Amy Acton last saw her mother in 1978, at the courthouse. Acton was 12.
That July, police arrested her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, and charged him with raping her. The report came from her biological father. The charge: sexual conduct with a minor under 13, over nearly a year and a half. Acton testified. Authorities removed her and her younger brother from their mother’s home and placed them in foster care.
Then the stepfather ran, and her mother ran with him. In October 1978, Arthur skipped a court hearing. A Mahoning County judge issued a warrant, finding that Arthur had “willfully vacated his last known address” and that his whereabouts were unknown. The court issued a second warrant in December 1981. Ohio was still looking three years later. He died in Pennsylvania in 2004, a fugitive, never tried, and still married to Donna Arthur.
Acton’s case wasn’t the first. Four years earlier, in a separate case, Cledith had been charged with incest; court and newspaper records reviewed by HuffPost say that charge accused him of raping his own eldest daughter. Donna Arthur married him the next year.
Forty-eight years later, Donna Arthur has resurfaced in an ad paid for by her daughter’s opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy.1
“She is a liar,” Donna Acton says about her estranged daughter. “She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true.” The ad calls Acton a liar in sweeping terms but makes exactly one checkable claim. The arrest records refute it. In 1978, police found the stepfather living in a tent at an Ohio campground.2
The ad first ran without a sponsor. Ramaswamy’s campaign later claimed it and committed $4 million to air it. His justification: Acton “has hid from debate and ducked questions.” The debate complaint is the pretext. Plenty of ads could punish a candidate for ducking debates. This one goes after the most private wound she has and which, obviously, has nothing to do with debates.
Nothing in the law forbids this ad. Only norms stand in the way, but how a candidate treats norms on the way to power is the best preview we get of how he’ll treat them once he has it. The larger harm spreads beyond this ad. It’s habituation. Every ad like this, or glee in the death of a political opponent, or lie about pet-eating Hatians, trains the rest of us to see another person’s pain as an opportunity, to seek entrepreneurial roles in manufacturing that pain or at least recline and watch without comment from our conscience.
Why this is different:
Politics ain’t beanbag, but this ad enters new territory. The nearest precedent I can think of came in South Carolina in 2000, when anonymous push polls asked voters whether they would think differently of John McCain if they knew he had fathered a Black child out of wedlock. McCain and his wife had adopted their daughter from Bangladesh. That smear moved in the dark, and George W. Bush’s campaign denied any part in it. This one carries the candidate’s name. The president and vice president have defended it. Their embrace makes the ad look less like an outlier than it is. The decline in public shame is not a good thing. Crossing a line is not undone, even if it’s done with glee.
Four Issues:
Relevance: Fair attacks bear on fitness for office: a candidate’s record, judgment, and honesty about public matters. A family estrangement rooted in childhood rape tells voters nothing about how Acton would govern.
Putting a mother on screen implies she knows something the rest of us don’t. Donna Arthur knew her daughter for 12 years. She hasn’t known her for 48. No judge would let a character witness who last saw the defendant in 1978 testify to her character today. The last time mother and daughter shared a room, it was a courtroom, and the daughter was the witness.
Ramaswamy’s judgment: The ad tells voters nothing about Acton. It tells them something about Ramaswamy. Asked about the ad, he described Arthur as someone who “appears to know her well.”
That sentence, uttered by an adult, requires you to believe that a woman who last saw her daughter as a 12-year-old in a courthouse, and who left the state with the man charged with raping that daughter, can vouch for the character of a 60-year-old physician she has never met as an adult. Ramaswamy, a Yale Law graduate, knows what a credible witness looks like. Either he believes this one qualifies, a disqualifying failure of judgment, or he knows she doesn’t and tells voters otherwise. You don’t have to go to Yale to know what that’s called.
Judgment and honesty are exactly the qualities Ramaswamy says voters should be weighing. He asks them to judge Acton on testimony 48 years out of date, and in doing so hands them a fresh sample of his own judgment. A governor weighs evidence every day: on parole boards, on child-welfare cases, on emergencies. This is how he would weigh it in office.
How survivors are treated: The ad never mentions the rape. A mother who calls her daughter a liar about her childhood, before an audience that knows what that childhood contained, doesn’t have to get out the whiteboard. The account she asks voters to doubt is one the state took seriously enough to arrest, indict, take a child into protective custody, and pursue the accused across years and state lines.
You don’t need to settle what happened in 1978 to judge what happened this week.3 Whatever the truth, this is the most private kind of pain, and a person fit for office knows to handle it with care. (What a funny place this puts Ramaswamy in: denying what the police and criminal justice system concluded on a matter of child rape.4)
The ad reopens a private wound for political gain. Ramaswamy asks Ohioans to make him the steward of a public trust, including a government charged with protecting children like the one Acton was. In this ad he tells every survivor watching that speaking up can be turned against them, decades later, on statewide television. That previews how he might handle the trust he’s asking for on all sensitive issues.
