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Vivek Ramaswamy’s New Attack Ad Should Be a National Scandal

The Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate has accused his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, of lying about being raped when she was 12 years old.

Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during a rally with President Donald Trump in Youngstown, Ohio.

There are vile and amoral political actors who will stop at nothing to promote their venal interests—and then there’s Ohio GOP gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. The biotech billionaire mounted a vanity 2024 presidential run to brand himself as a Gen Z mini-Trump and went on to codirect the nihilist DOGE assault on governance until Elon Musk’s more capacious ego muscled him aside. After both these self-branding efforts flatlined, Ramaswamy decided to emulate the career path of Vice President JD Vance, leveraging his sketchy venture-capitalist fortune into a run for statewide office in his native Ohio.

Ramaswamy has been in a tight and ugly contest with former state health commissioner Amy Acton that, against all odds, became exponentially more repulsive this week with the release of a digital ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother. At the age of 12, Acton and her younger brother had been removed from their mother’s home in 1978 after her stepfather, Cletis Arthur, was arrested and charged with the rape of his stepdaughter. Their biological father, Gerald Stearns, was granted custody of Acton and her brother; her mother, Donna, and her accused rapist then skipped out on bond. Acton told the Youngstown Vindicator that her last contact with her mom came in the courtroom where the custody case was held: “I went to give her a kiss, and she just turned her cheek away. That was the last time I ever saw her.”

Gleefully mining the trauma of an abused 12-year-old, Ramaswamy’s campaign cut an ad in which Donna Arthur proclaims, after 48 years of estrangement founded on her allegiance to her daughter’s abuser, that

I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent—and it’s not easy for a mother to say this—but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.

I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent—and it’s not easy for a mother to say this—but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.

When the ad surfaced as part of an online poll, it met with a proper........

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