The Ohio governor’s race between Republican Vivek Ramaswamy and Democrat Amy Acton reached a new low on Tuesday with an attack ad featuring Acton’s mother calling her daughter a “liar” and urging voters not to support her.

What the video doesn’t mention: Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, married a man, Cledith “Bud” Arthur, who sexually abused Acton from the ages of 9 to 12. She then abandoned her daughter and son to live as a fugitive with her husband.

Cledith Arthur was charged with abusing Acton before fleeing the state with his wife in 1978. Acton and her brother were taken by child protective services and placed in foster care and did not see their mother again.

It is not immediately clear whether Ramaswamy’s campaign or a supporting PAC produced the video, which runs a little over a minute long. It has yet to appear on television and is not in either the Meta or Google political ad archives. The video lacks the “paid for” disclaimers typically required of political ads.

Ramaswamy previously criticized Acton for talking about being raped by her stepfather in a speech, saying that the state needs someone with “a positive vision for our state versus a governor who has none at all other than to complain about what someone else did to her.”

Acton’s campaign blamed Ramaswamy’s campaign for the video.

“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,” Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, said in a statement provided by her campaign.

“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. 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,” Stearns said.

The Ramaswamy campaign did not claim credit or distance itself from the ad in a statement provided to HuffPost.

“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 that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor,” Connie Luck, a spokesperson for the Ramaswamy campaign, said in a statement.

The statement goes on to assert that Acton has repeatedly lied in the past and refused to debate Ramaswamy. It embraces Acton’s mother’s statements in the ad to back up these claims.

“Everyone who knows her best ― her former boss, her former state colleagues, her fellow physicians, and now her own mother ― are clearly warning Ohioans not to vote for her,” Luck said. “Ohioans deserve to know that.”

“I won’t normalize somebody who has said that my childhood is ‘something I’m just 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 said in a television interview on Tuesday. Adding, “The words our leaders use matter and I think it’s gonna take courage right now from all of us to stop normalizing this sort of rhetoric.”

“Vivek Ramaswamy should be ashamed of himself for giving airtime to yet another person who was complicit in acts of horrific sexual abuse — this time against Dr. Acton herself,” Meghan Meehan-Draper, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, said in a statement. “This is part of a disturbing pattern from Ramaswamy, who has mocked Dr. Acton for being an abuse survivor and just last week released an ad featuring a convicted child sex offender.”

Ramaswamy’s campaign recently took down an ad about state property taxes that featured B-roll footage of a man who happened to be a registered sex offender.

Acton has repeatedly discussed her difficult childhood, saying that after her parents divorced, she and her family lived a poor and peripatetic life and were temporarily homeless and living in a tent on the street. Her mother had a series of partners until she married Cledith Arthur, who had previously been charged with incest in 1974 for allegedly raping his eldest daughter, according to court and newspaper records.

At age 12, Acton filed charges against her stepfather, and she and her brother went to live permanently with her father. Her stepfather left town to avoid testifying before a grand jury about the abuse allegations.

In the ad, Donna Arthur claims that her daughter is lying that her childhood was difficult and that they were homeless and lived in a tent. Arthur previously made a similar claim in a 2020 interview with the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. In that interview, she claimed that her husband, whom she remained married to until he died in 2004, was never charged with raping Acton and blamed Acton’s father for manipulating their daughter into leveling the accusations. She also discounted Cledith Arthur’s daughter’s allegation of rape in the interview.

However, a lengthy court record shows that Cledith Arthur was arrested and charged with rape on July 14, 1978. He pleaded not guilty, and Acton testified as a witness in the case before her stepfather fled the state with her mother in October 1978. Mahoning County, Ohio, subsequently labeled him a fugitive and “ordered that a warrant for the arrest of the defendant, Cledith Arthur, shall issue forthwith.” A second arrest warrant was issued in 1981, and records show the county was still looking for him as of 1983.

The last time Acton saw her mother was at the courthouse after testifying against her stepfather.

“In the courthouse after they were charged, I went to give her a kiss, and she just turned her cheek away,” Acton told the Youngstown Vindicator in 2019. “That was the last time I ever saw her.”

Cledith and Donna Arthur moved to Pennsylvania to evade justice. There, Donna Arthur racked up a long rap sheet of criminal complaints, including being found guilty of animal neglect in 2021 and theft by deception for passing bad checks in 1995 and 1996. A court found her to be “not credible” in the case of animal neglect.

Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.

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