Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign spent a reported $4 million on an ad in which the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent calls her daughter a liar. That daughter, Amy Acton, was raped as a child by her stepfather, and her mother fled Ohio with the man rather than believe her. After a week of bipartisan revulsion, Ramaswamy says the ad simply "ran to completion."
The Ad That Ran Until It Didn't
The Ramaswamy campaign confirmed Thursday that the spot featuring Donna Arthur is off Ohio airwaves. Asked by a reporter in Vandalia whether he had pulled it, the Republican nominee for governor offered the kind of answer you give when you'd like the conversation to be over. "It ran to completion and we put up four other ads."
Then came the pivot. "For all of the discussion around 30-second ads, I would love, even for this final close, for this campaign to really be about policy," he said, before taking a shot at Acton for not debating him.
Read that again. The man who bought the ad would now love for everyone to stop talking about the ad.
What the Ad Left Out
Here's what Ohioans were not told in the spot. In 1978, Acton's mother lost custody of her daughter after her second husband, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping the girl between the ages of 10 and 12. Court records show that when Acton accused him, her mother fled the state with him. The mother has since called her daughter "a liar."
The ad doesn't touch the rape case. It simply presents a mother telling you not to trust her daughter, and lets you wonder why a family would be this estranged. The answer was sitting in court records the whole time.
It gets worse. In a 2020 interview with the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, recorded while Acton was leading Ohio's Covid response, Arthur said she knew before she married him that Cledith Arthur had previously been accused of raping his own daughter. So the credibility witness the Ramaswamy campaign rolled out married a man she knew had been accused of raping a child, and then fled the state with him when her own child made the same accusation.
The Tent Edit
The ad started as a minute-long spot and was cut to 30 seconds. The trim removed the mother's claim that her daughter had lied about the family living in a tent with Arthur when she was a child.
That claim was false. Court records from the time show Cledith Arthur was living in a tent when he was arrested on the rape charges. So the campaign edited out a line that the public record flatly contradicts, which tells you somebody in the building understood the problem.
Reporting from NBC News and Zeteo suggests Arthur has struggled with mental health challenges and was found living in her car with dozens of cats. That reportedly troubled some of the people involved in producing the ad. Good. Somebody should have been troubled, and somebody should have said so before the check cleared.
Republicans Fled Too
This was not just a Democratic freakout. The ad drew condemnation from both parties, and Ohio's term-limited Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who has endorsed Ramaswamy, called on him to take it down. When your own endorser is begging you to pull a spot, you have made a choice that even the people who want you to win can't stomach.
The Guardian described a wave of revulsion, and that undersells it. The only people not appalled were the ones who work for the campaign and the man who defended it from a rally stage.
Trump Doubles Down, Naturally
Donald Trump defended the ad repeatedly, including at a Wednesday rally with Ramaswamy. He also declined to acknowledge that the child rape allegation bears on the credibility of the woman in the ad. That's the whole defense, folks. The mother is a reliable narrator, except for the part where she stayed with the man accused of raping her kid.
There is no version of this argument that survives contact with the court file. So Trump just doesn't engage with the court file. It's a strategy, of sorts. It's the one he uses for everything.
Acton Fights Back
Acton's campaign hit back with a new ad Thursday. "How far will Vivek Ramaswamy go?" it asks. "To become governor, he'll smear his opponent for being raped by her stepfather when she was just 10 years old, exploiting the sexual abuse of a child and spending millions lying to you about it."
At an event the same day, Acton spoke plainly about her childhood. "My brother and I experienced a lot of things, a lot of abuse and a lot of neglect. We were frequent flyers in children's services, ended up living in a tent in the middle of winter." She accused her opponent of exploiting her past "in a desperate attempt to save his struggling campaign. But I'll tell you, Mr Ramaswamy, it's not going to work."
On Tuesday in Youngstown she said she's still absorbing what's coming out. "I'm learning things even about my childhood right now that I did not know." Think about that. A candidate for governor is finding out new details about her own abuse because her opponent's ad team dragged them into the light. Her spokesperson, Addie Bullock, called the removal cowardly and noted it came "without even the hint of an apology to Dr. Acton, her family, or to the people of Ohio."
The Dingo Take
Ramaswamy ran a $4 million ad against a child rape survivor and wants a medal for taking it down.
Let's be precise about what happened. His campaign found a mother who sided with an accused rapist over her own daughter, put her on television to call that daughter a liar, trimmed the one claim the court record disproved, and bought the airtime anyway. The ad was cut to 30 seconds and ran its full course. It was pulled only after it had done everything a $4 million flight can do, and the "policy" talk arrived right on schedule, once the damage was banked.
No apology came. Not to Acton, not to Ohio, not to the millions of people who have survived what she survived and just watched a major party's nominee treat it as opposition research. The ad didn't end because anyone found a conscience. It ended because the flight was over and the heat was bad, and somewhere in a consultant's office a very expensive person decided that "completion" sounded better than "mistake." Ohio votes Tuesday. Remember who ran this.
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