The Price of Accountability

Mother Jones illustration Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. “It’s easy in this industry, especially during the current era, to just feel like nothing matters,” Abby Vesoulis says. “Sometimes I gaslight myself into thinking: Is anyone going to care about this?” Abby, a reporter in our Washington bureau, is from Ohio, and she covered its Senate race in 2024, when Republican Bernie Moreno rode Donald Trump’s coattails to defeat incumbent Sherrod Brown. Also running that year was Rep. Max Miller, who had just gotten divorced from Moreno’s daughter, Emily. He skated to reelection in a suburban Cleveland district that went for Trump 55–45, even though Stephanie Grisham, a White House press secretary who dated him during the first Trump term, had accused him of abuse. (He’d sued her for defamation; they settled out of court.) This year, as Miller’s next reelection campaign got underway, local news outlets reported on another defamation lawsuit that Miller filed, this time against his ex-wife, and a blistering response from Emily Moreno. Abby decided to dig deeper and request files on the pair’s child custody case. Soon, 2,000 pages landed in her inbox. There were allegations of physical violence throughout the marriage, accounts of Miller throwing a girl down the stairs back in high school for refusing to let him touch her, and much more. When Abby reached out to Miller, she heard back from a spokesperson, who informed her that “Max Miller has a lot of defamation attorneys.” Subtle. But they didn’t know Abby. “Having that phone call just made me feel more motivated to get as much documentation as I possibly could,” she recalls. So she asked for more records, including police reports. She found documents indicating that Miller put his hand through a glass door in an argument. He’d crashed his car with alcohol, molly, and Klonopin in his system. And his 2-year-old daughter, who told her mother that “Daddy’s house is scary,” had ended up with a broken collarbone and what police deemed suspicious bruising. In an age of ubiquitous aggregation, clipping, and AI summaries, it’s sometimes easy to lose track of what it takes to actually uncover the information voters need to know. After weeks of digging, Abby published her story on July 18, carefully detailing all this. And a week later, The New York Times published a story that essentially recapped much of what Abby had found—without once referring to her reporting. The Times merely noted that the issue “has in recent weeks risen to the level of a serious concern to Mr. Trump’s political operation.” The Times has a track record of re-reporting our stories without attribution; a media critic once noted that “if it’s in The New York Times today, it was probably in Mother Jones six months ago.” But other journalists knew who’d done the work. Abby appeared on CNN, MS Now, and Fox News, and her reporting was cited in virtually every major outlet, from The Atlantic to People and The New York Post. Eventually, Sen. Bernie Moreno made an emotional public statement, saying that “I hold my breath every minute [Miller] has custody of my granddaughter.” He noted that his ex-son-in-law had even refused to give up the toddler’s favorite stuffed animal, a blue bunny. Miller denied this and the other allegations against him. But that night, Abby posted screenshots of documents showing that the bunny had been withheld over and over, with Emily Moreno pleading: “She’s had it since birth, sleeps with it every night, carries it with her around the house…Please don’t punish [her] if you’re upset with me.” In an age of ubiquitous aggregation, clipping, and AI summaries, it’s sometimes easy to lose track of what it takes to actually uncover the information voters need to know. By mid-September, Abby had been working on the Miller story for more than three months, including traveling to Ohio to cover court hearings in the case, and to profile his opponent, Brian Poindexter. Then there was her editor, our lawyer, video producers, fact-checkers, and all the others whose work is needed to make journalism airtight. It cost us between $80,000 and $100,000—a ridiculously tiny fraction of the $11.6 billion that political donors are projected to spend on the midterms. Indeed, just 10 percent of overall political spending would be enough, by some estimates, to power independent, nonprofit reporting in every corner of the country. When I asked Abby if there’s anything she wanted our readers to know, she said she was surprised, at a time when news stories land and vanish in an instant, that “readers have shown that they really care.” (Miller’s district was moved from “likely Republican” to “toss-up” in the wake of her reporting.) And, she added, at a time when misogyny is openly celebrated by our leaders, “personally, as a woman, it was nice to see that people take these kinds of accusations seriously.” Abby was able to do this reporting for one reason only: people—like you, reading this—who keep our journalism alive. Thank you so much for that.