In 1978, a 12-year-old girl in Ohio and her younger brother were taken out of their mother’s custody after the man her mother had married was charged with raping her. That girl, Amy Acton, later told The Vindicator, her hometown newspaper in Youngstown, that the last time she saw her mother was in a courtroom, where she tried to kiss her and her mother refused.
According to The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom that covers gender and politics, her mother left Ohio with him and stayed married to him until he died in 2004. Today she is on television across the state in an ad for Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican running against Acton for governor.
In the ad, the mother calls her daughter a liar, and viewers are never told why the two have not spoken in nearly 50 years. In football, a referee throws a flag for a personal foul when a player crosses the line. Politics has no referee, so it is up to leaders in both parties and to voters to make sure this tactic fails in Ohio and is never tried anywhere else.
“It’s not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem,” Donna Arthur says in the ad. “She is a liar. She lies about her past.” According to a transcript published by The 19th, she also says her daughter’s story about living in a tent as a child is not true.
The court records tell a different story. The Associated Press reported that Cledith Arthur was arrested in July 1978 and charged with raping his 12-year-old stepdaughter after her biological father went to the police. A grand jury indicted him two months later.
He never showed up for court. FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan fact-checking site, found records showing that authorities were still looking for him in 1983 and that the case never went to trial.
National Review, a conservative magazine, obtained court records that support Acton’s account. CBS News reported that court records also show the family did live in a tent. The ad never mentions the rape charge, the fugitive or the loss of custody.
Ramaswamy has confirmed that “it is an ad from our campaign.” When the video first appeared online on October 19, it did not say who paid for it, even though the law requires that disclosure before a political ad can run on television, according to The 19th.
Axios, a political news site, reported that the campaign decided to put $4 million behind the ad after it tested well with persuadable voters, the Ohioans who have not yet decided how they will vote. In the same remarks in which he took ownership of the ad, Ramaswamy said he “would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans.”
Instead of asking him to pull it, President Trump encouraged Ramaswamy to keep the ad running and wrote that it was “hitting pay dirt.” Vice President JD Vance told reporters in Ohio that “whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern.”
The people this ad hurts most will never appear on a ballot. Emily Gemar of the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence told Signal Ohio, a nonprofit Ohio newsroom, that survivors have been reaching out to the group’s rape crisis centers since the ad appeared. She said it reaches survivors “who are watching and already wondering whether it’s safe to tell their stories.”
Signal Ohio reported that the alliance is now advising survivors to mute their televisions when political ads come on. Andrew DeFratis of the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center told Cleveland 19 News, a local television station, that public fights like this one can keep survivors from ever coming forward.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that at least one in seven American children experience abuse or neglect each year, according to The 19th. Those children are learning from this ad what can happen to a girl who tells.
Politics has always been a rough business, and voters expect candidates to hit each other hard. Ramaswamy has every right to go after Acton’s record as Ohio’s health director, her positions on the issues and her decision, reported by The 19th, not to debate him. He can even question her honesty, as long as he has the facts to back it up.
What a candidate has done as an adult is open to examination. What was done to her as a child is not. Acton did not choose to be abused at 12, and she wrote on Facebook this week that her mother “did nothing to protect me.”
This ad crosses that line in more than one way. It puts an estranged parent on camera to attack her own child, and that parent left the state with the man charged with abusing that child. It takes the most painful chapter of a person’s life and turns it into a campaign weapon.
It also leaves out a history the campaign already knew. Acton first spoke publicly about her abuse in 2019, and The 19th reported that Ramaswamy referred to it in a speech this spring, while a super PAC supporting him ran ads about the therapy she sought to cope with it. The campaign knew the full story and chose to leave it out.
Finally, this was done on purpose. It was not a heated remark in a debate or a careless post from a supporter. It was a finished ad, tested on voters and backed by $4 million.
Hard-fought campaigns make a democracy stronger. Campaigns that turn a child’s abuse into a talking point make it weaker, because they teach every survivor that telling the truth comes at a price.
Some of the sharpest criticism has come from Ramaswamy’s own party. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who endorsed him, told reporters on October 22, “It’s wrong to run this ad,” and urged the campaign to take it down. DeWine, who worked with rape victims as a county prosecutor and as Ohio’s attorney general, said family members have “always historically been off limits.”
Lydia Mihalik, the Republican director of the Ohio Department of Development, wrote, “There are lines we shouldn’t cross, and this is one of them.” Sen. Jon Husted and Secretary of State Frank LaRose, both Republicans, said they would not have run the ad.
Former Republican Gov. John Kasich called it “completely inappropriate.” Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina called it “the most shameful, disgusting, offensive ad this election season,” and Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown called it “disgusting.”
Republicans who spoke out have faced pressure from within their own party. Vance told them to “stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race,” and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Alex Triantafilou wrote that “we are keeping score.” Politico, a Washington news outlet, reported that DeWine condemned the ad but did not withdraw his endorsement.
Ramaswamy’s campaign argues that Acton went after his family first. His spokesperson, Connie Luck, said that “the first and only candidate to attack the mother of her opponent in this race was Amy Acton.” The Associated Press reported that Acton and Ohio Democrats accused Ramaswamy over the summer of “hiring his own mother to manipulate clinical trial data” at a drug company he ran, a charge his campaign calls slanderous.
The campaign has a point there, because candidates should leave each other’s families alone. Questioning a grown woman’s role in her son’s company, however, is not the same as using a mother who stood by an indicted man to call the girl he was charged with raping a liar. DeWine made a similar point, noting that the earlier attack was never turned into a multimillion-dollar ad campaign.
Ending this kind of campaigning is up to all of us. Leaders in all political parties have to condemn it when it comes from their own side, and voters in every state have to make clear that a candidate’s childhood abuse is never a legitimate target.
Ramaswamy has crossed a line most of us have never seen a candidate cross. If we accept it, we lower ourselves as a nation, and every child who is afraid to speak up will notice.
The adults around a 12-year-old girl in Ohio failed her in 1978. Nearly half a century later, Americans of every party have the chance to do better, and it starts by coming together to restore our sense of decency.