WASHINGTON — A jarring new ad in the Ohio governor’s race features Democrat Amy Acton’s birth mother denouncing her and calling her a liar — but Acton says her mom enabled and supported the man who raped her when she was just 12 years old.
Acton’s campaign is now accusing her GOP opponent Vivek Ramaswamy of reaching a “despicable low” in the race by dredging up her painful past as a child sex abuse survivor.
In the shocking video, Donna Arthur accused Acton of embellishing her accusations about the man Arthur married.
“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,” Arthur said in the stunning video clip.
“She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true,” Arthur went on. “She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself. People can change, but first they have to tell the truth, and my daughter still isn’t doing that.”
“Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor. If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself. It will only get worse.”
Acton’s camp immediately hit out at Ramaswamy — a biotech entrepreneur and former 2024 GOP presidential candidate — after the video surfaced online Tuesday, though it was not clear whether the Republican campaign was responsible for the spot.
“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,” Philip Stearns, Acton’s brother, said in a statement released 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,” he added.
“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.”
Acton currently has a 3.7 percentage point edge over Ramaswamy in the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls — despite Ohio electing just one Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, since 1990.
“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 Ramaswamy campaign spokesperson, told The Post.
“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. Ohioans deserve to know that.”
The Ramaswamy-Acton race has been one of the nation’s nastiest this year — with rampant mudslinging and deeply personal attacks from both sides.
Ramaswamy’s allies have sought to paint Acton as unstable and insinuated that she has an issue with alcohol.
For her part, Acton has called Ramaswamy a “serial liar” and a “scam artist,” refusing to debate him while her allies have also attacked him over his business affairs.
Rumors had swirled for some time that Ramaswamy’s allies were planning to spotlight Arthur, according to left-wing Ohio political site The Rooster.
Acton, who helmed the Ohio Department of Health from 2019 through 2020, has been open about her harsh upbringing, making it part of her political origin story.
With Acton the product of an unexpected pregnancy, her mother and father divorced when she was about three years old, she told The Vindicator newspaper in 2019.
“It got out of control. Custody [back then] always went to the mom. My dad tried to get custody of us,” she recounted. “I have so many crazy stories. … I spent so much time being scared as a kid, but also navigating the adult world.”
Acton claimed that Arthur was involved with different men until she finally married her stepfather, only identified as Bud, whom she said had previously been accused of molestation. His purported abuse of Acton led to criminal charges being filed against him, and later she moved in with her biological father, according to her account.
“I was lucky that it got bad enough, because it got me out of there,” she recounted, noting that she spent at least one winter in a campground outside Youngstown.
The Democratic hopeful claimed in 2020 that Arthur also faced charges and that she and her stepfather “skipped town and have not been heard from since.”
Arthur, however, has accused Acton’s biological father, Jerry Stearns, of abusing her when she was pregnant with Acton and claimed the rape and sexual assault allegations against Bud were part of a ploy by her ex to take custody of the children.
