The campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican running for governor in Ohio, sparked controversy this week with an ad featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton. In the ad, Acton’s mother calls her a “liar” who is being dishonest about her past.
But court documents — as well as contemporaneous news articles and statements by Acton’s brother — corroborate key elements of Acton’s account of her difficult childhood. Acton has said she was removed from her mother’s custody at age 12 after her stepfather was charged with raping her. She says she hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother since.
The 60-second ad has drawn widespread backlash since it first surfaced on social media Oct. 19, including from some Republicans. It was initially unclear who was behind the ad, but Ramaswamy told reporters the next day that his campaign had produced it and plans to spend $4 million airing it. (So far, the ad tracking service AdImpact showed only $2,116 had been spent to air the ad on Oct. 20.)
The race is considered a toss-up, according to the Cook Political Report.
Acton, who previously served as director of the Ohio Department of Health, has spoken before about the hardships she endured as a child.
In a 2019 profile by the Youngstown Vindicator, she said her biological parents divorced when she was 3, leaving her and her brother in the custody of her mother. She described cycling through a series of different homes in the following years, including a tent at a campground outside Youngstown one winter.
By that point, her mother had remarried, according to the profile. Acton told the Vindicator that her stepfather sexually abused her. Acton, who was 12, went to live with her biological father. She said she hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother since a court appearance after her stepfather’s 1978 arrest.
In the ad, Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, accuses her daughter of lying about her childhood, including the extent of their housing insecurity.
“Amy has a serious problem,” Arthur says in the ad. “She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help. And she can’t help you if she needs help herself.”
Though the ad does not refer specifically to the sexual abuse allegations, Arthur has done so in the past. In 2020, she gave an interview to the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue in which she claimed her daughter had “lied” when she accused Donna’s second husband, Cledith Arthur, of rape.
Court records provided by the Acton campaign show that Cledith Arthur was charged with rape in July 1978 after Acton’s biological father reported that Arthur had sexually abused her. He pleaded not guilty. He was indicted by a grand jury that September.
The Youngstown Vindicator reported on the arrest at the time.
The case never went to trial, however, because the Arthurs left town without notifying the authorities, the records show.
After Cledith Arthur failed to appear for a court date in October 1978, a Mahoning County judge issued a warrant for his arrest, writing that “it appears that the Defendant has willfully vacated his last known address and has failed to provide any forwarding address and his present whereabouts are unknown.”
Another arrest warrant was issued in 1981, and records show the authorities were looking for him as late as 1983.
In the 2020 Operation Rescue interview, Donna Arthur indicates that she and her husband skipped town in order to avoid a trial. “Donna borrowed $10,000 from her father and hired an attorney who recommended that she and [Cledith] move away for awhile until things could calm down and charges could be dropped,” the article said.
The Mahoning County court system’s online records search only goes back to 1989. We reached out to the court clerk’s office for more information on the case, including its ultimate resolution, and haven’t heard back.
Cledith Arthur died in 2004. He and Donna Arthur had been living in Pennsylvania.
As for Acton’s description of living in a tent at one point, her campaign pointed to a 1982 police report documenting an interview with an Ohio campground manager who said Cledith Arthur had lived there some years earlier. Arrest paperwork from 1978 also lists that campground as Arthur’s address.
The Acton campaign has also released statements by her younger brother, Philip Stearns, in which he backs her account of their childhood.
“It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point,” Stearns said in a statement the campaign released Oct. 20. “After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.”
In a response ad the campaign released the same day, Stearns also describes repeated childhood abuse.
“I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it,” he says. “She continued to receive that abuse because she knew she had to protect me from that, and that if she hadn’t done that, who knows where I would have ended up.”
We reached out to the Ramaswamy campaign with questions about the ad and haven’t received a response. Ramaswamy defended the ad when speaking to reporters on Oct. 20.
“This is part of a pattern,” he said. “Someone else who appears to know her well who says the same thing, and I do think that is important for voters to take all of that into account.”
The ad has been criticized by some Republicans, including Ohio Sen. Jon Husted, who’s in a close race of his own. Vice President JD Vance defended the ad this week, saying it “calls it out like it is, and calls Amy Acton a liar.”
The Acton campaign has condemned the ad as a “disgusting smear using Dr. Acton’s estranged, abusive mother, who stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.”
“I won’t normalize somebody who has said my childhood is just something I’m complaining about, who today just released an ad using my birth mother, who I was removed from at the age of 12 for severe abuse and neglect, and sexual abuse,” Acton told Spectrum News, a local TV outlet.
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