Attack by proxy: Ramaswamy gets to say something he could never say in his own voice, roughly “her account of her childhood is a lie,” while keeping his hands clean. For a day, the cleanliness was literal: the ad had no sponsor, and it does not mention Ramaswamy by name. That’s what makes it feel sly as well as cruel.
The defenses:
“They did it too”: Ramaswamy’s campaign says he’s being held to a different standard than Acton and other Democrats who have attacked Republicans’ families. Their example: this summer, Acton’s campaign accused him of hiring his own mother to manipulate clinical trial data, an attack that Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who has also criticized Ramaswamy’s ad, called wrong. But Geetha Ramaswamy was in that story because she worked in the candidate’s business, which is at least a connection to his public record that Acton’s mother doesn’t have. (That doesn’t mean it wasn’t unfair, but if we’re talking about standards of lowliness and useful evidence, they exist on different places in the scale.)
Vice President JD Vance went further in defending the ad: “People have called Vivek Ramaswamy a murderer in some of the advertisements ran against him.” The Ohio Capital Journal could not find any such ad.
This is a dodge dressed up as an argument. In Vance’s version, it convicts the other side of an act no one can locate to excuse one everyone can see. It also gives the game away. Nobody says “they did it too” about something they think is fine. The defense concedes the ad is wrong and argues only about who gets blamed.
And it confuses who the victim is. The target isn’t the Democratic Party; it’s a woman whose childhood became advertising copy. Nothing another campaign did, and nothing else in politics, makes her trauma fair game, a distinction you’d hope a politician second in line to the president with a recent book on his Christian faith would know. Also, if the test is whether you can imagine the other side doing something similar, your conduct sinks to the floor of your imagination.
“Who wouldn’t?”: President Trump skipped the comparison and went straight to the universal: “Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt.’” He called Acton’s mother “brave.” That answers a question nobody asked. No one doubted the ad might work. The question was whether it’s decent, and Trump’s answer treats that as beside the point. He also told reporters he had no idea about Acton’s allegation that her mother’s husband raped her, which means he praised the ad without knowing the history it trades on. Effectiveness is the only test he applies. Confusing what works with what’s right is a sign of a larger rot in politics.
“The stakes are too high”
Vance’s other argument: “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern.” He said he felt “a little bit disgusted” that Republicans were whining more about the ad than about what Democrats “want to do to the United States of America.” His instruction to his party: “stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days.”5
This is emergency logic, and its flaw is that it never stops. Nearly every partisan now believes the other side poses an existential threat. If that belief licenses anything, nothing is off limits for anyone. Even on its own terms, it fails: if Democrats endanger the country, make that case on policy. An ad about a woman’s mother does nothing to stop the danger. And if what you’re defending is a decent political order, you erode it in the act of defending it.
The tell: The president says this is normal: anyone would do it. The vice president says it’s an emergency measure for an emergency moment. It can’t be both. When a defense needs two incompatible justifications, both are usually alibis.
Each defense, like the ad itself, reveals something about the person offering it, in real time. The ad tries to indict Acton’s character on the word of a woman who last saw her in a courthouse 48 years ago. Its defenders have supplied fresher evidence about their own character.
She opens with credentials: she says she worked at a Children and Family Service Association, building “one of the first two sexual abuse programs in America,” a claim no one has verified.
When police arrested Cledith Arthur in 1978, the paperwork listed his address as a campground, Terrace Lake Park in Rogers, Ohio. A 1982 police report quotes the campground’s manager saying Arthur had lived there years earlier. Court records show police found the stepfather living in a tent while Acton was a child.
This isn’t a parking ticket.
This piece is already going on a little long, but a lot of statements like this from the Vice President illustrate long-accepted truths. Thucydides watched baseness dressed up as bravery during the civil war at Corcyra in 427 B.C., and he saw it as a symptom of a city coming apart.
“Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected.”
A century later, Aristotle explained why the counterfeit fools people. Courage, he argued, is the mean between cowardice and rashness, and the rash man borrows courage’s reputation without earning it.
“The rash man, however, is also thought to be boastful and only a pretender to courage; at all events, as the brave man is with regard to what is terrible, so the rash man wishes to appear; and so he imitates him in situations where he can.”
Thank you for your analysis. Again, these Republican underhanded behaviors give us a view of what we have to look forward to should they continue to be in power. Vote, and vote Blue.
Thank you John. Excellent reporting.