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Hot off the Platner scandal, here comes Max Miller one upping him. Max Miller, a Republican who previously served in Trump's first admin and running for reelection as state representative has been accused by his ex-wife of throwing hot water on her, putting a gun to her head, and (potentially) even choking their 2 year old daughter.
She doesn't know for sure as it would have happened behind closed doors, and Miller obviously denies this but CPS investigations did suggest strangulation as possible.
And the daughter for some reason seems to be scared of her father, so even if he didn't cause this particular injury it's not a great sign.
There's also apparently been other accusations against him when he was younger.
Especially when I made an interesting discovery, him being an abuser seems to have been already known or at least suspected in politics. George Santos had previously called him a woman beater during a spat with Miller, because Miller was accused of assaulting his previous girlfriend before that.
and
And Miller is (or was) a drug user, showing a history of irresponsible behavior.
And there is hard proof that he poured hot water on Moreno, per a recording.
Again there's no hard proof of most of these (yet at least) but a history of physical abuse allegations throughout his life + drug usage (and lying about it) + the abuse suggesting bruising patterns on his own child + at least one proven allegation, it certainly seems to be leaning towards his guilt.
These allegations haven't reached the general public much yet, but they do seem to having a small effect on his reelection chances already. Not as much as Platner did but the news is still pretty young. Some comments I've been seeing however suggest that Republican candidates are simply held to lower moral standards nowadays by their respective sides and it won't impact him too much despite the severity. I guess time will tell.
(Morbid humor:doing a great job representing his constituents .)
He's running for a +5R-+8R district, and his opponent (despite being literally named Poindexter) has some actual union bonafides, so there's a decent chance this sinks Miller, especially if the child abuse gets substantiated. Unfortunately, he didn't have a primary challenger. He could drop out until August 5th, but it's going to be a pretty hard battle to do it and I don't think he has the stones for it.
((Though there's very much a 'throw everything at the wall and see what sticks' here: Ohio's general voting population just doesn't care that much about an under-limit crash where no one was hurt but a lamppole, or about MDMA use. That might genuinely not have even have counted as driving under the influence under state law at the time of the crash.))
That is a fascinating choice of words where one party was credibly accused of multiple counts of rape, and it's not the "one up".
I'll caveat that they're in a very messy divorce and custody proceeding, and there's serious questions that one has (alleged misdiagnosed) BPD (and, tbf, I'd only be surprised for Miller in the sense that he doesn't seem likely to get diagnosed by consent). And the guy's a genuine putz and has been known to be one for a long time, ranging from fighting a glass window at a hookah bar to allegedly slapping Grisham. Which remains a good argument about him not getting reelected, but it makes the factual claims specific to each case a lot less strong than they look at first glance.
Likewise, it's very strange that his alleged expulsion didn't surface in the first election, and the claims are messy: both Mother Jones and the court filings jump between whether Miller "faced" expulsion or was actually expelled, and despite Mother Jone's attempt to frame the court transcript carefully, Miller did specifically deny (and offer to prove non-existence of) the expulsion to the New York Post. The stairs incident was brought up in 2021, but it's also almost twenty years after it allegedly happened now, released by someone who's name isn't on the record, and echoed by people talking as much about rumors or 'fits his character' than actually seeing whatever happened.
There's credible reasons no one can find proof - the former would only exist in records protected by federal law, the latter was allegedly a high-school party where no one was injured and the core of the allegation is just shoving someone at a wall - but it's still not very persuasive on its own.
The child abuse one and the water incident are the most impactful, but they're also the most dependent on facts not in evidence. The child's injuries were investigated and the allegations found "unsubstantiated", and the prosecutor's office that would have been involved doesn't exactly scream 'MAGA diehard'. The boiling water one fell in similar bounds, and was messy enough That Right-Wing Rag couldn't come out and call it clearly proven. The reddened skin is more than we have for Katie Portner, to be fair!
Yeah, I absolutely do not believe anything Parent A says about Parent B, or Parent B says about Parent A, alleging the kid(s) are scared of whomever. Get a neutral third party to back this up, without coaching from A or B as to what to tell them, but "My kid told me they don't want to go to Mom's place/Dad's place because they're scared" is nothing more than mud to throw in custody dispute.
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