The night before President Trump spoke in Youngstown, Ohio, this month, Blake Miley stayed up past 4 a.m., cutting out felt letters for a T-shirt that would say “RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES.”
The next evening, she went to the rally and stood up halfway through, revealing her shirt and yelling, “Fascist, fascist!” Almost immediately, Ms. Miley, 29, was tackled, held down and punched by male rally-goers as the president mocked her from the stage, calling her “scum,” “low-class,” and “a fat guy.”
As Mr. Trump barnstorms the country hoping to revive his base ahead of the midterm election, he is returning to an old habit: heckling protesters and encouraging violence against them. In Georgia last week, he expressed his love for a supporter who had responded to a protester by “slapping the guy around,” and promised to bring the slapper to Washington. In South Carolina on Wednesday, he praised an “incredible” punch that a rally-goer landed on another protester, saying, “He got whacked, man!”
Ten years after Mr. Trump shocked some voters by saying he would personally like to punch a protester in the face at one of his rallies, these skirmishes are now met by many with a shrug. Ms. Miley, who is identifying herself publicly for the first time, said she suspects that no one in power much cares that she got beaten up.
“I knew there was a really good possibility that this would happen,” she said. “But I don’t blame myself. It is not right what they did to me.”
Ms. Miley attended the rally alone, and had intentionally seated herself among people who seemed older, she said. She hoped it would keep her safe. But as soon as she started yelling, a man grabbed for her neck and then shoved her backward, video of the episode shows. When she stood back up, another man appeared to pull her to the ground, put her in a headlock, yank her hair and punch her in the face.
She remembers being hit twice, unable to get up until Mahoning County sheriff’s deputies intervened about 30 seconds into the brawl.
“What he doesn’t know is that his mother and father voted for me,” Mr. Trump continued about Ms. Miley, who is a woman. “Oh, he looks so terrible. And he’s going to get home and he’s going to get smacked.”
The deputies escorted Ms. Miley out of the arena. The men who attacked her were left alone. One raised his fists and high-fived those around him.
In the arena’s parking lot, Ms. Miley was shaking so severely that onlookers called her an ambulance. She said she spent a few hours at the hospital, was discharged, and drove in a daze to her mobile home north of Columbus. She threw her Epstein shirt in her closet and collapsed onto her bed.
Back in Youngstown, the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Department was getting flooded with angry calls from people who had seen video of the incident, demanding to know why no one had been arrested. The sheriff, Jerry Greene, said he had as many 800 phone messages, many of them containing raw abuse.
Video footage, Sheriff Greene said, clearly showed a woman being punched in the face. “I know what people saw, and if I saw that video, too, I’d be like, ‘My God, why didn’t the police do anything?’”
Sheriff Greene, who had changed parties to become a Republican in 2023, said that he is, in fact, doing something. He reviewed body camera footage, which he said shows that his deputies were pushing through the crowd to reach Ms. Miley and did not witness the punch.
He has identified three men who he said took part in the assault, including a New Jersey resident who said in a now-deleted Facebook post that he and two friends had “subdued her and threw her to the concrete.” Investigators believe the other two men, including the one who threw the punch, are local; none could be reached by The Times.
The sheriff said that all three would be interviewed in coming days. He is waiting for medical records from Ms. Miley’s trip to the emergency room, he added, to determine whether her injuries were severe enough to warrant felony charges instead of misdemeanors.
Three days after the rally, one of the sheriff’s investigators tracked down Ms. Miley through her mother, who, contrary to Mr. Trump’s presumption, does not vote.
She had not told her parents she was going to the Trump rally. Though she had been to a few local protests before, facing down the president and his most fervent supporters directly was out of character for Ms. Miley, who spends most of her days at home.
She frequently has seizures, she said, and after years of passing out while working at warehouses, nursing homes and retail stores, she has not held a job since April. Lately, she relies on financial help from her boyfriend, who works in an auto-parts store, and her mother, who is a nurse.
“Most days are quite monotonous for me,” she said. “I get up. I might wash dishes or do laundry. I work on my art.”
When she scrolls, her feeds seem to constantly be filled with news about Mr. Trump and how he is changing the country.
She is worried about the prospect of losing Medicaid, which is likely to happen next year unless she starts working, volunteering or going to school 80 hours per month under a new law that Mr. Trump championed. She is worried about the cost of gas and groceries for her grandparents, who are still working at ages 79 and 82. But Ms. Miley is particularly bothered about the millions of documents related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, she said, because of her own experiences with abuse in a past relationship.
She has watched every documentary she can find on Mr. Epstein, who before his arrest and subsequent suicide routinely communicated with politicians, celebrities and business executives — including Mr. Trump. Many of their names appear in the files of documents, some of which the Justice Department started releasing, with redactions, last year after months of resistance from the president.
Most days this year, as she waited for her boyfriend to come home for dinner, Ms. Miley felt as though she could do little about the actions of Mr. Trump. But this month, a video came across her TikTok feed of a protester interrupting a Trump rally in Vandalia, Ohio, and being escorted out.
It was something simple, something doable.
The president, she realized, would be back in her state just a few days later.
She said she did not coordinate with any formal protest group, and despite Mr. Trump’s allegation that she was paid, went on her own accord.
In the days after she came home with cuts on her face and bruises on her arms, she read dozens of posts about the incident. She noticed the commenters who called her brave, who seemed to far outweigh the ones that made fun of her. It bothered her that there were AI-generated images of the scene, but one showed her with her arms raised, her face defiant. “I’m with her,” the caption said.
A high-profile civil rights attorney, Subodh Chandra, tracked her down and is representing her for free. Mr. Chandra said he has been in touch with Sheriff Greene, and he feels “persuaded that they are trying to do their jobs.” If arrests are not made, he said, Ohio has a law allowing citizens to file charges for a judge to review.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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