YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO, WHERE THE COURT RECORDS ARE KEPT (The Daily Whatever Press)—”She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent.” That’s Donna Arthur, looking into a camera. She is Dr. Amy Acton’s mother. Acton is the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, running against Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, and Election Day is November 3.
“None of that is true,” Arthur says. “She’s lied her entire life.”
Then she tells Ohio not to let her daughter become its governor.
When the minute-long video surfaced Monday night, it carried no “paid for by” line. An Ohio political blogger, D.J. Byrnes, told CNN he got it from a voter who’d been shown it as part of a poll. By Tuesday night the mystery was over: Ramaswamy’s campaign confirmed it made the ad and announced it would spend $4 million running it on TV and online between now and Election Day.
A voter saw it in a poll. Which means somebody was testing it. Somebody looked at the numbers on a mother calling her abused daughter a liar and decided Ohio needed four million dollars’ worth more.
Stop it. Just fucking stop this madness.
What Acton has said, and what the record says
Acton has talked about her Youngstown childhood for years. In 2019 she told the Youngstown Vindicator that she and her brother moved 18 or so times before she was 12, including one winter in a tent at a campground, and that her mother’s husband sexually abused her. This week she put it plainly: between the ages of 10 and 12, she was abused by her mother’s husband, “while my birth mother did nothing to protect me.”
Here’s the court record, according to AP. The man, Cledith Arthur, was charged in July 1978 and indicted that September. He failed to appear, and he was a fugitive until at least 1981. Acton and her brother were removed from the home and went to live with their father. Nothing I’ve read shows a conviction, because he ran.
Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, put it this way on Tuesday: “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.”
And then there’s Operation Rescue.
In 2020, Arthur gave an interview to the anti-abortion group to dispute her daughter’s story. The group was on her side. Its own write-up of that interview says there was a grand jury investigation and that Amy was called to testify. It says Arthur borrowed $10,000 from her father for the defense. It says a lawyer advised the couple to move away.
So the friendliest possible account of the mother’s side, written by people trying to help her, still has the grand jury, the defense fund, and the leaving in it.
That same write-up says Arthur disputed the abuse account, that she was never personally charged, and that the group found no charges against either of them in Mahoning County records. Acton has said her mother was charged too. That piece is disputed, and I’m telling you it’s disputed. The charge and indictment against the man are in the court records AP reviewed.
What Acton described in 2019 was this: “In the courthouse after they were charged, I went to give her a kiss, and she just turned her cheek away.” It was the last time she saw her mother.
She was a child.
The campaign that made it, as it turns out
Before it owned the ad, the Ramaswamy campaign offered this, from spokesperson Connie Luck: “We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020, but we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth.”
“We don’t know what happened.” Then a confident conclusion about what happened.
By Tuesday afternoon, Ramaswamy was claiming it himself. “This is part of a pattern,” he told reporters. “Someone else who appears to know her well who says the same thing.”
Someone who appears to know her well. A woman who, by Acton’s account, hasn’t had contact with her since a courthouse in the 1970s.
He also said Arthur wasn’t paid or coached, and added: “I don’t know Amy Acton’s mother and I’ve never met Amy Acton either.” So a man who has never met either woman is spending $4 million to tell Ohio which one of them is lying. Get the fuck out of here.
I have two teenage daughters. If either of them tried to settle a fight between two people she’d never met by buying airtime for the one who stood by an accused rapist, we would be having a very long conversation in the car.
Asked why he’d run it at all, Ramaswamy said he “would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans.” Then maybe don’t spend four million dollars on this one, Vivek.
None of this is new territory for him. In April, he posted a clip of a campaign speech that WVXU’s political analyst read as criticizing Acton for being a victim of child sexual abuse. Her campaign called it disqualifying then, too.
The backlash has been bipartisan; CNN reports key Ohio Republicans criticized the ad even after JD Vance warned them not to. Vance himself, asked Wednesday whether the ad was appropriate, said that was “not really my concern.” Then he got on stage at a Cincinnati rally with Ramaswamy and made it his concern, praising Ramaswamy for having “the audacity” to run a commercial calling Acton a liar.
Stearns was less diplomatic than any of them. He called Ramaswamy “a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.”
Who we believe
In 1986, Oprah Winfrey sat on her own talk-show set and told America she had been sexually abused as a child. A lot of us GenX kids watched that after school. It was one of the first times many of us heard a grown woman say it out loud on television, without apologizing.
Forty years later, a woman who says the same thing about her own childhood is running for governor, and the answer is $4 million worth of the mother who stayed married to the accused man, telling voters the girl made it up.
Every survivor knows the fear of not being believed. The worse fear is this one: that someone will go find the person who stood by the abuser instead of you, hand her a microphone, and call it a pattern.
Marist has Acton up 50% to 43% among likely voters. That’s the math that makes a campaign test an ad like this and decide it’s worth the money.
Vivek Ramaswamy looked at a 12-year-old’s worst year and saw a media buy.
We believe her.
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