$4M Ad Buy Turns Abuse Survivor's Trauma Into Campaign Ammo

Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign says it is spending $4 million to run a television advertisement in which a woman disputes her daughter's account of childhood homelessness and sexual abuse by a stepfather. The daughter is Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for Ohio governor. The woman is Donna Arthur, Acton's estranged mother. In the ad, Arthur urges Ohioans not to vote for her daughter.

US President Donald Trump backed the buy in a social media post on Thursday. Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate, should keep running it, Trump said. "Anybody whose mother spoke about a daughter in that way would normally lead to the daughter being precluded from serving in office," the president said.

The Record Behind the Ad

Acton says she hasn't seen her mother since 1978, which makes it 48 years. Her brother, Philip Stearns, has supported her account of being sexually abused by her stepfather as a child. The stepfather was charged with rape. He died in 2004, 22 years ago.

Stearns called the advertisement a "desperate, disgusting attack." Acton campaign spokesperson Addie Bullock said Ramaswamy's decision to promote it was "both despicable and entirely predictable."

Opinion polls suggest Acton is narrowly leading Ramaswamy in a tight race to replace the term-limited Governor Mike DeWine. That's the context for the spending: a multimillion-dollar buy aimed at a candidate who's ahead.

The Party Closes Ranks

Vice President JD Vance, a former senator from Ohio, campaigned Wednesday with Ramaswamy and US Senator Jon Husted, an Ohio Republican. Vance brushed aside the blowback. He expressed disgust with Republicans "whining" about the ad as low and in poor taste.

The objections came from inside the party. DeWine, the Republican governor, advised Ramaswamy to pull the ad. Speaking to reporters at the Ohio Statehouse, he recalled the painful experiences of rape victims he dealt with as a county prosecutor and state attorney general. "It's wrong to run this ad," DeWine said. "And, even at this late time – my wife, Fran, saw the advertisement just run this morning on TV – I would just urge the Ramaswamy campaign to take this down."

Trump's answer was to attack DeWine. He labelled the sitting Republican governor "disloyal" to the Republican party.

What the Dispute Reveals

The ad's logic runs through a family estrangement dating to 1978. A woman who hasn't seen her daughter in nearly five decades is the campaign's chosen messenger, and the subject she disputes includes a rape charge against a man who's been dead since 2004. A former prosecutor and attorney general sits on one side of the argument, the president and vice president on the other.

No one in the dispute has proposed a limit on what a $4 million buy can say or whom it can feature. The only restraint on offer was DeWine's appeal to Ramaswamy's conscience, and Ramaswamy's campaign didn't act on it. The president answered the governor's objection by questioning his loyalty to the party.