allegations. She wrote a post or wrote a piece for The Washington Post saying that a member of the Trump administration had abused her. It's widely known that's Max Miller. He filed a lawsuit against her trying to get her to not talk about those allegations. My understanding is the specifics of those is that he slapped her across the face and pushed her into a wall.

5:34Jill Filipovic: You have a girl in high school who said Max Miller pushed her down the stairs. And she said, like, I still remember that. And it was one of the most awful events of my life. The most traumatic things. Yeah. And then you have Max Miller, who is trying to speak out in his own defense. And I think it's kind of making every woman and, frankly, many men's, like, spidey sense tingle a little bit. But the way that he responds to these allegations, the condescension toward his ex-wife, the condescension to anyone that might doubt him or question him or challenge him, the kind of under the surface simmering rage at having to answer for his actions, it all kind of – it paints a picture of a certain kind of person.

6:21And that I've been finding just as troubling. Yeah, I got to say Mother Jones has done a lot of reporting here. They seem to have gotten access to court filings through FOIA requests. And it really is like the fine details there that stick with me. Like there are awful allegations, but like there's this one that I can't stop thinking about that when his daughter was born, Max Miller, he referred to the birth of his daughter as setting his playground on fire. and he he did not deny that i should say in court records he just sort of took a pass on it but it's one of those things where it's like it just lends so much context to everything else that's been said and bolsters it yeah i think that's right and i mean mother jones has been doing just phenomenal phenomenal reporting on this and on twitter i think yesterday uh the reporter who's been doing the bulk of this, she released some text messages about this blue bunny debacle.

7:30The allegation that Max Miller kept a stuffed animal from his two-year-old child, stuffed animal, she needed to sleep. Yes, that she has this little blue bunny. She's two years old. She's had it since she was born, basically. Sleeps with it every single night. It was left at his house. And he apparently refused to return it. And so he releases these text messages that he, you know, says bolster his claims. And in reality, they just make him sound like a total psycho. And I think anyone who has a child who's reliant on a beloved stuffed animal, kind of no matter what situation you're in, if your kid forgets that stuffed animal, you just drive the stuffed animal to the kid, right?

8:12Like you figure out how to get it. And Max Miller's argument is that the Morenos, Bernie and his daughter, Emily, sent this third party to retrieve the stuffed animal, and that third party wasn't on the approved list. And I think part of the reason that story to me was so striking was because it was clearly totally about Max Miller's need to control the situation and to be right rather than the interests of a two-year-old child who needed a little stuffed bunny to sleep. Yeah. You're getting to this interesting thing, which is there are the allegations against Max Miller and then there's his response to the allegations against him and the response is not making the allegations seem less credible.

8:57He went on Jake Tapper, he had a long conversation with Jake Tapper where he deflected, deflected, deflected. He released a video of his own where he said, well, if I'd assaulted my wife, why would she be offering to cook me dinner a few days later, which is like, excuse me, like, do you understand how domestic abuse works? And then he released a trove of what he called evidence to exonerate him. But it ended up including images of his daughter that his wife said were inappropriate potential child sexual abuse material, which his lawyer has apologized for. But like, you don't release that in the course of trying to defend yourself.

9:43And especially when you know that the entirety of the political press has their eyes on you right now, that whatever you're doing right now is under deep scrutiny. So you double check that file before you release it.

9:53Jill Filipovic: Yeah, it's an election year. He's running for office. You know, these text messages, they included his daughter's name. You know, and like, why do I know the name of Max Miller's two-year-old daughter? I should not know that. But that is in some of the documents, images that he has released. So I just, you know, again, I see this level of total carelessness when it comes to his child and his family. And just an interest in protecting himself, in controlling the narrative, and a very deep and abiding belief that he is actually, I think he probably believes he actually hasn't done anything wrong.

