Boozy house parties are a rite of passage for young political staffers grinding through the final stretch of a campaign. 

For a dozen Ohio GOP operatives and Trump reelection hands, that night came in October 2020 inside a cramped one-bedroom house north of Columbus. They tried to light the fire pit out back for a while, but as the night grew colder, everyone pulled inside. They drank late and eventually ran out of places to sleep. Some took the couch. Others claimed the floor. A few passed out in the basement.

Among the attendees was a 19-year-old female junior staffer. She had just moved in with the hostess and now found herself with nowhere else to sleep.

Hostess Madison Sheahan, then 23, invited her into bed, according to the young staffer's account. By morning, a secret sexual relationship had begun, one that would quietly shape the next two years of the young woman's life in ways she could not yet foresee, she told the Daily Mail.

Sheahan is a self-described Trump conservative now running for Congress in Ohio, who worked as ex-DHS secretary Kristi Noem's deputy ICE director from March last year to January. 

Sheahan's former lover, speaking to the Daily Mail under the condition of anonymity, detailed a tumultuous two-year relationship, started during Trump's reelection campaign, that she claims was defined by control. 

Sheahan, the woman says, was consumed by the nagging fear that she would leave her for a man and did everything she could to keep that from happening. That insecurity would allegedly boil over into verbal blowups and late-night screaming fights.

The woman’s recollection of her oppressive relationship with Sheahan was corroborated by two independent sources.

What started in secret quickly spiraled into a relationship where Sheahan, then a senior official working with the Ohio Republican Party, paid through the Trump campaign's 2020 political operation, exerted control over her younger partner in ways that extended to something as basic as what she was allowed to wear when going out with friends, according to the woman.

Before announcing her bid to run for Congress last January, Sheahan started her political career working for the Trump reelection campaign at the Ohio Republican office in Columbus. Sheahan held the title of state election operations director during the 2020 cycle, a senior role that placed her above her alleged lover in the office hierarchy.

There she met a young woman looking for a place to live after being forced to leave her student housing at Denison University due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sheahan offered to let the college student move into her house in October 2020. Within a few weeks, the woman says their sexual relationship had begun.

At one point, in November 2020, Sheahan briefly became the woman’s supervisor while they were engaged in a sexual relationship, three sources told the Daily Mail.

Their sexual relationship followed both women through the end of the 2020 campaign and into the Georgia Senate runoffs in December 2020, where they worked at separate headquarters in the Peach State and did not live together.

Sheahan was stationed in Buckhead with senior staff. The younger woman was posted about an hour away from Sheahan in Georgia at a place she describes as ‘the literal middle of nowhere.’

It was during this stretch that Sheahan's allegedly ‘toxic’ behavior began to show itself more plainly, though the woman says she did not fully see it at the time.

The most vivid episode allegedly came one evening in Atlanta on November 29, when the ex-lover and a group of friends decided to go out. She was wearing black jeans and a tight-fitting black bodysuit, and sent Sheahan a photo before they left.

‘She lost it on me,’ the woman recalled. ‘It went from her saying, “Have fun, have a great night,” to, 'What the f***, you're not gonna f***ing go. Are you actually f***ing serious? I'm not gonna talk to you again.”’ 

The woman went out anyway. She came back to her hotel room in the early hours and called Sheahan. The conversation worsened.

The implication, she says, was plain: women who dressed like that were women who cheated.

Sheahan screamed at her lover on the phone: ‘People who do that stuff, that's what they do. They cheat on people.’

A separate source who was present that night told the Daily Mail they could hear Sheahan screaming through the walls of the hotel room on speaker phone, corroborating the account.

Sheahan was not jealous of the other women in the group. She was jealous of the men, her former lover claimed.

The younger woman had never been in a relationship like this before, a fact Sheahan did not know because, as the woman puts it, ‘it just never came up.’

When it finally did, Sheahan's purported response was blunt: ‘This is why I don't like to date people who aren't gay.’

The woman believes Sheahan’s insecurities regarding her own sexuality played a role in their chaotic relationship. 

She describes Sheahan as someone not fully able to come to terms with her sexuality.

‘I think a lot of the problems with our relationship was that she's not comfortable in her own skin,’ the ex-lover told the Daily Mail. ‘It's okay to be gay … but I don't think that's something she has accepted.’

Sheahan declined to comment when contacted by the Daily Mail about the relationship.

There were other forms of control, the woman said. Shehan was purportedly particular about how the younger woman presented herself, insisting she look and dress the part. She would become furious if the woman smoked a cigarette on a night out.

‘She would lose her ever-loving mind,’ the woman said.

Public affection, especially in front of other staffers or friends, was off limits.

At work events and in professional settings, she was expected to act as though nothing existed between them.

‘You couldn't hold her hand,’ the woman recalls. ‘You couldn't show affection.’

When the woman began looking at a job in Washington State in late 2021, Sheahan made her position clear.

‘She was not okay with that at all,’ the woman said. Her moving to Washington State was not acceptable.

Sheahan went on to serve as Noem's political director during her South Dakota governorship and was named ICE deputy director in March last year.

A senior DHS official told the Daily Mail that Sheahan often targeted female staffers at ICE who she viewed as ‘disloyal’ to her.

‘She’d always try to be the alpha in the room. There could never be a stronger woman. Madison was intimidated by strong women,’ said the senior DHS official.

‘She’d always push to get women fired.’

The senior official noted that Sheahan would act as though she had the full power and backing of Noem to other staffers.

Sheahan was allegedly known to verbally abuse staff and aides who worked for by often threatening to ‘rip their faces off,’ the source told the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail reached out to DHS and ICE for comment on Sheahan’s alleged behavior while serving in the Trump administration.

She resigned last January to run for Ohio's ninth Congressional District, challenging Democratic incumbent Marcy Kaptur, ahead of a Republican primary on May 5.

Despite raising over $450,000 since announcing her candidacy, Sheahan trails in third place with 10 percent support from GOP primary voters, according to a JL Partners poll.

By the time Sheahan’s secret relationship broke off, the pattern was familiar to the woman: a fight over the phone.

The woman said the relationship ended in 2022 on a phone call she took while driving from Washington, DC. Sheahan had just returned from a family vacation and had been largely unreachable. The woman had had enough.

‘It was a screaming fight over the phone,’ she said. ‘It was very defeating. There's no winning. Everyone's losing… So it didn’t end well by any means.’

‘It was all about how she'd always tell you how she feels,’ the ex-lover added, ‘but it's not about how you feel.’

The conversation, she says, only ever ran one direction.

She saw Sheahan once more in 2022, in Washington State, at a political fundraiser for Noem, where they had drinks and it was friendly. That was the last time.

When contacted by the Daily Mail for comment, Sheahan’s political adviser Bob Pudachik denied any wrongdoing on her behalf.

‘As the Ohio campaign manager, I can speak with authority that no such relationship existed,’ Pudachik told the Daily Mail. ‘Madison was not and has never been in a relationship with a subordinate.’

When asked to describe what she experienced, the ex-lover did not hesitate: 'Toxic.' 'Volatile.' 'Controlling.'

A relationship where Sheahan held most of the power and used it.