A Sitting Senator's Daughter Filed a Restraining Order Against Rep. Max Miller, Saying He Grabbed Her Lawyer in a Courthouse

Emily Moreno, the ex-wife of Republican Rep. Max Miller and the daughter of Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, filed for a restraining order in Cuyahoga County court on Thursday, asking a judge to limit the congressman's ability to contact her attorneys after a series of confrontations she says took place in and around an Ohio courthouse.

The filing does not concern contact between the former spouses, who already have court-ordered restraining orders against each other. It concerns her lawyers. Moreno alleges that Miller has repeatedly had physical and verbal altercations with her attorney, Andrew Zashin, following hearings in an ongoing custody dispute. According to the filing, Miller began verbally harassing one of her attorneys after a hearing in May 2026 and insulted Zashin's fiancée in front of witnesses at the courthouse. After a hearing this week, the filing says, Miller physically grabbed Zashin and a second attorney.

Miller, 37, represents Ohio's 7th Congressional District and worked in the White House during President Trump's first term before running for Congress. He has denied all of the allegations against him. He is running for reelection this November, and the case has become a live factor in a race Republicans had not expected to have to think about.

The underlying custody fight is bitter and well documented in the court record. Miller and Moreno married in 2022 and separated in June 2025, and they share a young daughter. In earlier court filings, Moreno alleged that Miller threw hot water on her from the stove, threw her against a wall, and broke their 2-year-old daughter's collarbone. Miller has rejected each of those claims. None has been tested at trial.

The political geometry is unusual even by the standards of a difficult divorce. Bernie Moreno, Emily Moreno's father, is the junior senator from Ohio and a Republican, which puts a member of the Senate GOP conference on the opposite side of a domestic-violence allegation from a member of the House GOP conference in the same state, in the middle of an election year. Neither the senator's office nor House Republican leadership has said publicly how it intends to handle the matter.

Thursday's filing is narrower than the allegations that have drawn the most attention — it asks a court to keep a congressman away from opposing counsel, not to adjudicate what happened inside a marriage. But it moves the dispute out of the private custody docket and into a public request for judicial protection, and it does so on the record of a county court in the district Miller represents. A hearing date on the request has not been announced.