10:29And that none of this should matter for his race. And he said as much on Tapper's show, right? I mean, he said Donald Trump also had all these accusations thrown at him. He persevered. I think he called him resilient. He didn't say Trump is my model, but he listed Trump as someone whose campaign he's emulating when faced with a crisis of credible accusations of abuse and mistreatment of women. And, you know, he kept using that. I think he used the word resilient two or three times, basically casting himself as this resilient figure, you know, in the face of these unfair accusations. And to me, that was just that was so interesting that in his narrative, he's both victim and hero and that he really thinks if he just pushes through and just denies, denies, denies, denies, then he can win this election.

11:20And what I think is really sad is that that might actually be what happens. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't sound like someone who's going to drop out. No. And I think the deadline to replace him is in just a few days. And so there isn't that much time. Republicans are not exactly pressing for him to drop out. Bernie Moreno is. A handful of others have said, you know, kind of wishy-washy-o, yeah, he probably should. But for the most part, party leadership is behind him. Other Republicans in his state are either staying silent or supporting him. Jim Jordan's on TV saying he's a good guy. It really seems like the party apparatus is doing one of two things.

12:00Some of them are rallying behind him, and those that aren't are just staying to the sidelines and refusing to make any statement at all. It's kind of pathetic.

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14:35I kind of want to tell the whole Max Miller saga if we can. Can we do that? Mm-hmm. I guess I'd start with the fact that there have been disturbing allegations against Max Miller for years now. He worked for Donald Trump in his first term in office, and he got close to Stephanie Grisham, the press secretary. And she ended up leveling allegations against him that when they broke up, he got physical. And not only that, but she told President Trump and his wife about these allegations and nothing happened. And, like, you can go back five years, July 2021, Politico. The headline is, Trump's favored aide has a troubled past.

15:20I mean, this is not new information about this man. And yet he has endured. When you look at his history, is there one allegation that stands out to you?

15:35Jill Filipovic: I mean, what stands out to me really is the pattern. and the fact that the Republican Party up to the highest levels knew about this, right? Grisham, according to her telling, told Trump, this is a woman who was very close to the Trumps, had dedicated her career to them, did very good and dedicated work in their service. And when she told them, this guy abused me, not only did they do nothing, but then Trump backed his congressional, his first congressional run. Yeah, that Politico article is actually interesting to look at because its headline is Trump's favorite aide has a troubled past. And then inside this article, it basically lays out how Max Miller is not just any former Trump aide, not just any congressional candidate.

16:22It says he's the poster child of Trump's post-impeachment retribution tour. He's not just one of Trump's House endorsements. He was the first. And to me, that's really important. He's like a template. Yeah, he's the chosen son, the MAGA golden boy, and then married into this kind of MAGA royalty, right? I mean, Bernie Moreno is also a very vocal, very prominent Trump supporter.

16:50Jill Filipovic: Yeah, Bernie Moreno, a senator from Ohio. Right, exactly. And so, you know, I do think that part of, I think part of the Miller story is someone who, I think, has moved through the world, obviously, with a lot of rage, a lot of, certainly a lot of entitlement, and a history of essentially just not having both these bad acts, but then not really having to pay significant consequences for these bad acts, right? I mean, this is a guy who allegedly is slapping the White House press secretary across the face and pushing her against a wall, knowing that she's close with his boss. And then the boss endorses his congressional run and he pays no professional penalty at all.

17:30I mean, this is a guy whose colleagues obviously know this story. I mean, there is video footage from a few years ago of George Santos standing up in Congress and essentially shouting at Max Miller about basically how dare you call me a crook when everyone here knows that you're a wife beater, right? So this is not something that Republicans didn't know about. I'm not saying every single one of them knew every single detail, but it's not exactly hidden. And it's, I think, been very much attached to Miller's reputation in Washington. Well, he's kind of baked into the party. Like, Emily Moreno, his ex-wife, she's not just the daughter of a U.S.

18:12senator. She's been involved in Republican circles for a long time. They got married at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey in 2022. They divorced very quickly, only two years married before he's filing for a divorce. Trump was at their wedding. You know what I mean? Like, it's just, they, it's the portrait of a couple that's sort of part of the furniture for the Republican party and then all of a sudden these allegations surface um you know and we've talked about them a little bit the the broken collarbone which uh max miller denies that was uh his fault but also the daughter allegedly telling her mother daddy's house is scary um and that i mean as a parent as human, you hear that and you just think like, is that what I want representing me in Washington?

