I just saw this on Facebook about the disgusting Ramaswamy:
When Dr. Amy Acton was twelve years old, she testified before a grand jury against the stepfather who had raped her. Her mother, rather than stand with her daughter, stood with the man accused of the crime backing him in court, then staying married to him until he died decades later. The last time Acton saw her mother was in that courtroom, in 1978, when she leaned in to kiss her goodbye and her mother turned her cheek away. Nearly half a century later, her mother has resurfaced in a $4 million attack ad, paid for by Acton's opponent in the race for governor of Ohio, calling her daughter a liar.
The opponent is Vivek Ramaswamy, the hard-right biotech billionaire who briefly co-led Elon Musk's disastrous DOGE initiative and has sought to position himself as Trump's successor. He confirmed on Tuesday that the ad came from his campaign. Acton's brother, Philip Stearns, who was removed from their mother's custody along with Amy as children, denounced it as "despicable."
"Our birth mother stayed married to Amy's rapist until he died," Stearns said. "This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core -- a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants."
The ad itself is built on a cruel sleight of hand. In it, Acton's estranged mother, Donna Arthur, does not explicitly address the sexual abuse she chose to ignore; instead, she tells Ohioans that her daughter lies about her childhood, claiming that the hardships Acton has described surviving never happened. It is a case made entirely on the word of a woman who, the last time it mattered, chose a child's rapist over the child.
The ad's premise that Acton cannot be trusted to recount the harsh realities of her own childhood collapses against the legal record, though the facts have never seemed to matter much to the Ramaswamy campaign. Court documents obtained this week by ABC 6 in Columbus corroborate what Acton has said for years. In 1978, after her biological father reported the abuse to police, her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was indicted for raping her -- a girl, the charge read, "less than thirteen" years of age.
It was not the first such accusation against her stepfather: four years earlier, Arthur had been charged with incest for allegedly raping his own daughter, before he ever married Acton's mother. In Acton's case, he pleaded not guilty and fled the state before trial, and Acton and her brother were removed from their mother's custody. "I've never lied," she told a reporter, pointing to the grand jury testimony and the arrests that are all a matter of record.
Even in a campaign season full of ugly attacks, this one provoked widespread revulsion, even from many of Ramaswamy's fellow Republicans. Meghan McCain called the ad "dastardly." Nikki Haley, the former Republican governor of South Carolina who ran against Ramaswamy in the 2024 Republican presidential primary during which he dragged her teenage daughter into a debate said simply, "He's a bad guy. It's a shame he continues to get away with it." A Republican operative told Politico the obvious: "It's so gross to forsake family members for politics... It's just morally bad."
Then there was JD Vance. When asked on Wednesday about the ad, Vance said that he was "disgusted" -- not by Ramaswamy's attempt to exploit a woman's childhood rape to score political points, but by his fellow Republicans for daring to criticize it. He told them to "stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race."
The depravity of running such an attack ad one featuring a woman who abandoned her children to stand by her daughter's rapist is clearly irrelevant not just to Vance but to Ramaswamy and his campaign, which is pouring $4 million into airing it statewide, reportedly because it tested well with "persuadable" voters. That is the calculation: that a woman's childhood rape, and a mother's betrayal, are worth putting on television if the numbers come back right.
Acton, who would be the first woman ever elected governor of Ohio, has refused to treat it as politics as usual. "I won't normalize somebody who has said that my childhood is something I'm just complaining about," she said, declining to share a debate stage with Ramaswamy. Of the mother in the ad, she was more sympathetic than most would have been, given the circumstances: "It's sad to see this. Obviously, she's not doing well... I've known for a long time she's troubled."
Acton has held a slight lead in nearly every poll for the past month though forecasters still rate the race a toss-up even as she has been buried on the airwaves, outspent on advertising by Ramaswamy and his allies by more than three to one. Whether it helps him or sinks him on November 3 is for Ohio to decide. But Americans across the political spectrum have already rejected the weaponizing of a woman's childhood rape as a campaign tactic for what it is: disgusting, and pathetically desperate.
To learn more about Dr. Amy Acton's campaign, visit actonforgovernor.com
To read more about the attack ad against Dr. Acton, visit www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/us/politics/ramaswamy-campaign-ad-acton-estranged-mother-donna-arthur.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KVE.PzFe.HAdiLc6oRitB&smid=url-share