The race for governor has escalated with an ad from the Republican candidate for governor, featuring the Democratic candidate’s estranged mother. There have been bipartisan calls for the ads to be taken down, but some prominent Republicans have endorsed the ads.
The ads from Vivek Ramaswamy starring Amy Acton’s mother Donna Arthur are airing as 30-second spots, re-edited from a 60-second version.
“It’s not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar,” Arthur said in part of the original 60-second ad.
The shortened ad omits this line from the longer one: “She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true.”
This shorter version of the ad is more in line with how Ramaswamy has been characterizing it on the campaign trail lately, saying it is about lying, not the abuse Acton suffered.
Acton said she last saw Arthur, in 1978 after testifying in court against Arthur’s husband, who was eventually indicted for raping Acton when she was 12 years old. Cledith Arthur fled the state before he could be convicted and his wife went with him, and lost custody of Acton and her brother. An 1978 arrest warrant for Cledith Arthur lists an address at a campground off Route 7 in Youngstown. Acton’s brother, Phillip Stearns, also corroborated the abuse and neglect Acton has talked about enduring.
“It was a tough childhood. We had all sorts of forms of abuse, neglect, hunger. We were a team going through that, and Amy was the big sister who really protected me,” Stearns said. “I received a lot of abuse, but Amy got the worst of it.”
The Ohio Republican Party has kicked off a bus tour featuring the candidates running for statewide offices. In comments about the ad on that tour, Ramaswamy has deflected criticism that the ad was a low blow at someone who had been abused as a child, but as someone he says is a “serial liar.”
At a stop in Delaware County Friday afternoon, Ramaswamy called that interpretation a “made up” controversy by the media. He reframed them, saying they are about a mother talking about her daughter being a liar.
Ramaswamy said, “The media will lie. The media will deflect. They will do everything in their power to try to prop up the Democrat game. We are not going to fall for their tricks.”
And Ramaswamy said Acton lied about him and about his involvement in his business dealings, accusing his mother of helping to hype an ineffective drug so he could cash out before the clinical trial on it failed and before the stock plummeted. Ramaswamy has repeatedly denied those claims, calling them “slanderous”. He said in a press release that Acton has defamed him “in a way that’s been completely debunked but they still fail to correct.”
Ramaswamy has also been critical of Acton for not doing a televised debate with him. Acton said she did not want to platform him, calling him a “scam artist” who spreads baseless lies about her and her family - including claiming she has a drug and alcohol problem, which she has denied.