19:15Right. And, you know, it's both that, of course, you don't want someone who's loses their temper, who is out of control of his family, who doesn't even have, yeah, the basic kind of continents to not hit people or throw hot water on them when he's angry. But, you know, I think part of why this story to me is also so telling is that you see this just embedded patriarchy in the Republican Party. You see this pattern of women are expendable. And if men are in power or adjacent to power, we will rally around them and defend them. And again, the Democratic Party also has had plenty of men who have done terrible things.

19:59I think it's really telling that anytime, you know, I post about this on Twitter, the response I get from conservatives is to yell at me about Bill Clinton, right? Who, I'm in my 40s and I was too young to ever vote for Bill Clinton in any election, you know? So that's how far back we have to go to find a point where Democrats kind of broadly excused a powerful male Democrat and his misbehavior. We look at Eric Swalwell.

20:23Jill Filipovic: You know, we obviously look at Graham Plattner. And Republicans might say, well, Tony Gonzalez, because Gonzalez eventually left the house. But it was literally after like a year of pressing and lots of people excusing his behavior. And it wasn't just that he said some mean things. A staffer set herself on fire in his front yard. So it's like. It's like one of the most extreme stories that you can possibly imagine. Yeah. It's so interesting to me that like just a few months ago, the New York Times did a big splashy story about Republican women who are going to kick the sex pests out of Congress.

21:00You know, it had a picture of Lauren Boebert and Anna Paulina Luna and Nancy Mace, Congresswoman who had pushed for Tony Gonzalez and Eric Swalwell to get out of Congress and were kind of, they were, their hands folded, like we're going to get the job done. There's no mention of Max Miller in that story, even though as we've laid out, there were a lot of things that were known about Max Miller at that time. And in fact, when these latest allegations surfaced again, Politico went back to Anna Paulina Luna, who's been outspoken about people behaving badly in Congress. And she was torn. She talked about, oh, well, I had my baby shower with Max Miller's ex with Emily Moreno, and I support both him and her.

21:48And I was like, what is happening here? One thing that I think I've been asking myself in the course of the Max Miller debacle is how much of the Republican Party's excusing of Trump's misbehavior among women, right? Many, many, many, two dozen creditable allegations of things that range from sexual assault to sexual harassment. A sexual abuse court case where he was found liable by a jury in civil court. I've been wondering how much of the excusing of that is Trump specific, right? Because there's so much that Trump does that he gets away with that I actually don't think any other Republican could.

22:34I think some others could, but I don't think it's, you know, a party-wide standard. One thing that I think the Max Miller case is teaching us is that that standard that Trump has set, which is essentially you can talk about women any way you want, You can abuse women. You can be found liable by a jury for abusing women. You can go through a fact-finding process and lose that process. And your party will stay behind you is now a norm on the right that many members of the Republican Party are trying to apply to all men within that party.

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25:02Can we talk about Senator Bernie Moreno? Because he occupies a really interesting and especially upsetting part of this story. We should say that Max Miller says that his daughter, Emily Moreno, Max Miller's ex, has some kind of mental illness. It's a little unclear what that means to him. He said she has untreated bipolar disorder, of which there is no proof, right? So that is just, that's as far as any of the evidence shows, that is invented wholesale just as a way to smear her as a crazy person. Yes. And for a long time, Bernie Moreno did not say anything about Max Miller. And then very recently, he released a statement and was like, okay, I feel like I need to say something.

25:54You've done a close read of this statement to kind of analyze what does this really mean? What did you come away with when you did that? So I'll tell you, this is one of those things where actually my view has kind of shifted in the past few days, given more recent reporting. So my initial take, and I do still stand by this, is that it was actually pretty cowardly of Bernie Moreno to not publicly stand up for his daughter, right, as she's being trashed by her ex-husband.

26:23Jill Filipovic: Has he spoken, Bernie Marino, like spoken out loud or spoken to camera or any of those things? Not that I've seen. He's done a few kind of brief, like he's answered questions from reporters, but very, very briefly. And then he released a statement that I actually thought was pretty, it was interesting. I mean, he said in it something to the effect of, you know, I hold my breath every minute that this guy is with my two-year-old granddaughter. That line stuck with me because that, to me, felt very, very human and very real. He talks about how he thinks Max Miller has some psychological issues that need treating.

26:58It was a pretty direct statement, but it came after many, many weeks of pressure and speculation and wondering why is this guy not standing up for his own daughter. in more recent interviews, something that he has kind of hinted around the edges at is that his daughter maybe didn't want him to speak out, and their custody agreement could perhaps have been compromised if her family members had spoken about it. I obviously have a lot more sympathy if that, and I don't know for sure that that is the circumstance, but if that is the circumstance, I have a bit more sympathy there. Yeah, and it's sort of interesting.

27:35this statement kind of happened around the same time that the Anthony Fauci hearings were taking place, right? And Moreno made a big show, like dropped an F-bomb. And it was an interesting confluence of events. I wonder what you took away from that. Yeah, I thought it was very telling that Bernie Moreno was willing to do this big grandstanding congressional hearing with Fauci, right? And yeah, like you said, drop an F-bomb, yell at him, kind of read him the riot app. Clearly he wanted attention. He definitely wanted attention in a moment where he knew that his family was already under a microscope, right?

28:10So I'm not sure how he thought that it was going to escape notice that he's willing to speak out and, yeah, you know, try to have this big TV moment taking down a former public health official when he's not willing to take that same kind of like, you know, chest puffed out stance against the man who he believes is abusing his daughter. um yeah i mean i just yeah i found that to be so i mean not unlike miller very very very craven very self-interested and again seemed to be much more about interests of the party and their collective power than actually doing the right thing yeah i mean i know democrats are not blameless in the patriarchy game, right?

28:59Like even in the last year, you have the allegations against Graham Plattner, who is running for Senate in Maine and eventually dropped out. You have the allegations against Eric Swalwell, who eventually left Congress, had been running for governor in California. But if I just like count things up, right? Here's what I count on the GOP's ledger. I count Tony Gonzalez, Texas Republican congressperson, had this staffer who he was involved in some kind of relationship with who killed herself. It seems because of that relationship. You have Chuck Edwards, who just dropped out of his race, representative from North Carolina.

29:41He had been inviting young staffers to go on vacation with him. And buying them guns. Okay. Yes. Right. Great. You have Corey Mills, who's currently being investigated by the House Ethics Committee over serious and complex accusations, including domestic assault. And now we have Max Miller. These GOP guys seem to hang on to power a lot longer than the Democrats, although Eric Swalwell was there for a long time. And I just wonder when we stop seeing this as abhorrent behavior and like something more baked in to the structure here with this political party.

30:27Jill Filipovic: It is. It's absolutely baked in with this political party. I mean, the Republican Party is an anti-feminist party, right? And that has gotten much more pronounced in the Trump era. You've always had the religious right as a component part of the Republican Party, a really important component part that has this traditional family view that it should be men who have a monopoly on political power, on economic power, and on public life, and that women should be the ones who are at home raising children financially, culturally, politically dependent on men. But that's a deal. The deal is that you're keeping the people safe.

31:02But the deal is, right, that you're keeping, that you're getting kept safe. That's always been the promise, and that promise has always been empty. And I think what we're seeing in the Max Miller case, again, is that, yeah, the women are expendable in the service of male power. Then you have in the MAGA movement, the Manosphere, Andrew Tate side of things, cage match, right wing Republicans, who really enjoy the aesthetics of violence, who are much more blatantly and hostily sexist, right? So researchers often talk about like hostile sexism, which is calling women, you know, the B word in various slurs and like a very aggressive woman hate.

31:44And then you have the kind of sexism that I think you've seen from the religious right for a long time, which is this more of a benevolent sexism, putting women on a pedestal saying, we'll protect you if only you play by this set of gender norms. And you have both of those things crashing into each other in the Republican Party. And so those are the gender politics. Helen Lewis wrote a great piece in The Atlantic that was essentially about this, that the thing that unites the entirety of Trump's now very disparate coalition is hating women.

32:15Jill Filipovic: So there are reports that Donald Trump himself called Max Miller, and he did not tell him to drop out. That's not what the reports say. They say that they basically gave Max Miller the headline that he could have gotten by picking up any newspaper, which is your candidacy is in trouble. So far, Max Miller seems to be ignoring the blinking warning signs. He had one deadline of Wednesday to sort of drop out. He ignored that. There's one more deadline, which is August 10th, where local Republicans could select a replacement for him. Do you think he's going to? You think he's going to do anything about that deadline?

32:55No. Huh.

32:57Jill Filipovic: I mean, he said, I'm never going to give up. And he said, but for my daughter. Yeah, no, it's for Max Miller. Having now watched, yeah, watching the Jake Tapper interview, watching the video that he released himself, reading his statements, there is a level of belligerence and rage that is not just about his ex-wife at this point, it's about, it's clearly reflective to me, at least. It feels like it's reflective of this deep aggrievement. He feels fundamentally wronged, personally wronged, deeply victimized. And I think because he so deeply believes that he deserves to be in Congress, that he frankly deserves probably a higher approach, he deserves power.

33:44There's very little that can dislodge that, especially when there's no apparatus around him saying, sorry, we're not supporting you anymore. The bottom has not actually fallen out of his campaign because Republicans aren't pulling the bottom out of his campaign. If he was going to lose funding, if the president said, you no longer have my confidence. Notably, that's what got Graham Plattner out.

34:03Jill Filipovic: His funding was pulled. There were not, as far as I know, there was not a single prominent Democrat who, after the allegations of sexual assault against Graham Plattner, was out saying, actually, this guy should stay in the race. It was quite the opposite. Democrats were one after another after another making public statements about how he should drop out. And they did. They pulled the funding. His staff was quitting. All of the wheels fell off of that campaign. That's not what's happening with Miller. Yeah, it strikes me even if he did drop out. I don't know that the larger lesson would be learned.

34:42Like, I just don't know that what you've laid out so eloquently about how the sort of patriarchal systems are are inside the Republican Party would ever get through and if that's the case he can drop out all he wants there's going to be another Max Miller down the line yeah I mean the prime patriarchs in the White House, right? Like, this is Donald Trump's Republican Party. Max Miller getting axed is not going to make that party say, oh, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't be the party of, like, hostile misogyny, right? I think what it could, hopefully would do, is signal that at the point where Trump is no longer in charge of this party, that the exceptions that apply to him will not apply to anyone else, right?

35:37It's pathetic the exceptions apply to him. I would certainly prefer a world in which, okay, fine, Trump is exceptional, but the rest of the party at least has to adhere to some kind of basic rules, norms, morals, and that that continues once Trump is gone. I think what we're setting ourselves up for here is a scenario in which all of the exceptions that apply to Trump, but particularly the exceptions around treatment of women, they just cease to apply to Republicans. And I think that creates this kind of feedback loop, right, where Republicans don't respond to credible allegations of abuse by women.

36:18I think because then media outlets know they won't respond and it doesn't create a big kind of media firestorm, I think the coverage will get less and less. And all of the pressure on Republicans to drop out when they behave like this will essentially start to lessen. You're describing a numbing. Yeah, exactly. And I think we've experienced this numbing with Trump, right? The number of stories that, you know, it's a cliche at this point to say, if this story had been about any other president, it would have ended his, you know, it would have ended his presidency. But with Trump, it's like, you know, it's a ticker on CNN, you know, like barely even makes any kind of ripple.

36:57I don't think that we're there yet when it comes to stories of abusing women, even by Republicans. We're obviously not there yet, right? We're having this conversation. But it sounds like you think Max Miller is like the beginning of us getting there. I think he's one more data point toward us getting there. And I hope I'm wrong.

37:18Jill, I'm grateful for your time. Not really grateful for your message, but maybe one we need to hear. Thanks for having me. Always nice to talk to you.

37:54is the Senior Director of Podcast Operations. And I'm Mary Harris. You can always track me down on Blue Sky to say hello. I'm at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you back here next time.

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